To Imagine...

Volatility

I fear recompense; our world is without a crown.

The broken, endless field shrinks with the mist of darkness; we stand as myriad glass, shattered, each side sharp with blood. Swords dwell in the flood of bodies and dark liquid, forgotten at our sides. Without purpose, our aim is a wandering question--a stray arrow that, caught in the blazes of a powerful detonation, shatters into a thousand different forms.

"I have no will of my own."

The words were duly written in their eyes, inscribed deeply in the way they were stanced, imprinted unquestionably on the very earth from where they gazed upon her. Her presence, like a star; and like a star she had fallen. Across the fog, past the thousands and thousands of teeming bodies, motionless. Silence is then consumed as the earth quakes, punctuated by a cry of fear. Those which had stood before me now stood as silhouettes dozens of feet above my stature, the ground beneath them seething as if pulled by the rolling tides of the ocean, reaching towards the sky, reaching to her.

Great, mighty roars flood the consciousness of every sentient being; the ground welcomes me with a kiss as I taste dust in my mouth, spinning, blind, leaping to my feet only to stumble into the pillars of earth around me. The world explodes into shocks of colors and jolts and vibrations--the sounds of the earth and the sounds of the people all conglomerated into one strident noise.

Fight.

I stumble again, but now regain my balance. My shoulders broaden; my back stiffens. Volleys of dark-haired, wild-eyed creatures streak past, above, below, drawn to her--a world begotten by her existence.

A world forsaken by them.

The thought raged through him as it did each and every creature surrounding him--they thought as one, complete without individuality. Independence escaped them; it clung to him like tortured man to his life: evidently with little regard. Furious power ignited behind his eyes.

They were to blame. They were the reason. They shall procure the punishment.

They were his greatest enemy--falling from his teeth, bitten by his blade, blood running anew to the quiet flood that flourished about their ankles.

The newfound torrent of rain seemed no color but crimson in the darkness of his vision, useless after little more than a few feet, the differential markings between droplets of rain and the spraying of blood lost as the cesspool grew in the wake of their passing.

The rationality of his maladroit consciousness made an appearance only after the slash of a blade tore through skin and muscle, severing the usefulness of his opposing arm. His own steel swung in an arc and crashed through the defenses of that beas--man... Of the man, falling soundlessly from the great spine they stood upon, far above the tumultuous earth writhing hundreds of feet below. Realization dawned on him like thunder in a storm.

And with the beast fell the blade from his hand. The great, damned blade he had donned with grace through ageless times.

The blade fled from his grip and he whirled; he feared the realization of it, flitting from one scene to the next as he fled past horrors, drinking in every ageless terror that he passed and that which passed him. With conviction, he sanctioned no hesitation as he surged into the deep nothingness of a cavity carved into the mountains to which he now fled. The labyrinth of stone hallways, passages, levels, and secrets descended without end, falling lower until surely I must have fallen into the very depths of darkness itself.

It was there that I left her--and again I fled, farther into the mountains than possible to conceivable memory. The earth became one with a stranger such as I, consumed what I had come to know as my mind and my body. And with it left the omnipresence of my desperation--the fear melted softly into a resigned submission to contentment. From then on, I watched. My eyes stretched farther than even that which I had come to know--I watched the forests beyond me and swept the halls with my gaze, where my people found their interest to stay, by the gravestone of their Mother.

Lost and without recompense. My world was filled with madmen, who plundered and murdered for pleasure, tortured and raped for pastimes, terrified and repressed for amusement and sick leisure.

I watched; I was stricken with disgust.

They were my people.