How the War Ends
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What with the nightmare of my parents' divorce, selling the house in a dying market, and…hmm…my freshman year of college, it's a surprise I haven't gone into epileptic fits. I finally had to sit down (hell with my busy schedule) and just write.
Anyway, here's to taking some time out of your day to relax. Here's to writing (and reading) slow.
—
One tower.
Alone.
As the soul of a candle would twine round the smothered flame, so too the gray column of stone rose, adrift in death. Ashes fell into darkness, never to rise. Never again a child's laugh, its breath, its despair as it curled into the cold embrace. Wrapped in this frigid shroud, the white flame trembled and fell. A bleeding ember, it, and all it had touched and scorched black, lay still, strewn across the frozen landscape.
In the starless midnight the tower loomed over them all, and all, seeing or no, stared back.
The long-threatened, cold December rain finally fell from the sky. Water washed blackened stone and seeped into the white to turn the world a sodden, lifeless gray. Blind to human enmity, the rain cried for all. It caressed the brow of an ebon skull, and it drowned flaming hair crushed against a heart that had stilled, still sobbing.
Alone, a single drop shivered in a cradle of curved glass—an eyeglass lens, the most useless protector, the most deceitful traitor, which, instead of sparing the child, had only served to focus his tormented gaze upon the world's horrors. The teardrop from heaven lay safe for one transient moment. Then it was swept over the glass edge and forced to rejoin its brethren in their journey towards death. Might had already fallen through the cracks into the mire of the earth, as had blood, finally united and indivisible after having been shed and spilled indiscriminately to the ground. Now the rain, too, sped helplessly towards the doom found in the grooves of shattered stone.
The stream flowed inexorably past crushed limbs under fallen debris. Directly in its path a limp, white, skeletal hand lay splayed out across a red pool. Neither would be moved, and the stream flowed on. Only the rain disturbed the open palm. It bore down on the flesh, as though determined to wear the furrowed life line down to be as indiscernible as the heart's. It had no force, though, and nothing changed. The lines remained the same. The base of a dark wand still rested on the end of one tapered finger and gleamed with the power of a half-uttered spell, never to be finished, never to be heard again.
The rain died down to a murmur and continued on only in a muffled sob. The pool of water—to call it a gentler name, though a rose by any other remains that familiar red—the water surrounding the deadened hand, it threw back a reflection of the tower spiraling high. In the rippling scene the gray monolith seemed a serpent, its head upraised in wary search for more predators. Or, perhaps, prey. From the highest shattered window a shredded cloak lay half-in, half-out the gaping, saw-toothed maw and writhed in the wind, a darting, slavering tongue.
The tree line had shrunken back, beating a fearful retreat that left a careless trail of sodden ash and centaur bones. To the west, fires played dead. Their smoldering remains bided time, hidden with the townsfolk under collapsed rooftops. Only the thestrals circled the ruins without fear, but even they would not dare a sound.
The world lay silent as the soul of a candle burned too bright drifted home. All lay still, save for the tower rising into the sky, still standing and standing still, for it had known all along. It had always known how the war would end—how all wars always end.
With a bang.
Then a whimper.
Then nothing, nothing at all.
