You watch from your window as metal-winged titans cleave the heavens, their iron bellies roaring with a fire not of this earth. Trumpets wail from unseen heights, a lamentation that splits the sky, an omen of doom that falls upon deaf ears. Below, the streets churn with the madness of the forsaken! Men and women, once dignified, now reduced to beasts, their hands clawing at the earth for shelter that will not save them. Blood anoints the pavement as lives are reaped over the mere promise of water, as if such a thing could quench the thirst of the doomed.
A voice from above, a final decree, echoes through the firmament, a warning of destruction beyond reckoning. But it comes too late. In the distance, the sky is torn asunder by a light that makes mockery of the sun, a searing radiance that blinds before it consumes. And for a breath, a single, sacred breath, there is silence, heavy and absolute. It is not peace, but the pause before the storm, the held breath of a world waiting to die.
Then, the roar returns. A sound not heard, but felt, a tremor that unmoors the very bones of the earth. A mighty wave of dust rises like the hand of an avenging god, stretching forth to smother all that dares to stand. Debris hails from above as the ground convulses, and you flee, casting yourself into the frail sanctuary of your home. The walls tremble, the air shudders, tiles and stone falling like autumn leaves in a dying season.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the world is still. The silence returns, no longer a pause but a verdict. Through the ringing in your ears, you hear only the whispers of angels, voices carried on a wind that no longer knows the scent of the living. You rise, stepping out from your shelter, only to behold the great reckoning’s aftermath. The city, your city, your world that is no more. All that once stood, all that once was built by hands both calloused and proud, lies broken. Ash and ruin stretch as far as sight allows, a graveyard vast and endless. The ambitions of man, the monuments to his pride, have been ground to dust beneath the weight of divine wrath and folly made flesh.
And so you stand, witness to the death of a world, with no voice left to ask if this was justice, or merely fate.
ImpChimp Art 