Gellio kept glancing now at the floor, playing the previous battle in his head again and again. Kyle was now missing, and out of pure frustration and anger he had destroyed any sense of partnership he could have had. And he didn’t want to do it, to make Kyle disappear. But it was done, and actions could not be erased. 

  Gellio now stood again alone as ever.  The bodies of Shorin’s dead were all in him, as far as he knew, and only their feelings and memories remained. He sat down on the hard ground  still thinking about all the questions Kyle and the Wasteland had given him.

  “Why...why am I still alive?” he asked of himself.  “If Kyle told the truth about that Hellstone, it combined everyone in that Wasteland, and no one should be alive being like that. Yet I am...is it the blue fire?

  “Is Kyle right…? Am I made of pure hellstone? Are there others? Or was I simply stupidly chosen? The bomb supposedly combined everything in the Wasteland. Why is it so hard to goddamn understand? Why couldn’t I simply have been like the rest? Some other hero to take on this place, and just be dead not to care for something else...Damn this place! Damn it to hell!”

  And Gellio screamed out into the Wasteland, and pounded his fists on the floor of the forest just outside of the marketplace where it all began. It was frustrating for him, nothing explained, and nothing positive. A small hope now ruined, confusion everything there was on Gellio’s mind. And everytime he looked at his hand he grew extremely frustrated.

  This baleful crying and hate lasted for quite a while. Gellio’s mind was a mess during this time, and at a certain point he could not even organize his thoughts or even think clearly. For he let everything out, everything out yet with no one to hear. He punched the ground several times, anything to let it out.

  Each time it slowed down, ridding himself of frustration to a pure emotionless state. At a certain point this stopped. Gellio now simply motionless, his mind blank and without anything to say or think of. His form had let every feeling, frustration, and memory out into the empty and lonely place. But he slowly started gathering himself, now thinking more about the frustrating questions that plagued the Wasteland.

 “Perhaps I am different, this fire in me is something that I have to embrace. A curse I have to take on, a body of pure hellstone and mysterious power that the few people who were able to understand were killed. Yet, the question remains...are there other people like me? People who survived?”

  His head now remained on that single thought: other survivors. Other people who could understand his pain, his frustrations, and maybe help out with his loneliness.

  “Someone that I don’t have to kill, someone that does not make me scream out into this place.”

  He kept thinking about that. The possibility of more in other places, outside of small Shorin. Gellio turned his gaze up to the outline of the forest, his mind seeing that there could be more. And his determination grew, slowly, his gaze still turned up ahead. Gellio grabbed up a nearby tent from Kyle’s ruined camp, and ignoring the lingering hate and frustration in his mind, he went up ahead out into the forest.

  After he started walking a bit in the rough dirt, he started running. Running because he wanted to get out of this terrible place. Gellio did not care if he hit a ruined bramble here or a bush there, for he saw the possibility to get out of this ruined Wasteland, and he was gonna take it.

  It was a mad dash, for Gellio was not feeling hungry or tired. He was hopeful, he was letting all his anger behind for now. 

 And Gellio saw it, something to spread his foolish hopefulness. It was the outline of a lake, a very large lake. And even as he dashed more and more quickly, it never seemed to end. But it had that color that distinguished a lake, along with the plant life encircling the water and beyond.

  But his hope never wavered, even as the lake expanded more and more. It was endless, yet strangely beautiful. For after seeing all the grey and dirty Wasteland that Shorin was now, a simple natural unruined beauty like this was a relief.