Lost on Alva: ALBUS

CROW'S JOURNAL, ALBUS

I remember how it was before humanity faded into the past. It was before humanity's god's angels flooded the world, each tiny glowing orb of destruction. It was before they were coined the Guardians of Void. It was watching a war that no side would truly win, at the time I didn't know that. I stayed with the one I loved, the one I had.

"We were supposed to save the world," she said while she sobbed. I knew the world was already gone, but I'd reassured her anyway. The sound of bullets and the rain of missiles cried outside like the whine of humanity's unceasing pulse as it writhed on the brink of death.

I looked out curiously, looking over the world outside. The amber sunset burned an image of rising flames as the dust from the Earth's fresh wounds were never capable of settling. The once-bustling city lay hidden beneath the ash and dust, the only glow from strange magic, pure white like a holy messenger's idol, and the glow of the black powder's spark induced explosions from heated barrels.

I looked up, past the sun, above what was once the final tower of defense, the Planetarium. The idol that fell in favor of a new lord would eventually come to ease the suffering of mortality that humans feared. I will wake up tomorrow, but the rest of this earth will not. At the time, I didn't know that. The gaping slash that spilled out the void's blood into our world, the eradicator, the new order of godship that Christ unparalleled. I watched helplessly among men, looking down upon my partner who sobbed into my chest, I clenched her to me, my heart and soul, closing my eyes in a plea, a wistful inquiry for order among the discord.

Through the disharmony, my prayer was quelled. I heard the screeching cry of a distant angel, as she began her descent upon the earth, a whisper of solace to the city of Albus. I smiled pressing my lips upon my partner's head.

"Tomorrow will be another life," I whispered, as I listened to the final repentance of the angel's call before all occupants of the city were torn apart by her holy light. Her wings spread as rings of decimation, her rising form a cloud of dust that rolled outward against the sky. Those nearby the drop, as my partner and I, were blessed to be nothing but a stain upon the concrete.

Now, I sit and recall the end of my first life, before death was simply a small bump in the road in my seemingly unending somersault of an existence. I look upon the Sun Bleached City, the same one that thousands of years ago I called home, the one that a mere two truly recall as what was once Albus. I remember what life meant to me then, before the Beasts and Men of the new Earth, now Alva. I remember what it was like to be afraid to die.