A short piece from an upcoming collection tentatively titled Violas and Violets.
The phenomenon weeps in the city by the water. A veil; a blackness overtakes them all. Shadows blotch the streets, every window is eclipsed. Every face drapes in the burden. Every single skin withers in the last moments of this detrimental living. The rising water robes the city walls. The wind of threatening tempest coats the air like gritty rags. A transition set by the creaking of rafters and dripping of stone.
Each tower’s turret is garmented in decay. A swipe, as if by a dragon’s wing, and the structures quickly fail. All of this city’s greatest edifices fall as the worn souls of their engineers flee for cover. Yet they’re all doomed to perish. They’ll die either in the open streets or in their hiding places. Crushed under the tumbling of towers and drowning with the plummeting of bridges, the highest powers of man are grinded to dusty blood. The thick and fetid aroma of this night weighs on the city until it’s gone. All the triumph of the living washed in pieces wearily away from the cape. Bodies swooped into the black sea.
The cape of death swallows all the little cloaks. It renders such little souls into insignificant ripples in its blanket of nothingness. The castles of many significant years are not even a memory, the canyons of what’s left sheeted by the finest windblown sand. The city and its influence are spent, and without a trace.
Tomorrow, if the drapery that fell tonight lifts, nothing will be revealed but crags over agitated waves. No testimony to suspect that life ever flourished on the cape, only the vaguely discerned black veil of clouds floating away from the rising sun. The cape of death lags behind the throes of chaos as a stark reminder. Man, in his pursuit of godhood, only advances the scale of his ruin.
