Beyond the Wall

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“YOU DARE TO DEFY YOUR LORD??!!” raged Sammuel. “Re-open the gates!!” he yelled.

The gates stopped their decent and began to ascend once again. Sammuel still laid on the ground sobbing in self-pity. I walked through the opened gateway and raised Emmanuel to his feet. I unhinged the lock on his pillory, removed his muzzle and slung his arm over my shoulder. “Where are we going?” asked Emmanuel.

“We are escaping Hell” I responded, as we slowly trudged into the darkness.

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In my short story, “Beyond the Wall” I decided to create a dystopian/post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by a terrible nuclear war. The world that their ancestors had once lived in was completely forgotten. Advanced technology such as computers were abandoned for things such as parchment and manually crank gates. My idea behind this was the advancement of technology is what ended the world, so the technological clock needed to be turned back to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again. Technology wasn’t the only thing changed within the 629 years after the nuclear war. Democracy that we all know now has shifted back to a monarchy. This monarchy severely abuses their power over their people and use their social status to be able to get whatever they want. Using my main character, I explored the idea of what the true hell is. My main character speaks very lowly already of the monarchy and how immoral they are. He becomes fed up and decides to choose the evil beyond the wall that is unknown, rather than continue to live in the hell created by the worst of the rest of humanity. At the end of the story the main character walks away from the only thing he’s ever know and disappears into the darkness.