The voyage was not, by any means or measure, pleasant. But after the horror of Montreal, anything would be considered preferable. The Irvings had decided to sail from Montreal to Yorkae, up the St. Lawrence and across the Eastern Sea. The cogs of the Irving fleet were hardly the most comfortable form of travel. They swayed back and forth on the rough water, the waves chopping into the hull. The barnacle infested and rotting pine that made up the keel had the most annoying quality of leaking at inopportune times. For all intents and purposes, sailing after the fall of the Old Empire was Joseph’s own private version of hell.

            Joseph was more than elated when the first mate of his cog awoke him early one morning and whispered that Yorkae had been spotted on the horizon. Joseph skulked from his hammock and crept along the catwalks to the top deck. The cold, dreary sea smells assaulted Joseph’s nostrils and to him it seemed to cleanse his soul. He had always hated the brutally large cogs of his fleet. They were hulking mountains on the sea, lacking manoeuverability and spirit. No, Joseph was an Acadian and thus he had been born on the fishing boats and baptised by the sea. The ocean wasn’t just a second home to Joseph, it was a plain to which he transcended his earthly bonds. The sea was a thing of beauty that gleamed when the sun caressed its smooth surface and at night its pure blackness sleeked and slushed as perfect as ink in a well. The water had given Joseph and his people their wealth, their freedom, and their lives and the more wood and barnacles between them and the sea the worse their hearts stung. It felt to Joseph like the woman he had loved from the greatest depths of his heart was being kept away from him by some horrid, colossal jailor. Joseph longed to be with his feisty, beautiful lover.

            On the horizon he saw what the lookout had first spotted; land was slowly forming in the distance. He could spot the towers and buildings that seemed to scrape the very kingdom of heaven. There in front of him he saw the jewel in the crown of the Old Empire and the endless treasure trove of the new world, the great city of Yorkae. A high wind ripped into the upper sail and the cog began soaring into the harbour. The city became gradually more defined and Joseph became under an even greater spell of awe.

            The city of Yorkae was a place constantly devoted to the production of eerily ancient grandeur. In no other city could one find such perfect testaments to the ideals of old and a complete subscription to the principles of the new. The towers and statues of the Old Empire had long since collapsed and been crushed into dust under their own weight. The apartments and sky scrapers and stock exchanges had been abandoned and now they crowded the bleak, empty landscape with their sad windows and barren stone. The schools and museums had all but been churned into ashes by the concussive blow of time and ignorance and the few that stood were skeletons of their former glory. All the monuments to false deities and statues that decried secularism had been destroyed by man’s stupidity and annihilated by his malice. The Empire State Building lay at the feet of those it had once pitied and detested and now its bricks and mortar served for the homes of liberated who had ripped apart its insides and decried its squandering of their wealth. The World Trade Centre, a tribute to humanity’s inability to move on and give up had once again fallen and was decayed and crumpling under the weight of the steel and cement that had been stolen from the poor hands of the starving and underprivileged.

            Wall Street, the symbol of the greed and malevolence that had once ruled the Old Empire, was now neglected and its banks and exchanges were worthless pieces of rubble. The vast stores of cash to which their owners would have pledged the lives of millions to defend floated above Manhattan’s new cover of water, valueless to all who looked upon them. Manhattan had been overrun first by the malnourished and impoverished it had forgotten existed and secondly by the movement of oceans caused by a warming climate they had also neglected. The towers and office buildings that had once dominated the island were the only things tall enough to be useful and thus their innards had been salvaged and scavenged from and the tops were used by Congri and dukes as private palaces, floating above the ruins of America.

            Joseph had his captain steer around the harbour and instead detour to what remained of Ellis Island. Joseph had never seen it before, but he wasn’t going to miss it this time. He heard the graceful, carefully considered footsteps of his brother walk up behind.

            “My Messiah,” Stewart exclaimed, every bit as excited as his older brother.

            There she was, chest deep in the sea water that had rotted her base and eaten her metallic entrails. And yet even as Joseph looked out and saw the hundreds of years of rust, lime, and sea creatures that nestled their way into her face and crown, he could still see something beautiful in her. Something that no one else saw when they looked upon her yellowish, green visage that had been worn down by acid rain and hurricanes too numerous to count could still be glimpsed. Though her skin was pealing and her arm was failing, she still managed to hold her torch proudly above her. Even the sea gulls had been unable to nest there and had settled for her copper brains instead. It was the torch that made Joseph realize that not everything of the Old Empire had been destroyed after all. Not every ideal had been conquered, nor every soul converted. Not every building had been burnt and not every man looking to defend his people had gone to the fire with them. There still remained but one relic of the past, one symbol of a better day, and Joseph only hoped its light would not be extinguished by the hideous rancour of man.

            Finally the captain docked the ship and Joseph descended onto the Brooklyn shore, awaiting his host to come forward and greet him, but the image of the torch burned bright in his mind.