A globe of fire stretched across the horizon like a new sun rising, swallowing the sky and the earth, making its clouds as blood. Everywhere forests fell flat, stone was baked into bulges of ash, and flying dragons tumbled downwards, crashing to the sea with their leather wings bent and twisted and they screamed, jaws agape with steam spewing from their outstuck bones.
Jack sat on the stairs of the Villa with his eyes covered. He parted his hand and opened his eyes when the heat on his skin dimmed and he watched as a cloud emerged in the far distance, sprouting from the ground like a strange flower. The black and white newspaper photoshots didn't do it justice. Even from this distance, he felt the shockwave slap the cliffside and the ground shuddered.
He looked away as the light dimmed into an orange afterimage. Strings of blood rivered down his face. His bones rattled when he tried to stand. His skin was cold, sweaty with adrenaline, stinging and numb. A pain chewed into his lungs. He jerked and fell back on his rear. He then looked at the sky. It was getting hard for him to see; his sight was blurry, out of focus as though he were looking through bad, misshapen glass. Was the whole world spinning, he wondered, or was it just him?
Jack gently leaned over on his side. He laughed and coughed blood on his palm and on his shirt in little droplets. His chest rose up and down so slowly like he had seen dying animals do on the farm back home in Iowa.
Why? Had he broken something in him? Maybe a rib? He didn't think so. It was hard to remember what had happened after speaking to the Slab. There were faint flashes in his mind; screaming and the slapping of swords and angry steel.
Soon his limbs went slump and his neck fell back as if boneless. "Bet you rat bastards didn't see that one coming," he said aloud.
He was all alone now. All dead save him. Nothing stirred in the marble ruins. Nothing save the circling fire.
In response to his words, the flames grew like hot coals on his face and his scalp boiled with sweat. The fires then touched and wrapped around his body, engirdling like molten serpents, but they did not kill him. They wouldn't let him off so easily. No. It was just starting.
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"Oh," Jack gritted, staring up at the blackening sky. "Is that the best you can do, you stupid bitch? This is going to be a sorry eternity."
A moment passed. Then, something whispered back to him, high above. It spoke with a nail-craking hiss: "Deceiver, destroyer, mock and base pretender! Would you undo this very world to satisfy your hate? This is how you repay us, those that gave you love. With destruction, with old-world hate?"
The voice was a woman's.
A blue star began to shine above in the dusk like a blue diamond. The flames around Jack grew wild. They took the feverish appearance of strange beasts, dancing as they formed around him like members of a heathen ritual. They held red eyes in their shimmering skull sockets and tall looping horns and mouths that spat wet obsidian.
Jack grinned. "Howdy boys."
Soon other voices came to him between the flanged lashes and whipping thunder; other nightmares. One by one, they spoke: old men, angels, the pleating murmurs of animals and insect beings. There were those whose mere utterance shook the earth and those whose speech was poison to his ears. Hissing things from nightmare realms beyond knowing. Things molded and set to shape from the reflections of old Greek war gods.
All of them cursed him. They yelled his name, pulling away strips of his blue soul and laughing as they swallowed it into their gullets or burned it to ethereal ash.
"For such base depravity," one long-haired spirit cried. "No punishment will be too harsh."
"You will suffer in unending despair and torment."
"You shall serve as our warning. A warning to all others."
"Death!"
They harked: "Restitution!"
"Justice!"