Maria

"We shout, the echo fades, and every evening she jotted down her dreams in a small notebook.

On the maple wood coffee table, she unleashed ideas in the yellow notebook that served as her outlet; over time, stains accumulated on the pretty pad, giving it a nauseating greenish hue.

In her room, books about war, indecipherable to her, piled up. Every day she compared the two languages to understand, but the meaning often spoke of breaking the barrier of what? To her, of the dome, but her wildest theories spoke of destroying the world; otherwise, why no more humans? Why no more life?

And at 18, she stopped searching; she disappeared from the family home and the dome she had already been to before, but this time she wouldn't return.

Walking in the cold or the heat, in snow or rain, through marshes and meadows for years, suffering from her exhausted little heart, what was her surprise when she discovered an old man lying on the ground beside a dead tree.

"Sir, who are you and what are you doing here?"

The old man spat on the young girl with a certain disgust in his gaze, he said to her:

"Spawn of a monster, your damn family had it all planned, why, why, why?"

With his hands he grasped the ground to advance towards Maria, who didn't see the problem; had a monster done this? She began to think... were her parents really dead?

She huddled near the edge of the water, stunned by her first encounter with a human in 5 years. At least she knew they weren't all dead.

And as she progressed, she understood the language of the tags on the city walls; some spoke of a god who had abandoned them, others of a demon who had imprisoned them.

Not a soul manifested itself for 10 years until she arrived at a high-tech complex, the birthplace of ancient technologies. She pressed a button revealing a video of 2 teenagers...

"He sold us to him, I'm telling you, we're dead."

"I believe in him, he can't do that."

"How can he not, he's all-powerful."

"Because he's all-powerful, he's all good."

"Because he's all good, he can't make mistakes?"

The young woman sat on the bench before bursting into tears; the video abruptly stopped.

As for who these people were or what they were talking about, Maria understood no more of their words than their emotions. So she began searching the tower for something that would enlighten her and stumbled upon a manuscript with the words

A gift of apology from God..."