Someplace, somewhere

It was Death. Reeking, rancid Death. Filling the silence of every ashen morning, during which the sun would embark upon another crawl across the horizon, shredded on every inch of its feeble journey by a tangle of clouds, iron in hue. A steel tomb for those below. They congregated on the streets in ever-growing masses, whilst the survivors were buried out of sight. Those who had envied the dead were already amongst them. Those who didn’t fought on for themselves, stalking, hunting and dying alone, whilst the slain quietly observed with expressions of horror, frozen in their final moments. Many of the still living (or rather, still-dying) wore similar expressions of terror, blurring the line that defined where life ended and death began.

The place bore no name, nor did the denizens. Identities were burdensome and an invention of civilisation, and here, civilisation was as alien as human kindness. Faith died with the city too. Mosques, synagogues and churches were hideouts at best, indistinct rubble sheltering mass graves at worst. The gods, it was said, had evacuated their own botched legacy, like refugees fleeing for some safe haven across the cosmos, pursued relentlessly by the taint of their own pride. It was more likely that they too were dead, or eternally insane. All chance of the afterlife extinguished, the dying looked ahead at an eternity of nothingness with relief.

No one even entertained himself or herself with the notion of leaving this charnel city. Better to live amongst horrors that you were familiar with, than venture out and face uncountable tortures conjured in the realms of bestial imaginations. All the survivors knew was how this place came to be, and this haunted them most of all. None of them, in their remaining lifetimes of permanent isolation, could contemplate the past, before the fall, with any warmth. For that previous age was the most despicable of all. They lived in the shadow of its final product, nameless, godless, loveless, human nature laid bare on the bloodstained ruins of a rotting city. And they deserved it and they knew this but shed no tears.

Another somebody, somewhere, died.