Exile (Chapter 1)

Wrote this while cramming for exams (sorry for being away so long)
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The sky brushed against my skin as I watched the leaves twinkle against the murky water. Birds flew up into the cloudless sky before splashing into the sea. As i look up above, I see waves and swirls and shapeless things. On the way to such a weightless world, you would have to fly if you want to swim. From where I stood, the ground crumbled bit by bit, falling into a black abyss. The floating lands that chain themselves to a realm beyond such reach, slowly corroded themselves away. The lands used to be beautiful, until the day hell rose to conquer the surface. Those that sought freedom were only dragged down into the darkness that stretched on forever. From that cursed place, rose the very essence of evil itself. It contaminated all it touched. It divided the land and its people, destroying the peace that reigned over the kingdom for more than a millennium. Slowly, the earth was devoured but the seas escaped above the skies. What remained of the land was chained down as a reminder that one day, they too will be claimed by shadows. The one sea that united the skies above the vanishing lands and the underworld that sought to conquer and destroy. The floating islands of Claircaravelle.  
 
A long time ago, the sun had said goodbye to hope and goodness and forever sat itself in the east, half blanketed by the moons of Era. The sun had long been the source of energy and warmth for both ocean and land, situated right in the middle of both realms, but no longer. The west parts of the sea had turned to ice. Ice that reflected only a portion of the sun's violet light. Ice that locked away the starlight that lay only in the once deep blue. The islands to the west however, were ancient and were never laid to waste for everything had been frozen over. What little living beings that were left, were to endure eternal twilight. When the occasional winds blew, they united the lands but only for a brief while. Never were they ever close enough to collide but close enough to build a temporary bridge across. But even then, humans only crossed to raid, plunder and pillage. It was every man for himself. With the population drastically declining, it was long believed that the human race was almost to extinction.  
 
A century had passed since the earth had fell away to nothingness. Evolution had taken its turn but no mercy was granted to the humans. Flora and Fauna were never what they originally were, back when cast amounts of land stood on seas. Most of the human race divided themselves into tribes, each according to their individual island. If they were lucky, some would have been born with a slight abnormability such as the gift of speed, sight or even strength. However, they would have been shunned by their own kind and exiled, roaming from land to land. They were looked upon as messengers of the underworld and were nothing but evil. No matter how drastic the situation, humans will never change and that it what had doomed them. There have been rumors that there were humans that populated the underworld. But some say that it was just a place of nothing but rock and stone where nothing grew, therefore they were forced to cannibalism. Evolution had enhanced their ability to hunt in the dark and breed to their survival however they would have changed so much that they would hardly have looked human anymore. This was normally a story told by parents to scare the young ones into obedience but it had been told so often that it was believed as an actual fact, though no one had actually ever seen someone from the underworld and lived to tell the tale.
 
Reminiscing over all the old stories my father had told me before I was exiled brought nostalgia that was neither good nor bad. I picked at the blades of grass as I continued to watch what the ancients called "whales" dance about in the seas above. A long time ago it seemed that there was such magic where a single place could experience beauty, heat, harvest and ice all in a period of time. All thats known now is that "winter" lay to the west and "summer" in the east. In my eyes, beauty lay everywhere. In the star studded sea, the everchanging clouds, the purple-scarlet sky and its transparent moons, Claircaravelle's twisted hollow trees, its flowers that blossomed only once every decade and its Fauna with their wings and tail-like fins. Harvest, however was only when one was lucky. It was said that human kind was punished and whatever they sowed will never grow. Legend or not, during my time in the Arcana tribe, I've never seen anyone "harvest" anything that was planted. The tribe's witch doctor had told me about the destruction that the humans of the past had brought among themselves long ago. Where they put acres of land to waste for the sake of "harvest". Building giant metal machines that poisoned the lands as they did so. She called it "Pollution". Because they had created such monster, they didn't live very long, therefore they had to breed before they became extinct. They succeeded in dominating every corner of the old world but as their numbers grew, so did their "Pollution". Many of the youths agree that the ancients had sold their souls to the evil for the temporary abundance of food, in which the ancients in the tribe sighed themselves away in deep thought.