Written: 10/30/05
Rallalon does not own Tales of Symphonia. Nor does she own any of its places characters or items.
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Everyone was running away, as fast as they could. Panicked screams and wild yells were silent under the roar of breaking, of falling, collapsing. Chunks larger than the palace plummeted to the ground, sending all those remotely in its path fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them. Each impact made the very earth tremble.
They ran past him in a flood, threatening to knock him over in their mindless terror. Somehow, he stood his ground, despite being unable to make his feet move.
He stood there, and he watched as the impossible happened.
Look, he whispered to himself, a whisper he couldn't hear over the rush of blood in his ears, the cries of those who lived, the wails of those who shortly wouldn't. The Tower falls.
The sky was ripped apart, colors changing, lightning of the most unnatural sort flashing. The thunder bellowed in the clouds, the very air crying out in pain. The Tower was breaking. It was already broken.
Voices shrieked prayers as bodies ran. Didn't they know it was pointless? Their faith had abandoned them.
The symbol of their hope collapsed into ruin, killing as it did so. Trees splintered; rivers were shaken from their beds. There would be no more resurrection, no more regeneration. Their world was dying, suddenly and without warning.
Listen, he said, finding a new creed in the moment where all else shattered, his body filled with chills and shivers. The Tower falls.
Tremors shook buildings, threw children out of the arms of their mothers. They didn't stop, refusing to heed the pleas of thousands. Death came with each new quake, each quake followed shortly by another.
The Tower had gone on into the Heavens. It had risen up and up and up threw the clouds without end. It had stretched up forever.
And so forever it would fall.
Feel, he told himself now, having been thrown onto the dirt, clutching the grass desperately as the world shook. The Tower falls.
Forcing himself up, his gaze never wavering from the sight of the on-going destruction, he breathed raggedly. It was all he could do but to watch the Goddess's edifice, like an entranced supplicant on bended knee. The impossible was happening. There was no longer the choice of looking away.
The world was blurred with dust and his vision with tears. The tremors faded away, leaving the air ghastly with silence, leaving him shaking in its absence. A chill had nested inside his body, as if for shelter, and nothing would ever be able to remove it. The pounding of his heart and the rasping of his breath once more acknowledged, the silence proved to be only relative, moans of pain and weeping reaching his ears at last.
Some of the weeping was his own and he knew that it was inevitable that he would join those wailing in their agony. But crying and kneeling to the fate which had been chosen for him and for all, he had born witness to the end of the world.
The Tower has fallen.
And it had been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.