"The world will not end with fire nor ice. It started with screams and shall end with silence. The world will end when no sentence will dare to be uttered. It will end with stillness and nothing else. Corpses will stack upon eachother and the ones left without a voice and only instincts will feast. The world will end as if it held its breathe and never exhaled. The world will end in darkness and stay still until a new monarch orders the world as he wills."
The world's order has collapsed. Each memory of men will crumble along the roaring ground. Humanity's role in this world has fallen, and what's left of us is our bodies that serves as meat for their feast. The world will soon end in silence, for silence is the utterance of the end. How silent would it be, with the sounds of a boy's desperation growling continously so? My feet would lift itself one after the other, sprinting across the isle of corpses that filled the road, is i who's breathe rigids. Is i whose heart pounds endlessly. What fate awaits for me is far worse than this world's end. What awaits for i, is the great weight of everyone's cries. A burden that no sane man can and should shoulder. "Leave me alone.." My breath speaks under my lips, and my lips parted each breath. "Leave me alone.." But the strange humor of fate, leaves no one but itself.
My legs would momentarily stop, and my head would look around the dark streets shrouded in fog. I hear a loud noise of crackling across the empty road, and a vignette of sobs that cowers faintly beneath the laughter of another.
"Is anybody there !?" I spoke out in hopes of signaling the eyes of someone else, in a desperate hope that perhaps what lies beyond those fog is not at all what i pictured. So i ran once again, not to face behind my own responsibilities but to confront it head on. I have to save someone, that's my only purpose, the only reason why i continue to cling upon my privilege to speak. So i can save as much people as i can. No matter how much it breaks me.
I sprinted towards the fog, and ran up until i was only an inch away from the destination i wish to arrive in. My fragile body trembled until it reached my shackled heart. Anxious filled me, I wished to see even merely a glance, but it was the sound that reached me first, thin and broken, like glass splintering under a weight. A cry. Not the startled squeak of an animal, but something human. Something desperate.
I stopped dead on the path, heart punching at my ribs. The fog ahead swirled like a living thing. Every sensible instinct of mine begged me to turn back. But the cry came again, sharper this time, choked with terror.
My legs moved before I could argue. I plunged into the fog. Cold dampness clung to my skin, beading on my lashes until the world blurred to ghostly shapes. The air smelled of iron and wet soil. "H.. Hello? Is anyone there?" My voice cracked the silence yet no answer was returned. Just the whisper of the wind, and then, something low and guttural, a sound that didn't seem belong to anyone with the flesh of men.
A laugh.
Though not human.
It rolled through the mist like gravel in a deep well, rising into a cruel, playful cackle. My stomach rumbled. But i only Foolishly pushed forward. The cry turned intoa soft whimper as the fog thinned in a sudden pocket of clearing. Moonlight pooled like tarnished silver, and there, at the center, she knelt. A woman, her dress soaked with mud, trembling so hard her hair shivered around her pale face.
Behind her loomed a shape that turned my blood to ice. It crouched low, all jutting angles and corded muscle, its skin a slick, midnight black that seemed to drink the dark sky. Its mouth stretched impossibly wide, and the teeth looked like shards of broken glass. The eyes, no, not eyes. Those were two burning coals, locked on her figure. The creature's tongue flicked across its teeth with an eager hiss. It's laughter was raspy, it's voice sounded like a parody of a lullaby. Then it laughed again, the sound curdling the air. I froze like a normal person would, my breath snagging in my throat. My body screamed to run, but my feet rooted to the earth. The woman's gaze lifted, pleading, and in that instant I knew. If i were to run away now, i will hear her screams.
And i wish i can run away right now. Dearly, I wished there was a reason for me to look back and run away as far as i could again. I wish, a divine intervention would come and save her instead of it being a problem of mine. I wish she can be a problem of another person.
But once upon a time, there was once an ancient blasphemy. The very thing that made Adam a split image of God. But just like the paradise that was gifted of them, God took it away for good. — The reign of their blood might have faded in the long path towards this very end, but their rotten desire for more never once went away.
Humanity managed to rebirth that blasphemy, and built a society upon blasphemy. People spat out blaspheme in the name of evil, but some spat out in against the evil doers. Those people were called Sinner Saviors.
"I.. I am a Sinner Savior ! Prepare yourself, devil !"
It's eyes averted from the woman, and looked at me in daze, as if it found a perfect addition to its already perfect meal. Upon a quick look at me, he immediately laughed an insulting laugh. "A sinner savior !? I thought you bastards were already wiped out !" He continued in his streak of laughter. "Now, what's your gimmick ?"
Terror coiled in me. My lungs worked in shallow bursts, each breath of mine was thick coated with the taste of fog. Every part of me screamed to back away, to let the night have her. But her eyes convinced a different side of me.
No. Not tonight, I told myself.
I yanked my left arm forward, fingers trembling. The familiar heat awoke like an ember deep in my bones. It flared, sudden and savage, a molten thread racing through my veins. The first snap came like a gunshot inside my own flesh. Gosh, this hurts like hell, so I bit down hard as my wrist twisted of its own accord, bones grinding as it reshapes. Sparks of pain burst behind my eyes. My skin bubbled where the heat pressed upward, blistered, then peeling back in shreds. The fire spread to my elbow, a forge stoked too high. My humerus groaned and lengthened; I felt each grinding inch as if someone were carving me from the inside. I felt the cold of blood, and cold of metallic. It seeped from the seams where muscle tore away, only to knit again in alien patterns. Metallic hiss rose beneath the pain: the sound of marrow hardening into alloy. My veins stiffened, the blood inside turning into a dark mercury that pulsed with its own dim light. My fingers fused next. One by one they locked and melded, nails softening to liquid and flowing together. I gasped loudly, as the last of my knuckles cracked and collapsed inward, forming a single seamless barrel. The heat peaked, until I could smell the char of my own flesh.
Then it just clicked.
The agony snapped off me like a switch. Coolness rushed, an unnatural calm that left me trembling with sweat. I flexed, what remained of my hand moved as a weapon. Black steel veined with faint blue lines that throbbed like a second heartbeat. The creature's laughter faltered, its ember eyes narrowing. I drew a breath, shaky but firm, and leveled the barrel at its chest. Something glowed faintly, a soft hum rising, deep within the forged metal that i call my arm. "I can turn my arm into a fuckin' gun. How's that for a show you son of a bitch !?" I rasped, my voice shredded but steady.
For the first time that night, the devil stopped smiling.
"I see, you're serious and not just being a little shit."
A strange sense of pride lifted upon me. A slow grin crept across my face, half of relief, half of raw adrenaline. The pain still licked at my nerves, but the weight of the weapon at the end of my arm made my chest swell. "Go on and keep laughing, you ugly son of a bitch." I said, voice rough with the ghost of a laugh. The barrel of my arm pulsed. Heat gathered at the muzzle until the air itself began to waver.
The creature tilted its head, those disgusting coal-bright eyes glinting with something that almost looked like amusement.
It rumbled, holding one hell of a laughter, i can see. It broke my false sense of confidence, and suddenly fear engulfed me as I squeezed, not a trigger, but the thought of one. I raised a finger and pointed it at the creature, "Bang !" I roared as a thunderous flame leapt from the barrel, a lance of white-hot fire that cut through the fog like a falling star. The night bloomed orange, the smell of scorched earth rushing back at me.
But the devil was already gone. One blink, then an empty air. The next, its shadow loomed at my flank. My heart skipped, and soon the pain moved all the way to my stomach, as something hard and cold as iron slammed into my ribs. In my eyes, the world cracked sideways. Pain detonated across my chest as I left the ground.
I hit the far curb with a bone-deep thud, stone and grit biting into my back. The breath blasted from my lungs; stars burst behind my eyes. For a sweet moment I could only taste my own nasty blood and hear loud ringing in my ears. Somehow i flew across the street, and through the haze of dust, the creature straightened, grin back in place. Seems i had misjudged badly, fucked up. The gap between our strength wasn't a cliff, it was an entire abyss.
But all of a sudden, in amidst that abyss, a glowing moon came to free me and the woman of our shackles. My eyes averted away from the ground, away from the devil nor the woman. I looked up to see the moon swaying with divine grace. I looked up to see the moon soar with wings, coated in long and white beautiful robe. The night split with a sound like a thousand chimes struck at once.
A sudden wind swept the fog into wild spirals, carrying with it is the scent of rain and something impossibly pure, like lightning caught in a single breath. I pushed onto an elbow, even though my lungs still excruciatingly burns
Light bloomed across the darkness.
She descended through the light, and restored the moonlights' cry, a figure carved from the kingdom of heavens. Her vast wings spread as the sky itself bent to her presence. Her robe flowed like a river of fire, unmarked by this place's filth. The devil hissed, its grin faltering for a moment. The angel's gold met the devil's burning coals. She told nothing and simply moved.
A single beat of her wings sent a gust that rattled windows and flung across the road. In her hand shimmered a blade of living light, thin as a whisper yet bright enough to drive the shadows back.
The devil lunged.
But she was faster.
One sweeping. It was a clean and effortless cut. The blade sang, and the creature's roar turned into a strangled shriek. A line of searing brilliance opened across its chest. Darkness bled out smoke and cinders. The devil staggered, coal-eyes wide in something like fear, then crumbled into a scatter of black embers that the wind devoured. Silence settled, broken only by the faint rustle of feathers. The angel turned, golden gaze softening as it fell first on the trembling woman, then on me. "It wasn't so gentleman of you to leave me there, you little bastard." She states in such painful anger. "Well.. I'm sorry, okay?" I replied reluctantly.
"Excuse me.. But.. Who are you guys ?"
The woman that stood still this entire time, continued the trembling of her legs, her voice is raspy, scared, with a slight tint of determination. The angel would then smack my head as she confidently smiled with a finger pointed at herself. "My name is Angelica, this little guy's guardian angel."
She exclaimed "As for this guy.." And teases with her fingers ruffling across my hair.
"His name's Lucy Forester.
— The messiah."