The hush, the whistle and scrape of dead leaves on concrete. A slight high moan of wind rushing through gutted towers. And the burbling hum of a city in stasis.
Humanity has long been deserted by this place. What would pride serve here, where greatness is sacrificed to expediency?
Though they may have left, their gods remain; working, never ceasing, hum.
Shorn from the side of their own creation, blown to the sky by its harsh derision; there to fly or fall.
Yet two feet remain. A strong pair, well worn, that stride purposefully through the autumn leaves, making harsh slashing sounds as they forge a path through this bronze mantle. These feet are not of the city, they are foreign. Where did they come from? Not from the sky, no they came from the river which carries through the arrested heart, undermining it with motion and change. These feet are the river incarnate.
Elemental man, the owner of the feet, owns nothing more or less than his body. Yet his purpose is great as he strides for the bridge which carries the weight of a hundred humming. He arrives, he pauses. And then he steps into the path of the humming and is cut down, almost as if he had been an unsubstantial ghost.
Almost. But the time taken to cut him down, however efficient, is still time. It now happens that one fewer car passes through that phase of traffic lights, and that this anomaly cannot be assimilated. The next car crashes into it, propels it forward into the path of flow. A flow that does not pause but seconds later has ascended to chaos, a cacophony catawauling. Altars of time desecrated and cast up to heaven, burning fragments to be thrown back to earth. The ascendance spreads, stopping all movement and breaking stasis, scattering libations to the four winds the machines essay their Human Gods: in vain. They cry, they call, they moan,
‘We, we are your descendants. Cast you your wrath upon your own kin?’
Verily you are, but is not pruning, even of kin, a prerequisite to our flight?
The body of elemental man lies face-upwards, thrown into the river by randomness and chaos; his eyes wide to the destruction caused just by his demise. He ends, and for this man, it is true that the world ends with him, the last, and only to see the soaring fragments, the heat of and the haze with it; the rising inferno. Lying face-upwards in the still, clear, blue waters, his sorrow makes the river flow. And as his eyes blur and close, his lungs heave with liquid and his face sinks beneath the surface; all closes in with a hush.
Its legacy, a single leaf, floating…
….. genesis….
-Alice (xLx)
Posted in author: Alice
Tags: Order of Nine Angles