Apocalypse
4.9.06

He had fought his way to the top of this stair-stepped mountain, and as the battle raged around and below him, he had gazed unwaveringly at what had once been the sky. Minutes before, every being there had paused, mid-strike, mid-blow, to stare upward as the entire spectrum of color had erupted through the clouds and disintegrated into a million tiny pieces. Now, as he held his sword aloft above him, the sky fought against itself, swallowing the blackened sun and the space the moon had once occupied. The clouds themselves were no longer floating above; they had melted, dropping rain down upon the world. Now, as the melting slowed, the rain had stopped, leaving the metallic-sky to wage war alone.

He turned toward the few golden steps left to the top. He had waited so long for this, for the world to end; and now that the Apocalypse had finally begun, he was disappointed. Where were the gods, of whom he had imagined grand speeches and dying grandeur? Where was the final reconciliation? Where were the golden trumpets, the bloodied angels? His imagination had built up his hopes too high, and now the wind of reality had pushed over his shakily-built castle. He supposed, as he wrapped his hand around the world-flag that stood proud above the carnage, that this was what the Apocalypse was all about. A dashing of hopes, of dreams, of aspirations. They’d all be dead soon, every last one of them; and were heaven-hopes really hopes at all?

Would heaven itself still be here after it all?

Beneath him, men he had known for years, who had shared his life with him, were dying at the hands of strangers. Man and beast, together and apart, tore each other to shreds. He stared, unfeeling, as the entire population killed itself off. Rank meant nothing now. Nobody took notice of him, even when, days ago, they would have killed to shake his hand. He stood alone, framed by the sky above him and the death beneath him, and he was silent.

To him, there was no noise, no dying cries or grunts of exertion. There was only the eternal sound of silence, and it wrapped around him and pulled him upward. He stabbed his sword downward, into the softened gold of the step, and raised his hands to the sky, the gods, heaven…anything. The final cry would be made, he told himself, by the only conscious soul left on the planet. And as he uttered the fatal words, he closed his eyes and let the tears fall.

And so the Earth was destroyed in malice by the very beings she gave birth to.

-twirling flags