The meeting room was densely populated, it was clear, upon Ezekiel’s late entry that Estrada was waiting for him. There was a thin haze of cigar smoke hanging overhead as he made his way towards a seat in the front of the room. The room itself was far too open for the couple dozen people scattered about its dusty halls.

Estrada wasted little time getting things started, he stood behind a church window as the dawns light poured in through the stained glass behind them. This was the Cathedral back in the day, now it was town hall. The general consensus around the frontier was that whatever god was watching over the old ones died with them and as a result all their holy books were purged from the area long ago. Estrada once told Ezekiel that their was enough kindling from the books that as a young boy staring into the flames he felt like he was he was in front of a great burning tower, like one of the buildings in the great cities that could no longer be reached and existed only as a memory suddenly manifested before his eyes to burn as it sure had in the cataclysm.

The cool winds blow across the veranda stirring a glass wind chime. A man dressed in a wrinkled brown suit and a pair of pilot sunglasses stirs slightly, beginning to wake to the cool afternoon. With an almost spectacular struggle he manages to get one arm over the edge of the small daybed before sinking back into the cool polyurethane cushions. The man brushes the shades off his face carelessly and struggles to open one eye, making the world seem distorted and blurry. A flag billowing in the wind, attached to the smooth white columns by a small metal mounting bracket, catches his eye and he fumbles for his sword. Of course even in his groggy condition it only takes him a moment to realize he was looking at the red flag that marked the independent territories and not one of the dust cloak bandits he rolled onto his back and waited for his heart to stop pounding.