The Greater Good

He stepped onto the roof after the deed had been done. Everything around him was stunned into silence and slowly, as if realising the dismay of what just happened, the buildings collapsed upon one another, crumbling to dust.

His eyes travelled over the landscape of what lay beyond him, his haven and his hell.

The place where he had first opened his eyes when he came into this world, and the same place where he could now see the light slowly fading away from the eyes of countless bodies that lay before him.
These people, whom he had grown up with, had known all his life-- friends, neighbours, teachers... but not his dearest Lyra. He had sent Lyra away, his beloved, who was too naïve and too pure to belong to this egocentric and imprudent world, a week ago to execute his final plan.

"The next time we meet, the world will be a better place," he had told her.
And even though a beautiful smile had blossomed on her face, it didn't quite reach her eyes whose tint shifted from hazel to dark brown as she had scanned his face, trying to get a glimpse of the approaching storm.

He thought of her now, his muse, and her memory was like a salve applied over the open wounds of his conscience and the pangs of guilt that went through him.
It was worth it, he thought. For a better world to live in, he did what he had to do. As he scanned the horizon, he could almost see the future of what was to come and what he had to do in order to fulfil his plan in the unbridled fires all around him.

He wandered through the streets of Eden, his body stiff and thought of all those places where he had first been acquainted with what it was to sin. How he had seen people lust, glutton, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and give in to their pride without any shred of conscience. How the good were isolated, belittled and discriminated upon and how the evil managed to emerge victorious, no matter how many it times it may have been supressed. He had seen his own family dragged onto the streets, starved to death and no one had given them two looks. But the same people now used to worship him because he had worked day and night until he had earned enough money to be called what the people considered to be 'rich'. True wealth was of the body, mind and soul. But no one was rich in this world, all of them drunk on their greed and their desire of always wanting more and more and more.
Was there ever a limit to it?

So he ended them. The world was better off without a whole race of beings whose whole world only revolved around their own selves. Even some of them, who did realise the meaning of true wealth were eschewed and ridiculed and had to finally give in to conforms of the society and mix within the conventional groups. How was the world to progress if the ones who could actually help in the advancement were unable to see the bigger picture?

"What have you done?!" a shriek emanated from somewhere and he fumbled, unable to pinpoint the location from where the voice had come, that one voice which was like music to his ears, now hoarse and desolate, filled with pain he could not bear to listen. He looked around but Lyra was nowhere to be seen. He was sure that the voice that he had heard was Lyra's, but all around him there was nothing but the myriad of dead bodies and disintegrated remains of the buildings that had once towered over the blue sky which was now the color of parchment, with smoke and ashes clouding his breath.

Even though her voice was just a figment of his imagination, no matter where he went, he couldn't stop hearing Lyra's shriek and could only see her lovely face streaked with tears, horrified and looking down on him with contempt for what he had done. His throat turned dry. This part of the plan he wasn't sure about, as to what he would tell Lyra once he saw her again. Because even though he was supposed to eradicate the entire human race so that he could train a new generation of humans to be ideal and impeccable and lay the foundation stones of the new world which was to come, Lyra shouldn't have survived the bomb blast. But he had still hidden her away, because a world without his Lyra, who was the epitome of every good thing in the world, wasn't a world worth living in.