Mateus Lazelai

Mateus' Story

The moon has crawled across the day-time sky, obscuring the sun and casting a shadow over the world.

Survivors of this jungle hellscape that used to be the Earth know to get to high ground or shelter during the night. When the sky gets dark, just a bit after dusk, vicious beasts and animals, known to people now as monsters, rise from their caves and the thick brambles to stalk their prey.

After decades of persisting as prey, humans began hiding, laying dormant until sunrise. However, they didn’t anticipate the eclipse. 

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Mateus held a make-shift telescope with glass shaped from the cradle of a magma pool. His mask lay on his back, its eyes pointing backwards into the night. Its radiant orange and yellow eyes could be seen by potential predators from miles away in the barren desert.

By this point in his life, he lived in a settlement known as Teayo, about 700 km south of the Rio Grande plutonium deposits.

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Although the settlement was left relatively unharmed after the fallout, as it found itself between a deadzone and the jungle, northern winds rushed through the valley carrying radiation from the river.

He was dependent on his village to survive from the apocalyptic conditions. Their homes shielded him from radioactive activity, and their resources kept him fed and safe.

They shielded him from acid storms and roaming infestations. He had a home here. However, in this world, the survivors put strength before wisdom.

They were surviving, but they didn’t ever live.

In the end, it was their fault that they hadn’t listened to him. Mateus pleaded with them, he threw himself onto the ground and he cried. He cried because he knew that if they didn’t leave with him now, he’d be leaving them to die. 

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He knew the eclipse was coming. He dutifully took notes over months and years on the moon’s shift in the night sky. He tracked how the moon’s rise and fall changed locations and places in time. Every time he saw the moon in the day-lit sky, as rare as it was, he made sure to take a note.

On the rare nights it glowed a brilliant orange, Mateus would lay awake all night, never taking his eyes off of it. 

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But of what purpose does wisdom and intelligence serve in a hellscape that’s cornered humanity into its darkest chapter? There exists, in every person, a powerful intuition to become something, or to interact with something, of a nature far more powerful than themselves.

You can see it in myths about Gods and heroes from centuries ago. You can read it in the recovered scrolls and books from the pre-event libraries.

Although their words and stories are foreign to us today, their pictures and storytelling mapped out generations of a relationship between mankind and its own ambitions.

From the very first ziggurats in Mesopotamia, to the ornate paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to the gargantuan nuclear missiles that decimated North America, there has always been a human desire to become something bigger than thought imaginable.

Mateus looked to the sun, the moon, and the stars. His village had no artifacts from before the reckoning, and very few survivors who lived before the calamity, but Mateus’ intuition told him that those tiny dots he watched dance across the sky were a part of something far greater than he was.

Being able to identify with such a beautiful and powerful natural phenomenon made surviving feel a little less important; A little more easy.

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And he didn’t do it because he was looking for anything specific, but where you can find patterns in nature, you can find reason. And where you find reason, you find logic: the undercurrent of survival and existence. He knew after his years of observation that indeed, on a date in the near future, the moon would eclipse the sun, and the beasts of the wastelands to the south would drive North, searching for easy prey in the human-built houses of clay.

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Mateus fled the settlement North, traversing the landscape on his own. He kept clear of the land, because he knew he couldn’t survive the jungles alone. He traveled as far north creeping along the coast as he could, far enough away from the land beasts, and not deep enough to attract any larger predators.

The water by the rapids were dangerous and radioactive, but Mateus knew that he could circumvent the rapids by trailing the fish that navigated the stream. He sat and watched streams of fish swim by, taking erratic and unpredictable moves through the water. But he sat and watched as the rocks eroded, and how the fish bobbed and weaved through currents unseen by the naked eye. He was able to grab a fish from the water and ignited a blistering blossom, which he stuck to the fish’s back.

With the light-weight fire kept burning by the flower’s oils, the fish would navigate the current, with a prominent bubble column rising in his wake. Mateus used this to carve out his path, and wedged his way through the rapids using long stilts atop his raft.

Beyond the rapids, he sailed himself down the coast, departing at the wind-swept plains north of the Channel.

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Mateus remembered how when they needed him most, his people abandoned him.

He hadn’t left them, no, they chose to leave him. He warned them. Mateus put his whole soul into his convictions, desperately trying to motivate his settlement to leave or take better shelter. He saw this months in advance, but they punished him regardless. He looked to the sky on the day he predicted.

He sat comfortably atop the canopy, now resting with some other survivors who listened to his warnings and helped him to safety. From the top of the tallest tree, where the jungle meets the craters, he looked to the sky.

He knew that because his sun was half obstructed by the moon, that his family had been cast into total darkness, just as he told them.

The double-edged sword of ego kills both its victim and its master.

Carrie

Reginald