It was a long and arduous trek to the edge of the world. Jimmy had trained his whole life for this moment, and today he was going to accomplish what nobody else before him had done. He was going over the edge. To be fair, he was going to be the first because nobody else cared enough. He didn’t even know what got into him. Nobody in his village believed that there was anything beyond the horizon, and the idea to visit it never crossed their minds. He wanted to prove them wrong. Lazy fucks! After two years of getting in shape and living in the wild to train himself to the harshness of the environment, was prepared for the journey.
It had been months since he bid farewell to his village, nobody shed a tear when he did. They expected him to give up and return, and since he didn’t, they probably thought he was dead. By his calculations, he’d be reaching the edge of the world soon. He had read in books about his ancestors living on a sphered world, where it would have been impossible to reach its edge (since it didn’t have one) but there were a significant amount of people who believed otherwise. Idiots. He knew that his world was flat because he had seen pictures of it taken from the air (at a very high altitude). There was an end point – and today he was going to find it.
She was on the run. There was no turning back now. Her family massacred, lover murdered right before her eyes. It had been by chance she had managed to slip by the marauders. She took it, and never looked back. Instead of heading westward, where other villagers could have sheltered her and offered protection, she decided to head east, towards the barren wasteland of the world. She preferred to take her chances on the unknown, instead of leaving her life in the hands of strangers. How would she know that they wouldn’t sell her out to those creatures? The monsters had caught up to her village because someone spilled the beans in the first place.
One thing she knew for sure – the marauders would never follow her east. It was much too dry and barren for them to travel through. They thrived in wet and slimy places – just like her own kind. She decided that she would rather die to the hands of nature than the claws of those beasts.
As she continued her journey east, she realized that the horizon was appearing closer to her – it wasn’t some intangible line that she thought it was when she first spotted it as a child. It seemed very real – like something within reach. She set her sights on it, and made it her goal. A literal endpoint to her escape. She wondered what laid ahead.
Writing Prompt from Reddit: [WP] A shattered Dyson sphere is fragmented across a dim star. It’s creators have long ascended. New life emerges on the sphere’s inner shell, where civilizations use the fragments as islands. Fungal life grows on the outer shell, surviving in the cold dark. The two sides meet for the first time.