Wednesday, June 10, 2009

In Limbo

The Light never came. The Darkness never fell. Dark, insidious masses rolled across what, in time immemorial, had been azure skies. Noxious fumes that never dissipated, the black dust that never settled, this was the miasma that blanketed the air. Freakish winds sometimes swept apart cracks in the clouds, seeming to offer some respite, only to reveal the permanent pale crimson iridescence of the skies above. The deathly light was not something borne of the Sun, but of Man. Perhaps not only of Man, but of things beyond this world.

The clouds parted again, bathing the world below in blood red, revealing the decay and gloom that rivaled the skies above. Where once lay swathes of trees, bustling cities and the energy of life, all that was left was the carrion of Earth. Vast plains spread all around, dessicated and dead, serrated with gaping chasms. The Black Rains had created predators of a new kind on these plains. Shrouded in sulfurous mist, lay small pockets of muck that pulled down anything that fell into it, slowly engulfing into the abyss.

A lone road remained. Passing through an arcade of rubble, mountains that were the remnants of a civilization long dead, the strip of broken asphalt cut its way across the barren wasteland. This is where he walked. He was the last one. A man, whose will was weathered as the stones around him, but still not broken. More bones than flesh, hair shriveled and blanched gray, he trudged on passing from shadow to shadow of the heaps of history around him. The wind swirled all around him, whistling and howling. Mocking. The rage never died down in him, the flames fanned, as they were, by the wind. As he shuffled out of the shadows, he looked up at the skies and raised his middle finger up to it, screeching with his broken voice, "Fuck You!"

And he walked on...

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