Winter sat in silent triumph, white death, dark skies, and a coldness so deep, it came from the bones. Unlike the season, Winter was a world, the truth of the world. It was a realm of truth, a dead world that had taken its true form. The coldness was holy.
Those who lived in such a world were among the scattered dead of the flock. Bones lay in green amid the frost, upon the streets. Ghosts stood in silence, gazing at the survivors. In a land of grazing pastures - now only wolves cast living shadows, that ran from tree to tree, always outrunning the sunset.
Survivors of Winter asked themselves: "What would I do to be here? Would I watch my loved ones die? Would I hear freedom silenced, and remain silent? Would I hide as they took my neighbors in the night? What have I done for the privilege of seeing the ruins, the snowflakes melting into poisoned mud? What, indeed, have I done?"
These survivors are not ghosts, wrapped in rags and shivering. They are alive, feeling hungry and afraid. But how their world became peaceful again seems an impossible story. For a world worried about high thoughts and wealth, watching foreign wars like sporting events, learned that there was yet one more war that had never burned the world into Winter.
The sun, the moon, the comets and their diseases, the glimmering clouds swung round and round and repainted the sky a thousand times a thousand days. Each of these days belonged to the humans, and they thought they were the first ones, the only ones, the chosen ones. They took what they wanted and built what they dreamed about. Even when they dreamed of nightmares.
Humans were unaware of many things, and they did not know they were ignorant. It was not the way of intelligent creatures with such short lives to worry about the unknown. What purpose is there to consider that which cannot be known, to believe in whatever cannot be seen? The life of a human is too short, and anything that they do not know for certain does not exist.
That is the one side. The other is the sight of the impossible. To witness a miracle, to know magic is real, to know the power of controlling it, that is another human experience. Among those who were willing to let the world burn, were those who knew the truth about magic, the lies of science, and the history of the world, as it lived spinning in each moment of the whole universe. Earth is the center of all things, the actual universe. Humans could not understand that they were intended as an example, an insult, a compromise, a joke. For the first eons, a thousand mighty races had ruled from one world, as it wildly projected across the endless void, time and space mere illusions.
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When each of the masks of God had stopped making their Creator smile, they fell. All of them looked their existence in the eyes and at that moment they finally died. Since the beginning, each was less than the one before. Humans might be the last, for nothing could be more contradictory or closer to their Creator's image, but like any good joke, their existence would be brief and witty. Their whole history is a mere poem. And then the universe would end.
Not with any sort of banging or whispering or anything, but with a mere chuckle from God.
To the cabal of sorcerers who kept magic for themselves, the time would not come until they had looked Creation in the eye and made it blink, making God flinch. They had commanded the secret words and emotions of magic since the beginning. They knew the dynasties and languages of the races that ruled the world before humans. They were the enemies of the gods, stealing from them, making themselves on equal footing, by knowing the ways of magic.
And should the gods die before they fulfilled their plans, would not those same plans die with them? Could the frail and short-lived race of humans ascend to the highest levels? The Elders told themselves through time, their long lives spanning history, that they would kill God and take the world for themselves.
Somehow nothing happened according to their carefully laid plans. Science had a few tricks up its sleeves and cast a sinister charm over humanity. With the advent of a world connected, with machines working and thinking for an entire generation of childish adults, science had proven to be a pied piper. The Elders openly seized power, exposing themselves, to rid the world of the threats of science. By those days, it was far too late. The last remnants of magic were reduced to simple wards and spells to reveal someone's secret admirer. Gone were the spells that could summon lesser gods, grant immortality or even raise the dead.
The Elders looked and saw the approach of the end of all things. Their moment was due, but their powers had abandoned them. When the spears of ultimate destruction rained down on the old cities, built upon the ruins of much older cities under unfamiliar constellations, there was no magic that could have stopped any of it.
And when the clouds bore the ashes of countless souls to the stars, there was laughter in the heavens. The end had come and the mighty Babylonian plans to strike down God were fruitless. The Elders waited in their buried bunkers, afraid of divine wrath.
In such a desolate landscape there is a prophecy. It shall be that the goodness of a new covenant shall be known, and humanity shall ascend to the highest sunrise of any of the many intelligent species the universe had watched rise and fall. If this covenant is not known, then each battle fought in the name of peace, justice, and vengeance shall be nothing more than acts of destruction, in a world made brittle and endangered by the frozen darkness that is Winter.