The Fire and the After
And in the very ending of your world, forests will be flame. Mountains will blind white in the heat of centuries’ vice. Oceans will chaos with the blood of the earth. All the empires of your toil will pass away.
And the stairway to the After will come down, in the city with silver walls.
The days were better now that the last hordes of the diehard were packing. The sky was lighter.
In years past, the Fires on the far horizon had stained it crimson. Now, in the very heights, the red was faded. It was as though the blood had been diluted. And though, at night, they could hear the rumbling inferno like the wind inside a conch, sometimes they could hear the silence of the world as well.
The canvas roofs were folded from the square beside the clock tower. The two dozen souls placed all that they owned, save their thick, pavement skimming coats and the pieces of fine weave muslin which kept the smoke from their lungs, into sackcloth. The mouldering crates were stacked on the few carts which hadn’t yet disintegrated. The wind blew, and wore the walls another inch. The stone, grey granite, caught the death of the sunset and sparkled. Quite where the throngs were going was still unclear.
Ashe was too young to remember anything but the ruins. Her mother might have, if she had strained to think, but the hours, if anything, were longer in the ruins, and there wasn’t much beyond them after which to lust. There had been a cliché once, just before the earth had burned, about being thrown from the frying pan and into the fire. Though mirrored, that seemed their world exactly.
If it was any consolation at all, that meant that Ashe couldn’t dread the world beyond their walls. Even the flames in the very eye of the inferno might have been an improvement.
Whether Ebony was afraid, or whether she had simply adjusted to the hell from hell in which they now resided, she couldn’t read.
“You can’t stay here.”
Ashe hadn’t sat down. There was only one spot on that particular mound of rubble which could function as a seat, and Ebony was perched on it already.
“This is where we have to be,” she said.
The fires had raged in the distance for so long that the years had ceased to be counted. It was generations now. Decades. When hell advances for so long, it doesn’t matter if the exact date slips from the consciousness.
Ashe kicked one of the smaller stones away. It was difficult to gauge her thoughts, the better part of her face was covered.
“We’re leaving at dawn.”
Sunrise, sunset, it didn’t make much of a difference. The sky was burning either way. The section in between, where they grew restless in the ruined streets, or listless under their sheets, was equally as grey.
“You’re an idiot, Ebony. And you’re not even happy. I can suffer fools if they’re content, we don’t have a choice. But you’re just not.”
“I’m not a fool either,” she on the bare rock said. “This is where we need to be. The After”
“There is no After.”
“I keep thinking about what it’s going to be like. No more pain. What is that going to be?”
Ashe turned her eyes away.
“Everything hurts now. Even the sky is screaming. I can’t imagine anything else. Not even numb to the pain. Free from it.”
“Pain is the hallmark of reality.”
Ebony laughed dryly. Ashe could quote the prophesies all she liked, but it couldn’t be that they were meant to hurt.
She stood, and stormed away. The die hard could leave the holy city if they wanted. She would stay until the fire blazed against the walls.
“If that’s what you’re chasing, you’re leaving me behind.”
What was there to leave for in the end? In the middle distance, if one craned and squinted and was talked into seeing what ought to be, there was a pool of a darkness so pure that it seemed the fire would never take it. But that wasn’t a future to strike out for.
At the city’s gate, there was a cherry tree. It didn’t blossom, and the leaves, once emerald, were so coated in the smut of the Fire that they were petrified. The tree only leaned over the gap in the wall, warped to a crescent, bark so tight and knotted that it seemed a muscle under greatest strain. Ashe dreamed through the branches. She left among the first of the two dozen.
Recklessly, Ebony climbed the clock tower to watch them leave. She sat in the curve of the great iron bell, safe. It had been years since the clock hands turned, and they were frozen forever at midnight or noon.
Some had said that that was when the world had ended.
The breeze, like solar wind, abounded through the belfry. It had taken the spider webs years ago. The birds nests in the corners had grown brittle, and even their fleas were gone. But she could make herself believe the air was pure, and she let it tear the muslin from over her mouth.
At her eyes, at her back, at one hand and the other, the Fire raged. The die hard had vanished before she had reached the top of the stairs, and her loneliness was in squinting for them across the plain. She couldn’t see a thing.
As hard as she lashed against the bell, it didn’t make a sound.
I'm June.
