There isn’t anything left of the Central Palace Complex.

Jutting pillars of destroyed marble and polished granite buried beneath collapsed roofs and rubbled walls; ornate buildings and lush gardens of an opulence in the wastes now a monument to ruin, and vengeance.

There’s frames surrounding once grand structures, still standing walls pockmarked with gaping holes exposing charred interiors. Greenery scattered from once beautiful gardens covered in fields of rubble and dust.

Wisps of smoke and embers still burn from the remnant phosphorus charges of incendiary rounds, noxious smoke clearing from a wasteland wind surging up from deserts below.

Movement amongst the dead towers, the gas masked form of military officers and their accompanying squads picking through the debris like starving maggots atop a decayed skeleton. The fragmented corpses still wearing partially destroyed party clothes buried beneath rock, identities censored through crushed bones and half-charred flesh.

Some of the dead still draw breath, barely alive against bombardment and gas; survivors subsequently put to the roar of gunfire in both mercy and political convenience. Orders distributed to personnel most loyal, a final cementation of power in an unruly city through cold death.

It rumbles beneath their feet, a gradient escalation slow yet building with force.

Massive waves of energy transferred from an apocalypse below towards a surface ten miles distant, a resultant earthquake shaking the entire mountain to ruins. The great beast of vengeance shifts the world, soldiers watching as massive cracks spiral outward at their very feet. It roars, a sound that kicks a fury of dust into the afternoon sky in sheets of deadly particulate; a noise found from the very bowels of their world surging towards the skies above.

There’s minutes before disaster, the mercy of reaction given to humanity as soldiers all scatter from ordered positions. A pattern of destruction stopping at the very edges of the ruined palace complex, a line of safety guaranteed via toppled fencing and burning piles of civilian corpses.

The Palace falls.

Sunbaked concrete cracks as stone liquifies from mechanical exertion, granite foundation slagged into magma. A contained explosion beneath unspeakable tonnes of bedrock sundering the stability of the very world itself, a wounded city shaken to its core by the disruption of divine importance.

The backblast of energy shutters the half-mile tall leyline tower, a power surge erupting throughout its arcane form. A distortion of reality rippling across its surface, the groaning of the world deafening the entire city of March in a low, pained howl. Absolution found in the decaying, dying form; a release in a single moment of lucidity for its true purpose.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Utter silence, every single living soul left in the dust beneath gods.

Water seeps forth from the cracks, the world hungrily consuming moisture in utter greed. A miracle smothered by the evil of the world, the selfishness of dust eating away at the first wisps of hope draining forth from a universe beyond.

Slowly but surely, it's overwhelmed by the sheer scale of mercy.

Liquid pours from expanding crevices, gushing forth in a torrent of frothy white foam intermixed with brown mud.

From puddles to streams, to rivers that spiral out from the massive leyline tower, souls watching in both awe and horror at the majesty of its creation.

The palace complex sinks, broken towers and walls sucked into roiling, undulating waves. The final memory of a dying empire pulled beneath the miracle of gods, a savior shedding tears against the loss of his own salvation.

It doesn’t stop, the water level rising higher and higher as squads run to evacuate their stragglers from the rubble. A leader found at the front, Field General Philip’s command station empty as her middle aged form pulls comrades from the gaping sinkhole; officers and soldiers saved by mere inches against frothing rapids.

Trying to catch breaths against the dust, the tearing of musculature obvious as she rolls her shoulder in pain. Soldiers in realization of rank, trying to stand to attention before her waved dismissal reaches them.

They all watch from the edge, from the shoals; a gaping maw filled from a new source in the bone dry desert.

Her analytical mind takes in the implication, both through academics of cold tactics and in a heart of faith. A prophecy from a civilization long conquered now to fruition, the holy city’s final and greatest gift to its people realized by an awoken savior.

The waves lap atop the shoreline, a perfectly calibrated infiltration of water converting dust to mud and subsequently into silt. A depth absolving the sins now buried beneath the gaze of gods, the islands of ancient machinery forming in jagged pillars of black steel the only remnant of divinity alongside the still standing leyline tower.

A miracle, a body of water here amongst the ruins and decay and dust; the souls of humankind gathering at the shores. Careful hands reaching onward towards the surface, physicality attempting to determine truth alongside visual spectrums.

It's real.

Dead gods above adjust their gazes to fragments; five evening suns finding five souls as they lie beneath their departing rage.

Two points in space-time folded together, eleven holes punched through dimensions forcing matter into differentiable matrices. A skin-thin layer of distorted reality redshifting as the link completes itself, bodies and weapons independently and inconspicuously dumped into the world.

An instantaneous transposition of spaces leaving five humans within the dust and decay of the old city districts, an alleyway directly over an opened sewer grate marking the beginnings of a new journey for their kind, for their sake.

Alongside the five and one fragments.

Taken from depths of ruins, salvaged from the hands of vengeance; brought beneath gods above in the presence of their wielders. Four weapons and one evenly arranged together in a perfected congruence, separated in the movement between realms for their absolute protection.

Five fragments all surrounding the childlike form standing at the center of a reborn universe.