The First Cry

They say the winds died the night she was born. Not a breath stirred the tarps or the leaves. The windmills slowed. The smoke of the fires rose straight into the black. Even the machines, those humming relics of the Time Before, ceased their whirring for a heartbeat. All of Camp Hope, young and trembling, held its breath.

There, in the dim-lit infirmary of the hospital ruins, beneath flickering bulbs powered by scavenged solar rigs, she came into the world with her eyes open. Gloria Dina Montu Averill, daughter of Barrett the Mourner, child of ruin and promise alike.

They say no one spoke for an hour after her first cry. It was not a newborn’s wail, but a sound like a bell beneath water—soft, distant, and clear. The power surged when she cried, and the flickering lights steadied. A failing monitor, dead for years, sparked to life and printed the word “HOPE” across its fractured screen.

Midwives claim she was born without blood on her, clean as rain. The old women who watched over the birth swore she grasped her father's finger with unnatural strength, as though anchoring him to this world. One of them fainted. Another dropped to her knees and wept, not knowing why.

And when Barrett Averill lifted her in trembling arms, he whispered, "The world has begun again."

The myth says the machines in the power station, long dormant, flickered to life that week without intervention. That a single white flower—long thought extinct—bloomed by the gate. That no child died that year. That the walls of Camp Hope stood stronger. That the Others howled from the distance and then were silent for seven days.

Some say she was not the first child born, but the first true one—unmarked by the world before, untouched by plague, conceived in the shadow of a dying world but destined to lead its resurrection. Her birth was not just a beginning, but a covenant. A promise that humanity was not yet lost. A sign that The Maker had not forgotten them.

So every child born since is held up to the flickering light, just as she was. And every cry is listened to in case it carries that same tone. But none have matched it.

Not yet.