The Most Loving Wrath
This was the necessary poison.
* * * * * * * *
She stood against the edge of the stone balcony and watched the ivy vines flay about with howls of the storming winds. Neither her complexion nor her disposition could sway. Even as towering trees tossed over around her, she stood still, unmoving, and watched it all. She would not miss their fall. Not even her hair lifted with the winds against her will.
In those days, her beauty had been indisputable fact. When blessed with the sight of such loving grace, humans chose to cut her down to size—which is the choice they make every time.
There have been many times.
Many chances.
Even when beauty is eternal, time gives way for humans to pervert such splendors. If a kind of beauty is found in one moment of time and space, humans will demand that it is in that singular moment it belonged, and nowhere else. For a human is mortal—its life, fleeting. Nothing is more valuable than impermanent life. And if this thought is fact, then nothing should stand against time. Not love, not happiness, and surely, not beauty, if not human life.
The grounds below swallowed a meandering road, there, to the right. Its cracks caved in to the mouths of the underworld. Colors from the flowerbeds she had strolled beside earlier that very morning fell into the abyss, where its depths were a blank mystery that ended precisely where she knew it to be.
And all is black.
Dark.
Cold.
The day before, the soil had begged to not be drowned by blood for another passing day, lest the earth die with all its inhabitants. Twenty-five years of tearing veins, crimson and blue, had polluted the air bit by bit with turmoil from the hearts.
Humans never see it, but just as the beat of a laugh and the shine of a smile are infectious upon the person beside it, so is the outcry of pain and the glimmer of a tear. They may never recognize her as beautiful after tomorrow, but the reality was, her beauty had always been and always will be.
Truth never swayed for the perceptions in the world. Not once.
A tree just below the tower surrendered, the last of its kind to stand in this garden. Its roots were persistent in holding onto all it held dear within the earth. But there exists that passing second, that one second in which one realizes an end must come and lets go of life. An action potential of sorts, for cutting off hope. Such a moment came for this once mighty tree, and its entire being fell. Its branches dug into the soil in the center of the garden and its trunk slammed into the bench standing in its looming shadow. The bench crumbled into shattered slabs among pebbles.
This was once her sister’s most cherished place in the world. Their brother, Adrion, had grown and cultivated this garden for their beloved Auna. Beaming among her memories—and she had many, for none were lost—was Auna’s smile when she had placed her foot upon the first stone elevated from the grass. Auna had danced—twirled upon the ball of her foot—before stepping onto the next stone beside it, brilliant silver eyes glowing brighter, still, as she turned to their brother and giggled in happiness before running into the maze of vibrant flowers that first day this garden was bestowed to her.
That was two millennia ago in a human’s eyes. But time made no difference for her.
Agonizing screams wisped through the air and interrupted her memory. She could hear the rumbling of the earth in the opposite hemisphere. The damage was not done. Mountain ranges shook and trembled, still, in her other brother’s anger. Anger in her place. And not a split second after, she heard them. The families torn and crushed beneath their houses. Mothers scared and heartbroken. Children lost and fallen between the cracks of earthen crust. There was not a shriek in this world worse than the cold shrill of young innocence staring at death in the face.
And here she stood, hearing their pains ten thousand times over.
She could stop this, but she would not. Not yet.
“… Anya? Why do you cry?”
Her eyes kept upon the storm in the distance. The winds could not dry her tear or push it in any direction other than where she allowed it to fall.
The question waited for a response. After a moment, she gave one.
“Your garden.”
Her whisper was soft, but its shy hymn could have traveled past the entire windstorm if she had demanded it. She turned to him. “Adrion.”
Adrion stepped forward from behind her and placed his hands upon her shoulders.
“Surely that is no reason to weep?” He held her shoulders a bit tighter, as if it meant translating more comfort to her spirit. “I will regrow it when Auna returns.”
“The world will have changed—will have regressed back to this moment, when she returns to us.”
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Adrion’s brilliant silver eyes met with Anya’s own. The depths of her silvers shined an irrevocable grace against the slaughter of the world. He knew of the true reason she wept when he looked into those eyes. This world would always be her beloved, even if it meant the death of all else she held dear.
“Ayren is waiting with Austyr,” he said instead, not because she did not know, but because the past could hold the present back from reaching the future when not careful.
Her face stayed solemn, eyes unrelenting upon the horizon.
True. As much as Anya loved them, all of them, she had to push them out of her mind.
Soft fingers gently lifted off the stones stacking their balcony high. The comfort for all the torment must wait until after the storm. And so she turned, waves of ivory hair twirling with her. She walked back into the palace and away from the destruction, but in truth, her mind lingered everywhere, still.
The balcony belonged to Auna, once, as did the rest of this room leading out two ways. One way traversed down a series of libraries before opening to the central ballroom, whilst the other bridged over the grand halls below to enter their common room. Anya walked down the path of the latter. Stepping into the common room, her heart ached at the dismal cold, its breath a vacuous chill upon her presence. In the past, Ayren could be found beside the hearth as Auna read one of her beloved stories. Stories of them, written by humans, in worlds seen through human eyes, where the past blended with the present as the two raced forward with the future.
The three distinctions, in truth, were all the same to her, her brothers, and her sisters.
The rumbling of the earth cracked these memories into pieces. Auna could not be found, and Ayren was above, waiting for her. She pressed on, taking steps up to the terrace above their common room, where two of her brothers overlooked the entirety of their island.
“That is enough, Ayren,” she called out before she saw him.
One of the brothers turned to greet her with the same silver eyes as she rose with each level of the stairway. He sat along the edge of the wall, face as stoic as could be in an anthropomorphic body. It was best, this way.
Ayren, on the other hand, had his arms outstretched, facing out to the sea. Upon Anya’s call, he stopped his dance in the air and brought his body down to the stone flooring. He turned and greeted her with a powerful smile—one that could lift the earth the same way his lips lifted his cheeks, if he had demanded it be as such.
“My sister is so serious!” he chuckled. His silver eyes met hers, too, and his ivory hair also mingled with hers when he reached over and hugged her.
“My love allows nothing less.”
There was a grief with power woven in those words. Ayren had felt it, and he had quivered, for laced within each word was a monotonous weight that could drag down men. He lifted back into the air.
“Why must you always be so full of gloom? Anya,” his voice pounded with ecstatic enunciations in joyous rhythms, “we should be celebrating. This is a new beginning!”
And he snapped his fingers.
In the distant north, the top of a mountain blew off. Smoke rose in the air. Slivers of red trickled down the mountainside as boulders rained upon houses built by toiled men. Ayren looked out to the horizon, where sparks drifted through the air.
His frown matched the sharpened glimmer in his irises, because he saw it. His sister stubbornly held on to every drop of love because she knew the pain could not kill her. The rage for this predicament was free to be his, and he gladly shouldered every part of it for her. For all of her children. He would not hesitate.
A second snap.
Anya heard their cries as they ran. And more than hearing, she saw every one of them simultaneously. Fire raced across the land and up the trees toppling upon each other. Wings flew however they could, but as forests fell where they once dwelled, sparks landed on their feathers for flight. Feet were caught by the tongue of flames and all that was left to do then, was burn.
And the rest that believed they were free—they suffocated in the febrile smoke. Each collapsed lung, shriveled and dry in the flames, caught her own breath and choked her a hundred thousand times over. No one knew death could shine so bright.
One more snap.
Feet rushed in fear as young men freed their horses to keep them safe from harm. The anxious restlessness wakes the children who only know to scream for comfort.
Another snap of fingers.
Where is that comfort?
Fins waved left and wiggled right beneath the frantic ocean under the assumption that they could swim against the weight of the swirling sea. The panic, the adrenaline, the fear, and the surreal calamity before their eyes—whatever they felt, she felt it, too. They caught her and they drowned her one million times over.
“Just shut them from your mind,” Austyr whispered beside her. “This is for the best, and you know so in your heart. Beyond the cries you hear and the rage you see upon their faces, we know this is what the world needs.”
“Auna must hear them, too,” was all Anya chose to say.
Austyr parted his lips to reply, but Ayren spoke before he did. “Fire spreads quite easily in a windstorm. Get ready for the next part, Austyr!” He chuckled as he sat upon empty space. “I have not had this particular sort of fun in centuries. What a human kind of freedom!”
“Whenever you are ready, brother,” Austyr answered with a nod. And with that, he ushered their beloved Anya down the steps. “Return to Adrion and Aiana. Find comfort in our sister’s eyes, for the future is guaranteed to hold peace, however fleeting.”
The sky roared. Thunder clapped against the sight of lightning, and clouds hovered over the vibrant fires and quaked earth as far as their brilliant eyes could see. And they could see the entire world in these silver irises.
“All will be better in three days’ time,” Austyr comforted again, hurrying his sister along. “We are incapable of wrong. Just this is enough.”
And this, too, was true.
With utmost reluctance, Anya stepped down the rest of the stairs back to the common room as Austyr rejoined Ayren at the edge of the terrace.
“Three days of this!” Ayren twirled in the air.
“Control yourself,” Austyr bluntly reminded him. “Try to not drown everyone on land.”
“Harsher rains are only on the first day, so we can rid this planet of these fires. Gathering clouds around the world is the easy part.”
“It must be as you say.”
“Correct, brother!” Ayren flashed a smile at Austyr, who was still as plain and indifferent as ever. “Even for me, it takes time to make the entire heavens weep. The perfect amount of time.”
* * * * * * * *
In the other hemisphere, a young man limped away from his home. Behind him, a wooden hut withdrew to ashes. The rest of his family resided in another village more inland, and he hoped with all the doubt in his heart that they were safe. Deep inside, though, he knew.
A journal dropped from his left hand, tossing pages open upon the ground. He had been writing an entry just a moment ago, before he heard the explosion, and before his greatest fears came true. On the page, scribbled messily in local tongue, were the following words:
> There have been rumors going around
> that the world is about to end.
>
> Everyone says that those who were good—those who loved
> and believed in the goodness of others—disappeared one day.
> Disappeared to a better place.
>
> I must not know any good people because everyone I have ever met
> is still here. But I do believe it.
>
>
>
>
>
> The world is finally going to end.