Before he married my mom, my dad was one of those illegals you heard about on the news. She once said he was āgoo goo eyed for his green card.ā He said he loved her because she gave him us kids. I was a poor Mexican kid and in elementary school our game of ātagā was called āLa migraā and we pretended to run from immigration while laughing, removed from the reality of what it actually meant; as kids can be. I understood it as an adult.
We all had uncles or cousins who had been deported, some more than a few times. āI donāt know why sheās crying, he will be back in two weeks,ā my dad would roll his eyes and say, and sometimes they would come back. Sometimes they did not.
When you take long drives out in the country roads far away from the major highways sometimes you see bright blue barrels.
Water for people. Water for human beings like my dad who are making a terrifying and dangerous journey through a land filled with hate.
I wonder if the barrels have all been removed yet.
When they first got married, my parents road-tripped through the southern states, Alabama, Mississippi, the panhandle of Florida, and my mom told me stories of the hate and dirty looks she got from the white people who called her a race traitor ā who called my dad a wetback. All of it said out loud. All of it said with boastful brazenness. I would get a taste of it on school trips into certain counties of Texas. āThe kids from the border, those were the illegals. Those were the wetbacks. The fucking mojos.ā I had it whispered to me from somewhere in a crowd of kids during a state level debate competition.
We pretended we didnāt hear it, but we all did.
This hate is not new. Itās deep, old, vicious hate that has been around for decades.
As an immigrant living in another country, I have too been asked, far too many times to count, "Don't you miss your parents, don't you miss your country? Don't you wanna go back?" Everytime, beautifully veilled behind a formal and overly polite smile.
Of course I'd love to be close to the ones I love, but such is life... We constantly search for better.
Now, I am lucky enough to be white and to be able to fake an accent as close as theirs, so their not so subtle inquiry only comes after I tell them where I'm from.
Canāt say the same about my husband.
Because he's got an accent, many times he's been told to go back to his country, he's been assaulted whilst doing his job, a much more aggressive tone or demeanour. He's been told that he's stealing the jobs of good, honest people, by the same people he's servicing. He puts a smile on his face and gets on with it, because that's who he is. But it hurts. Every time it chips away at our sense of belonging, and we wonder still... after 17 years... if this is home.
I can only imagine the horror of being chased in your own country, in a place that is supposed to be your home.
Luckily...again..., we have no ICE here... for now.
My heart goes to all who ever had to wonder why the hate?
āŖ (Cominā for that)
Yeah, Iām all in for you
(Now we cominā for that)
No one can take this from us
Even if it breaks me, Iāll give it all
Iāll protect the crown for you
(Cominā for that)
āCause youāre the only rightful one
Reach out, donāt hesitate
Cominā to the throne āŖ
Ash drifted through the streets like a second, heavier snow, clinging to skin and steel alike. Even now, the wind from the south carried the taste of it, old metal, scorched stone, the bitterness of a world that had ended too many times already. When the Six Empires clashed, nothing had been spared, towers fell, ancestry lines were erased, names forever lost.
The city still burned, on some nights the fire turned blue, on others, dark purple, poisoned by ever shifting clouds of molten acid.
It burned beneath the crumbled towers, where android and human had fought until there were no victors left to remember why.
That's where Jongin found Arisyn.
Kneeling in the dark between broken pillars and collapsed walkways, rain hissing as it struck her exposed conduits and split plating. Her synthetic skin had been torn open with deliberate precision, exactly where the Watchers blades struck. Decommissioned, discarded machinery, feared and misunderstood, her once unbreakable alloy gone, gold circuitry stripped away. What remained was left to the mercy of toxic rain, corrosion already eating into what had once been flawless.
āI will never run again.ā Her voice faltering as it spoke, glitching between tones, as if each word fought to exist.
Her words felt final, yet something in her eyes searched for disapproval, for someone to tell her āNo! It's not the endā
Jonginās hand tightened on the hilt of his sword.
A knight without a king, bound by an oath to nothing that could name him. No longer human, or holy, he moved through the ruins as a relic of stubborn defiance, seeking redemption in a world that had forgotten the meaning of mercy, and why it ever mattered, refusing to die when so many like him had welcomed it.
He lingered in that space and time, an oddity, whispered about by survivors in the seedy corners of the citadel, a shadow slipping through portals and jump gates, always passing on, searching for a mission, a mercy or a death.
The war had taken more than banners and thrones, it had stripped him of his purpose. Without a king to serve, Jongin carried his vows like broken heralds, still heavy, still commanding, yet with no enemy left to face.
He wandered from ruin to ruin, chasing echoes of command that no longer came, haunted by the discipline drilled into his bones and the silence that followed its loss. Some nights he wished for orders, any orders, if only to quiet the hollow ache of choice. Other nights, he cursed the freedom he had bled for, drifting through a world that no longer had a place for knights and honour, only for survivors.
He lowered his hand and knelt before her, carefully untangling snapped wires and sparking circuits, the savagery of it slowing his breath. He cursed at deafened gods, as wires still charged carried a jolt through his fingers, then up arm and into his chest, waking every cell in its path.
Unaware of eyes upon him, he untangled her from the wreckage, whilst above, the Watchers gathered in silence, ominously creeping through the ruins, filling the shadows with their unnatural drawn-out stillness.
Their cloaked figures lined the upper walkways, unmoving, patient, foreboding. Men who had traded flesh for machinery in the promise of eternity, their faces removed and emptied of humanity, hidden beneath cowls of blackened chrome.
Amongst them stood the High Priestess Anthropeta. A serene, ageless, terrible master, beyond cruel, devoted not only to destruction but to undoing centuries of knowledge, piece by stolen piece, until nothing was left except a universal ignorance, a single, obedient mind with no will of their own.
Arisyn's source code was the final piece; The access buried inside her had the power to reshape the world, to bend it into something obedient and hollow and Anthropeta felt victory within her grasp, with each step she drew closer.
The first strike came without warning.
Energy blades screamed through the air, disintegrating stone and steel alike.
Jongin moved on instinct. His sword flashed, cutting down one Watcher, then another, and another, everything around him becoming a blur as sparks burst where steel met force, the impact ringing through the ruins, sharp and violent.
A blade caught his shoulder, then swiftly another tore into his ribs, then another pierced into his calf and another at his back, relentless hits until he couldnāt tell where the pain was coming from.
But he didn't slow, fighting on like a man who had already accepted death, pressing forward with reckless, brutal resolve, until synthetic blood darkened the fractured floor beneath his boots, Watchers falling under his blade one by one.
For a fleeting moment, relief brushed against him. Death was close, close enough to feel like rest, and part of him leaned toward it, craving the peace it'd bring. He was so very tired of choosing, tired of surviving without command of a crown, lingering after a war that had taken his king, and with him, the certainty of purpose. āSurrender!ā He whispered softly to himself, promising silence at last.
But then his eyes found Arisyn's. Pleading, desperate, dreading the abandonment to a fate she didn't want.
Something older than despair stirred. Protection rose where the death-wish faltered, written deeper than loyalty, deeper even than grief. She carried a purpose, the way the world once had, ancient, guarded, enduring, and most importantlyā¦hopeful. He could not lay down his sword while such meaning still breathed behind him. If he no longer lived for a king, then he would stand for what had survived, unbroken, when he had not.
Arisyn watched as his armour cracked, and his strength bled out with every breath, still, he stood, and he swung, each strike carrying a force that felt unhuman, as if will alone kept him upright. When the sword finally slipped from his grasp, he dropped to one knee, breath ragged, vision collapsing inward, knowing he had given his all.
Anthropeta descended the steps with unhurried grace, victory hovering within reach as she extended her chrome-plated fingers toward her prize.
Arisyn's ancient core drive, older than the wars, older than the empires that had risen and fallen and burned. Languages no one spoke anymore, histories of people erased from record, all the truths that were now buried to keep the present obedient and unknowing.
āNo,ā Arisyn whispered. āYou are not worthyā, she added, helplessly covering her precious cargo, aimlessly swatting away the approaching end.
Unyielding, Anthropetaās hand pressed against Arisyn's gold-plated chest, reaching for the faltering core.
Then something broke.
Ancient locks shattered within Arisyn, safeguards and firewalls collapsed by one and a foreign pressure flared through her frame, as her primary mother-board overloaded, ripples blazing white-hot, tearing free through every joint and seam. Then a single, high-intensity beam followed shortly, erupting from her chest, a scream of pure radiance sweeping across the chamber in a blinding arc.
The remaining Watchers froze mid-motion, synthetic bodies spasming as circuits liquefied and cloaks ignited, one by one falling where they stood, smoking ruins collapsing into silence.
Jongin did not hesitate.
Drawing on the last brutal surge of strength burning through his ruined body, he surged forward.
His hand closed around the hilt and with a cry torn from his chest, he drove the sword straight through Anthropetaās cloak.
At first, his steel met resistance, then punched through.
The sound was wrong for the living, sharp grinding metal, followed by the wet crackle of severed wiring and failing power cells. Anthropeta stiffened, her mechanical breath catching, as sparks bled through her torn cape, unravelling in a hiss of dying circuitry mixed with synthetic blood.
The battlefield went silent, eerie and cold.
Ash drifted once more, the air tasting of metal and damaged ozone.
Jongin stood unsteadily, as the last of his strength faded away, and with it, the fury that had kept him alive. He stepped forward and lifted Arisyn into his arms.
His touches were careful.
Despite the tremor running through his battered frame, he held her as if she were fragile and irreplaceable, and not forged from metal and light, but made of flesh and blood. In the safety of his spent embrace, her systems dimmed, the glow within her fading to a soft, uneven pulse against Jonginās chest.
Without looking back, the knight turned north, toward his recluse towers hidden in the shadowed quadrant of the city, and carried her home.
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