It was one of those nights during which Charon could truly dream rather than lay motionless in wait for attack. After Eros's rant, he'd promised to stand guard and left Charon to sleep. Though he didn't trust the schizo little fuck's fingers on a trigger any more than he trusted himself not to strangle the kid every time his mouth opened.
He'd had a dream about the kid - though it was vivid as a vision.
Charon, why do you stare? Eros laughed. He kneeled beside a body – one Charon knew he'd left lifeless. Thine eyes betray thine mind, my ferryman. He jerkily rose his arm, slamming his hand into the wall beside him. His fingers curled and twitched against the metal, leaving the corpse's blood as their signature. Eros slammed himself against the wall, still kneeling, his forehead pressed hard against it, his eyes wide. The world ends with me, Charon.
Eros jingled pre-war coins in his hand – they had been scavenged mainly from vacant vaults – ghostly imprints of false hopes within their desolation. He felt chills course through his nerves as he thought of the vaults – their doors, through which once passed husbands and wives, children and elders. Their beds – once home to dreams of their days and hopes and tears and smiles. Occasionally he would find pictures – or worse, cameras. The pictures were their wishes to remember happy times – times they cannot experience any longer; cameras are their hopes to have happy times to remember.
The coins fell silent as he placed one into a dead man's mouth. "Charon may not escort you; however, I cannot wish you everlasting purgatory within the River." He turned to the stains of blood – a fluid moving at a definite rate pushed forward by a central point – it had spread itself across the walls. Blood is heavenly, Eros felt. As it hides within a body, it colors itself blue – the color of a sky and water when pure – but as it hits oxygen, it fades into red, the ribbon of death and the lace of enemies.
"My brothers, I find that you are with sin – its slams through your blood and reaps it of its love. You may feel your skin torn by the claw of Hades… or you may stand within the Field, never to step forward… Whatever your fate may hold for you, I must expel all feelings of guilt I may have. It is not my fault that you all have failed at the Gods' expectations; you have thrust forward your choices and they have proven futile and ignorant, as all humans are, ultimately. I am Eros – Love and War when held by hands. I need neither spouse nor enemy for I am my own. There is no love in Heaven; there is only eternal silence." Eros dropped a match lit at some point onto a body and hesitated only for a moment before running to awaken Charon.
"Charon, we have to leave immediately."
"Why?" There was no need in his mind to explain to Charon the work he did – only to repeat the necessity to leave. He was behind Charon as they ran, the ghoul's breath never quickening; his feet never stomping. He was the bacteria Eros had created back Home – he was the evolution of a greater Being.
The bombs fell like birds shot from the skies. Their impact shot through man's mind as only heartbreak ever could. A pang of surprise followed by shellshock which broke their knees and crushed their skulls was the last reminder of what early man had wanted - unity.
-Dr. Jacob Ambrose, Ph.D.