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Chapter 1: The Future

Author's Notes:

Standing on the Edge of Tomorrow

People used to say that the world was round; this was an undisputed fact. Someone read it in a book once and then all of the sudden the world had changed shape. Kara didn't know too much about that, or books. She hadn't seen one in a number of years. She remembered the first one she saw was in her Granddaddy's house. He used to love books - the way they smelled, the way the paper felt. The next time she saw a book was nearly twenty years later.

She and a group of survivors were walking through the ash and snow covered fields of some farm, in what used to be Kansas, and they came upon this little house so fragile a good wind would have knocked it from its frame. They went in to find food, and whatever else they could use to survive, and Kara stumbled upon this dusty volume of poetry lying next to a fireplace. Even though they only carried what they could use, she tucked it in her jacket, and kept it until the end.

Kara had always considered herself lucky because she had two mommies and a daddy when she was younger - young enough to remember golden hair on one and brown on the other, but nothing else. That golden hair reminded her of the sun. When she would lie cramped up in the corner of some moldy basement or under the stars in the woods, she would think of the sun and she would remember her mommy's golden hair. Then she would think of the velvet sky at night and remember her daddy's chocolate eyes and her other mommy's raven locks.

She had some special title that she had forgotten a long time ago. Someone once told her she was the `last of the line', the `final stand against all that rocked and shaped the world into the cesspool of evil that it had become.' Of course, that person died shortly thereafter. Everyone did. The funny thing about the end of the world, the sun rose the next day. She was still alive; so were some other people. But so were all of the demons. The survivors ran, flying through the night like ghosts of a life only remembered in songs and glances. One by one, she lost them all until she came upon the edge of the world.

She knew in that moment that the world was flat. A tiny smile lit up her face and the human still in her rejoiced at the thought of proving someone else wrong. Of course, he was long dead too. It was a smile of victory and a smile of defeat. She knew, standing on the edge of the world, that there was nothing left for which to run. Dangling her legs over the precipice, she watched the demons clamoring and clawing their way over each other to try to scrabble up the cliff side.

When she jumped, she thought that there would be pain; but she'd seen enough of that to know that pain wasn't anything to fear. Instead, a little voice whispered in her ear, telling her of things long forgotten, of places wiped off the maps, and of a time when the world was a little simpler of a place in which to live. She seemed to fall forever and when she opened her eyes, she was staring at the velvet sky of night with the stars smiling down on her.

It was then she noticed she was lying in the dew-covered grass next to a highway. Leaping to her feet, Kara blinked away the haze that settled on her eyes. “What the hell is going on…” she wondered aloud as her gaze landed on a metal sign planted firmly in the ground that read `Welcome to Sunnydale.'