My Last Breath?
Drenching Flames [HAITUS]
Look at me. Standing here, alone. It's a furnace here, ashes falling like snow, from the stars. Yet I'm drenched, head to toe. Sodden with pain.
This is it.
Grass is crackling furiously all around me, a blanket of flame, intimidating and blood red. The sky is black with a throttling smoke, billowing above me, looming like a predator in waiting. My village is evaporating, ashes rising to join the grave of the sky, what little left below smouldering in pity. I see the rage all around me, all track of time lost. All I can hear are the distant screams and chokes of neighbours echoing around my blank mind. I feel sweat run down my back and wet my tangled hair, I feel heat that sears my skin, I feel tears that blur my eyes with sorrow and the fear of the reality around me.
Once mighty and prosperous trees were shrivelled to half their size, the trunks now torches of fire which rocket into the sky, the buildings replaced by white and red hot ashes, plumes of black choking the air. My lungs were filled with soot every stuttering breath. There's nowhere left to hide, even the arsonists had left. My only way out is across an ancient stone bridge, crossing the divide between plateaus. It was over a tremendous gorge.
The ground was hot to walk on, too hot for bare feet. But I needed to cross, and fast.
I felt my knees weaken in my agony, the fire quickly surrounding me but failing to pick up on the earth path that was my passage to safety. Sore burns on exposed flesh from holes scorched into my filthy jacket were shot with pain as if afraid of being burned again. Blood started to lace the rim of the holes. The ground is black and orange, piles of broken memories scattered about, rubble and debris everywhere. I didn't dare look anywhere but directly in front of me.
Every few seconds, I took a pace. Hesitantly time started to make more sense, but it was moving so slowly I couldn't be sure of anything any more. Each step was a stagger and immense effort for me, cuts on my pale face stinging as the dirt mixed with my sweat washed over them. I was... Spaced out.
But as I approached the bridge, my blood started to boil. For everything. Everything down to the arguments I had instead of treasuring moments I'd never get again, for the last kiss from my girl I didn't make so precious, for not knowing that 'goodbye' would be the last.
My foot touches the stone, the outline of my foot glowing for a moment before fleeing like the life in my home. A small twirl of steam rolled into the arms of the fiery daemon suffocating the village. Another step, and I see the flashes of light around me. My legs felt elated. My stride strengthened with each step, the glow becoming taller and brighter each time. Soon I was striding forward in ecstasy, a confidence in a power I couldn't control. By now the glow shot as tall as my hips. But at the middle of the bridge, I came back to earth. Stopped in my tracks, I listened carefully. Crackling, and, cracking. The soft creak was barely audible, but it was a slit creeping up towards me like a stalking tiger.
My heart sank past my feet, down into the bridge. My body seemed to faint, though I was conscious, and I fell to my knees with an ear-splitting crack as they met the stone. My ears popped and my hearing went, blurred out of my mind. The bridge in front of me started to collapse, the end falling into the canyon almost silently. I could barely hear the thunderous thuds of the stone hitting the gorge walls all the way to the ground. The world faded and fuzzed around me, my peripheral vision incomprehensible.
But as the collapsed gap ever grew, and was only meters away, A blinding light appeared in front of me. A white figure formed as my eyes adjusted; it was floating above the ground, light endlessly radiating from it, its features obscured by the pureness I just couldn't see past. It was an angel, my angel, my guardian. It held its hands out to the sides, and I felt my knees leave the ground, and as the bridge disappeared from beneath me, tumbling to the pits of the gorge, my whole body was in the air. Yet I wasn't fearful. I felt like its hands were around my waist, I could feel the pressure on my skin. In that moment, my head fell back, and I looked into the sky, white as the purest dove. My jaw opens and the air I breath is clean and refreshing. My burns don't seem to be there, the pain leaves. I inhale and bliss fills my body.
But then, darkness, unconsciousness.
Who knows what awaits me... if I wake up.
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