Shatterverse Panfandom RP

Sitting in the shadow of Shay's fort is Conway, sprawled out atop a stray pile of hay from the stairs.

He's carving a little figure out of a piece of wood he found near the outskirts of town and singing softly in Gaelic.

Loathe as he is to admit it, he really is a Rankin, through and through -- he's got the voice of an angel.

Bother him? He's getting a little tired of picking splinters out of his fingers.

[ooc: A little info on Conway can be found here, in convenient first person narrative form!]

Another winter had come and gone and Conway found himself leaving his cabin and wandering the western shore of his island, once again in search of work. Sure, he could go to Sydney and easily get a job at the pier, but he refused to work on a ship ever again. (The Bluenose II, however, was exempt from that rule -- too bad the poor thing was nothing more than a tourist attraction.)

He passed restlessly and quickly through Inverness, Broad Cove -- he even made it as far north as Margaree, where he set up camp near the river. The nights were still chilly with the remnants of winter, but they weren't unbearable. He slept soundly through that particular night, and as the sun began to shine through the trees in the early morning, he awoke. He continued his journey north that day, hitchhiking into the Highlands. The park itself reminded him of his childhood in Scotland, which brought a smile to his face.

As he walked alone, he began to think. "A man must walk a lonely road," his father had once told him, and Conway had lost count of how many times he had to travel that metaphorical road firsthand. He was on another one of those roads yet again, his only company the song stuck in his head.

"Farewell to Nova Scotia, the seabound coast," he sang lightly, "let your mountains dark and dreary be --"

He was going to leave for Prince Edward Island, he decided, to try his hand at farming. Some poor son of a bitch was bound to need some help, Conway thought, and he had seen many people milking cows. How hard could it be? And if that didn't work out, he could try fishing, or go over to Newfoundland (God help him) to see if they needed any more miners.

"-- when I am far away on the briny ocean tossed, will you ever heave a sigh or a wish for me?"

Then, there was a flash. A flash and a loud bang! and Conway spun around with a gasp, expecting to see part of the forest on fire from a stray lightning bolt, but what he saw was far worse than that.

It was still a forest, yes, but the remnants of one. The trees looked as though they had been bent like plastic straws, charred only on one side by some sort of monstrous explosion. The song in Conway's heart got stuck in his throat in the form of a scream, and he stumbled backwards, tripping over a rock. His knapsack broke his fall, but he still had the wind knocked out of him.

He didn't want to get up. The sky, oddly enough, still looked the same -- the sun was shining in that wide blue sea, and there were clouds, big, puffy, white clouds, and --

"Shit," he breathed, leaning on his elbows. As he began to look around, he got this tremendously strong sinking feeling in his stomach and, worst of all, in his heart. He was scared, so scared, that the entire island was gone -- if that's even where he was. Nothing looked familiar at all; everything was dead and burnt and crushed and mangled, and he felt his eyes begin to water at the thought of his home, the only thing he truly knew, in ruin.