East of West #15

Issue 15:  Awake Babylon
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

It is a world thrust into war.  The Nation have engaged the Republic of Texas, taken action against Armistice itself.  The new Premier of the People's Republic, wife of Death and mother of the Beast, Xiaolian prepares her own agents for warfare in the wake of their mutual destruction.  Chief of Staff—and perhaps soon-to-be President—of the Confederacy Chamberlain is itching for power and eager for conflict.  Puppet of the Horsemen and President of the Union LeVay is powerless next to the machinations of her own Chief of Staff and the intervention of the Beast, who usurps her own missiles for his purposes.  The world is about to burn, and many are standing in line to watch it happen.

How, then, does the Beast—newly named Babylon—elicit a strange optimism?  He is a child of Death and a fearsome warrior.  He was stolen away by a cabal of apocalyptic zealots, kept prisoner, trained and mentored by a computer interface with unknown but increasingly sinister motives, and embraced by the Horsemen Conquest, War, and Famine as their master.  And the influences around him are considerable, the lies and deceptions deep.  There is little cause for optimism in such a world, a world that promises to be built on destruction.  But he calls his orb Balloon.

As he stands in a field of wildflowers glowing in the rays of the sun, but sees nothing but the graveyard wasteland that Balloon shows him, a warped distortion of the truth, he lacks only his own unmediated vision to see what is before him.  The world has already burned, and it has already been built anew.  In the devastation of the Deadlands, the most beautiful landscape in the world as it exists has emerged fresh and unblemished by the deadly politics of its neighboring nations.

[September 2014]