Birthdays were days we all dreaded. A reminder of what we’d lost. After the War of the Worlds, everything was bleak and gray. The people we mourn showed up everywhere, in spirit form, allowed by the people of the Western World.

On birthdays, whether it be your own or that of a lost loved one, you do nothing. No celebrations. If a Western soldier caught a birthday party occurring, they’d shoot devastating bullets at everyone involved, even children. It was ruthless.

To the Eastern Resistance, attacks like these meant war. Another one, that is. The Resistance group celebrated birthdays as lively as possible. They used the celebrations to honor their lost families, but also to lure soldiers in for unexpected attacks.

In a world of such brutality and loss, people learned to get by. They had altars for the lost during the battle, and Eastern Resistance members travelled out into the moonlit nights to look for dead among the rubble. It was always another upsetting sight to see members dragging in bodies to bury, to let them rest finally at peace.

The members learned to remember and honor birthdays. Birthdays of the living, and of the dead. Birthdays were a reoccurring memory of everything everyone had survived, and it gave them a sliver of hope that they could survive anything ahead.