<strong>Beat<br/>Baltimore, Maralynd</strong><br/><br/>Along with busses and a light rail system, Baltimore had one subway line that ran constantly back and forth from the harbor out to the suburbs and back.  Dressed in an old pair of black jeans and a closed leather jacket, Henry boarded the subway in his home hood, Mondomwin.<br/><br/>It wasn’t a pretty hood.  Grey cement, brown and steel buildings, and the occasional blue and red tags.  Even the college was dull, with little green.  It was his home, though, and he thought there was strength to find here.  The honest strength that comes from facing the worst pits a person could fall into on a daily basis and having the choice to step back from the edge.<br/><br/>Henry road the plain white subway car up through greener neighborhoods, and shiny glass ones.  Businessmen and gangsters moved on and off of the same car, the first nervously avoiding the second.<br/><br/>The end of the line was Owing’s Mills.  He walked out of the station too a vast, mostly empty parking lot strewn with litter and surrounded by green trees.  Across it he couild see a big mall going to seed, with a run down movie theater.<br/><br/>Henry remembered when this place was a mecha for city kids looking for a safe place to hang out after school.  Back in junior high, he would come here with his older sister, catch the buss to the subway, too a clean safe mall with a good food court, shiny arcade, even a Wizards of the Coast store with role playing games in the middle of the mall.<br/><br/>It couldn’t last, of course.  The criminal element from his own home hood and a others followed them out here, where everything was clean and shiny.  Not that Owing’s Mills kids were innocent.  Who was really ignorant about drugs and crime in this day and age?  But they didn’t know how to step back from that pit every day of their lives, not the way they did in Mondomwin.<br/><br/>Henry hiked up too the mall, between the green trees and over halfheartedly tended grass.  He smiled to think that—where man didn’t do something truly drastic, like poisons or nuclear weapons—the trees and the grass didn’t care about things like this.  It made human troubles seems smaller.<br/><br/>A few minutes of hiking up the roads, through the still settled apartments, he eventually came to his destination, a courtyard of completely abandoned townhouses, with some furniture just hauled out into the parking lot and never hauled away.<br/><br/>Henry drew the drumsticks out of his coat sleeves, then looked at the great trees stretching above the two story town houses.  He clicked the drumsticks together a few times tinkles resonated through the junk.  A few more, and the sporadic tones answered again.<br/><br/>Again, and like an orchestra tuning up, he had music.<br/><br/>“You know,” he spoke aloud, but fancied he was addressing the trees.  “The news is talking about all the things that are happening and people who are changing, and mentioning the Mayan calendar.  I heard about the Mayan calendar from some gamers at the Wizards of the Coast store a long time before it was some end of the world thing.  They said it was the start of the Sixth World.  A beginning, not an end.”<br/><br/>He clicked the drusticks together and this time he felt he knew what he was doing.  Turning in place, he drew musical resonances from the junk, the steel beams, the cement foundations.<br/><br/>He took up the pace, rattling out school fight songs that made chairs jump in the air and flip over to land on their feet.  The music knocked things down, righted them again, all in time to the music, ‘til the whole abandoned lot was dancing.<br/><br/>Henry stopped, thinking.  It all seemed to have a symmetry too him.  The city falling apart, but nature continuing.  A world ending, and beginning on the same day.<br/><br/>“So, I’m part of a new beginning?  I’m part of a sixth world?  All right, let’s see what I can do.”<br/>