473. Storm, 8

(Myls)

Something fell from the sky.

Very suddenly.

Like a rain, or a cloud.

There was no cloud.

These droplets were no rain.

Death.

In a matter of a minute, the forests around turned to barren lands with dead stumps, soon dissolving as well.

Snake flew away desperately, leaving a cloud and a river of its blood and dissolved feathers behind.

Nightmare was forced into humanity, because the effect was worse on her.

Only to see her body melt anyway.

She had the time to push me under a shelter, before her skin turned white, and then to dust and blood, and then to nothing. Even the bones dissolved instantly under that rain of death.

Her last words were incomplete, but I got that she didn’t want to die.

Her eyes were human and terror at that moment.

That unreal acidic rain turned her into a human, and killed her.

Zeslinry had been pushed to cover by Rose, as much as she could in the last moment.

Rose raised a ghastly face toward us as she stumbled, still one step too far from shelter.

She collapsed where she had been in motion, and liquefied into a pool of molten flesh as well at our feet.

Her sacrifice had not been enough. Rose died, and Zes had been one second too long outside.

My breath turned to ice as I watched her, looking at me just next to me, while a drop of poison was piercing her head.

Zes’s body fell in front of me. One step or one second too short.

One step made the difference.

I couldn’t move. Rose and Nightmare had just vanished. Zes had just collapsed dead at my feet.

Behind there, the land once lush and sunny was now a desolate alien land under a downpour that erased all.

I can’t move. Not even to reach Zes just before me.

Next to me, Blume also made it in time under a roof and ceiling, and she’s trembling all over, shaking, gawking at the chaos with the same terror in her eyes as mine.

She’s maybe even more shocked and terrified than I am.

The downpour has made us deaf in shock.

The terror of what we just saw petrified us.

They just died.

This is the end.

Our shelter won’t last either.

I have a painful black stain on my skin where Nightmare touched me. She pushed me into that shelter to the cost of her own life. I still don’t understand.

And her last words didn’t look like an act.

I can’t even cry. I can’t look at Zes, lying dead at my feet and bleeding from a tiny hole at the top of her head.

If I try to move, my heart will simply explode...

I’m passing out.

~

I woke up, the next day or a few later.

The sky was clear.

The landscape however showed that rain had not been just a bad dream.

I just couldn’t recognise anything in the land around. Nothing.

I was walking out from an artificial cave. A building half buried under the mud floods.

And as far as I could see, there was nothing but dark desert lands where nothing vegetal remained.

Not a plant. Not an insect. Not even a leftover of the forests that where once there, just the other day.

An entire forest has been destroyed, with everything inside...

As I looked around in stupor, I found Blume. She remains.

Her face has aged. She looks awful.

She brushes tears away, as she reaches out to me.

Looking at her, I realise, this incomprehensible event, it truly happened.

I fall onto my knees and begin to scream and cry.

I will for a long while.

~

I woke up again, in the middle of the night that time.

After another hour or so of cries and moans, I managed to stand up and walk.

Only Blume remains...

My face aches. I’ve broken bits of my teeth, gritting them. My jaw hurts.

If Rose was still alive, I might have killed her myself. Zes is...

I feel hollow. But a wrath takes over.

Zes was taken from me.

Something will pay!

Blume is crying as well. I see her a few steps away from me. It pains me.

I knew she could laugh. I didn’t think she could cry.

My arm hurts. The skin Nightmare touched as she pushed me burns, deep.

Blume came closer and raises her darker face towards me.

Next to her, lies the unburried body of Zeslinry.

Has she done something to her?

B - Please, Myls, sit down. I will tell you what happened...

~

What I didn’t see when that rain fell on Earth, Blume did.

She saw everything human eyes could not.

She saw, it was an attack.

A wrathful revenge, from the heavens.

A sudden strike to obliterate the godslayer.

A vengeance, from the one they called Magenta.

Something survived.

Something was reborn out of its remnants blown into space haphazardly.

A new Magenta awoke, in outer space. A new god driven by a single purpose now similar to mine.

Magenta threw its devastation like a nuke over us, obliterating everything along its nemesis.

The new god of hatred struck us with everything it got.

And that surprise attack worked.

~

What more I couldn’t see happened after I passed out.

That rain was made to destroy every form of life, both organic and made from T.I.

But what happened after everything had been dissolved into a thick fog of death, was the recall.

Blume managed to survive, to protect me and to watch it.

She witnessed the fog rising, and the rains charged with everything dissolved returning to the sky.

Everything flew up, and turned into a whirlwind of clouds vacuumed into the farthest layers of atmosphere.

The rain went upward from the flooded ground, until all water and all dead life had flown away in the sky.

Surely up to it.

Magenta had fed, on everything it had dissolved...

Magenta ate a piece of Zeslinry... Along with them.

B - Rose and Nightmare as we know them are dead. But something, some parts of them may still remain out there, for a little while... Until they’re digested entirely.

M - What about Zes?

B - I wanted you to choose...

Blume kept what’s left of her from decay. The body is turning cold, but mostly intact. Her wound to the head isn’t something you can just heal like it’s skin though. The acid drop went like molten iron through butter.

Blume kept it on hold nonetheless, so I could choose.

Either to let Zeslinry remaining dead as she is now.

Or for Blume to attempt rebuilding what’s missing in her head.

To reanimate her, as best she can.

I can barely breathe.

I’m tearing up as I think about it.

What am I supposed to choose?

~

There’s one other choice however that was easy to make.

All my muscles ache. My jaw hurts as I keep grinding my teeth badly.

I will burn the skies.

I don’t care about what happened between them before.

I don’t care if this will ignite a bigger state of war.

I will bring death to Magenta.

One way or another, I will kill that fucking god.

It can think it’s safe out there in space like a satellite. It can try to kill me as I go.

I will destroy it.

And Blume will arm me.

For Zeslinry, Nightmare, and even that dangerous Rose, Magenta will die. And soon.

I vow it. I will do it.

Because that fucking Rose failed at it.

Because that stupid bitch underestimated them...

Blume thinks there may be something of all of them out there we could try to save.

I don’t know about that yet.

But that monstrous satellite glowing pink around Earth will have to die!

Another tiny bit of a tooth broke into my mouth. It doesn’t hurt that much.

In the pile of stuff Blume was able to recover and gather, there’s more than I need to start.

I don’t choose what to do with Zeslinry right away.

But we will start moving away from that strike zone tomorrow.

I know what I will do to bring destruction to that shit god in space.

~