"W-what!? What are you talking about!? L-Live!?" Cael yelled frantically, his voice cracking with angered confusion as tears streamed down his scorched face, the salt burning against his raw flesh. "Why are they attacking us!? They're our soldiers!"
"Honey, there's no time, you need to le—"
A bullet smashed through his mother's skull with a sickening crack, cutting off her words instantly. Her head fell limp onto the blood-stained snow, and fragments of bone, brain matter, and crimson spray flew directly at Cael, coating his face and uniform.
Cael looked down at his mother's body, now completely still, covered in her remains. His eyes opened impossibly wide as shock and horror overwhelmed his young mind. "Ah—gua—ahh, I, ah, m-m—" He couldn't manage to form actual words, only broken sounds tumbling chaotically from his mouth as he stared at his mother's corpse, unable to process what he was seeing.
Suddenly, he heard agonized screaming from another direction. He looked to his left to see his father cease his fighting and stop dead in his tracks. The towering man stood completely still for a long moment, swaying slightly, before collapsing heavily to the ground, finally succumbing to the dozens of injuries that had torn through his body.
"D-D-Dad…" Cael said weakly, his voice barely a whisper.
He slowly looked up to see the person now standing directly over him and his mother's body, a figure pointing a pistol down at his face. The man wore a standard Eve soldier uniform, but a black combat mask completely concealed his identity, leaving only cold eyes visible through the narrow opening.
"Sorry, kid, orders are orders" were the only words that escaped the soldier's mouth before his finger began to squeeze the trigger.
But in that precise moment, everything changed for Cael. His fear, his stress, his horror, his anger, his devastation, and his crushing sadness, all of these overwhelming emotions began stirring and boiling violently inside of him, awakening something deep within his core, something that had been dormant his entire life.
As the man prepared to fire, Cael coiled back instinctively, closing his eyes tight and raising his hands up to block his face in a futile gesture of protection. Suddenly, he heard the soldier shout in alarm.
"Ah, what the fuck!?"
The unexpected exclamation sparked Cael to open his eyes once again, and he saw something absolutely shocking. The man's right hand was frozen completely solid along with the gun he held, encased in crystalline ice that gleamed even in the dim light of the burning wreckage.
'What?' Cael questioned internally, his mind struggling to understand.
The soldier tried desperately to pull his frozen hand toward his body, only for the entire appendage to shatter into countless pieces of ice that fell to the ground like broken glass, leaving only a bleeding stump at his wrist.
"Ahhh, fuck!" he screamed in pain and rage. He looked down at Cael with pure anger. "You little shit!"
The soldier began walking toward him with murderous intent, his remaining left hand outstretched to grab the boy. Cael started to crawl backwards frantically to avoid the man's reaching fingers, lifting his right arm up and pointing it out toward his attacker in desperate fear. Yet again, another miracle occurred right before his eyes.
A massive javelin of ice suddenly launched upward from the ground directly next to Cael's outstretched hand, shooting forward with incredible force and lodging itself deep into the soldier's abdomen with a wet thud.
"Ahhh!" the man screamed in agony, stumbling backward and looking down at the ice spike protruding from his stomach.
Cael stared at his own hand and then at the ice javelin in utter confusion and disbelief. 'D-Did I? Did I awaken!?' he thought, barely able to believe what had just happened.
He looked back at the wounded soldier, who was staring at the ice lodged in his stomach with complete shock. "Are you kidding me? T-This is impossible!" the man gasped, looking back at Cael with wide, disbelieving eyes. "An Ice Gift!? That's not possible! Only Eve herself has that power! How could a kid—"
Cael sat frozen in shock himself, trying to process this revelation, until he heard noise approaching from his left. He turned his head to see the other soldiers making their way over through the wreckage, weapons raised. His heart dropped.
He then looked down at his mother's corpse lying motionless in the snow, then over at his father's fallen form in the distance. He closed his eyes tightly for just a moment, fresh tears streaming down his face as he clenched his teeth hard and made a decision, a decision to honor his mother's final words. A decision to live.
He tried to stand up and run, only to immediately slip on the blood-slicked ice and fall hard, igniting every single one of his injuries to flare up in white-hot pain. "Ahh!" he yelped loudly, but he didn't let it stop him. He hurried to drag himself back to his feet and started running with everything he had left.
He ran in the only direction he could, through the gaping hole torn in the dome's supposedly impenetrable wall and into the deadly wilderness of endless snow beyond. He ran and ran, ignoring the excruciating pain in every ounce of his body and the anguish tearing through his mind. Tears flowed freely from his eyes and flew behind him as he pushed forward through the snow, his lungs burning with each freezing breath.
After running some more, he dared to look back over his shoulder to see if they were close behind him. But to his immense surprise, when he did, he saw something very odd. The group of soldiers weren't closing in on him at all. In fact, they weren't even chasing him. They simply stood there at the wreckage site, watching him flee.
But more than that, what caught Cael's attention the most was the man standing in the middle of the group of soldiers, the only one without a mask covering his face. The man was staring directly at Cael with an evil smile that seemed to radiate malice, a smile that would go on to haunt Cael for years to come.
Well, "staring" was perhaps too strong a word, because to Cael's absolute horror, the man had no eyes at all. There were simply smooth patches of pale skin where his eyes should have been, as if he'd been born without them. He also had a completely bald head, which was something Cael had never seen before, Eve descendants being so fiercely proud of their divine lineage, they never shaved their distinct white hair. It was considered sacrilege.
The eyeless man simply stood there motionless among the other soldiers as Cael ran farther and farther away, that horrible smile never leaving his face. Despite having no eyes, Cael could somehow feel the man watching him, tracking his every movement.
That man's face, that horrible, eyeless, smiling face was the last thing Cael saw before turning his head back around and running with renewed desperation. He ran until he couldn't see them anymore, ran until he couldn't see the train or the burning wreckage or the bodies or any of the horrors of what had happened there.
But what had occurred on that train, and that man's face smiling as he fled into the wasteland, would go on to haunt Cael Vandrel forever.