The Kadell
27-10-2005, 14:45
The image appeared as a panorama of totalitarian beauty. All perception was dominated by the endless line between the intense continuity of the sky and the mottled golden tones and green-browns of the land. Hidden between the sheafs of grey pealing bark and beneath the boughs of drooping drab green leaves the rasping click of cicada rose in rhythm to the rustling brush of branches up above.
A centre of glass towers cut into the infinite blue of summertime. A city of several million sits along the horizon, its great buildings rising from the shore and lifting into the mountains beyond. Between those buildings a great bustle of activity moves beneath the relentless gaze of the sun as thousands of tiny insects of tin and glass rush along the great bitumen pathways of the world.
And all of this is gone – for ever.
In a single day every great city had been obliterated under the hammer of atomic detonation. 10 million were obliterated in the initial blast waves that zeroed these great urban centres into creators of black glass. Rivers choked on the corpses of the dead who survived to witness and were irradiated by the storms of fine ash that blew across the damaged horizon. The towns and villages that lingered began to fall silent save for the violent sounds of canine packs bloated on the flesh of their masters. All the world began to unwind like a golden pocket watch.
Life however did not ground to a halt, civilisation did not implode and resistance did not demise. In the waves of the displaced, the terrified and the terrible that spread across the land they pooled into great centres of refuge and defiance. The greatest of these cities became Aeurous, a vibrant pastiche of throbbing activity and exchange. Around this urban axis run out to a web of towns and cities cast along an immense system of canals and waterways that began from the iced mountain peaks and end as a great cascade into the Tear of the Earth.
There is anger, there is bitterness and a soul destroying sorrow of loss that howls across the great deserts but above all and beyond all there is hope
A centre of glass towers cut into the infinite blue of summertime. A city of several million sits along the horizon, its great buildings rising from the shore and lifting into the mountains beyond. Between those buildings a great bustle of activity moves beneath the relentless gaze of the sun as thousands of tiny insects of tin and glass rush along the great bitumen pathways of the world.
And all of this is gone – for ever.
In a single day every great city had been obliterated under the hammer of atomic detonation. 10 million were obliterated in the initial blast waves that zeroed these great urban centres into creators of black glass. Rivers choked on the corpses of the dead who survived to witness and were irradiated by the storms of fine ash that blew across the damaged horizon. The towns and villages that lingered began to fall silent save for the violent sounds of canine packs bloated on the flesh of their masters. All the world began to unwind like a golden pocket watch.
Life however did not ground to a halt, civilisation did not implode and resistance did not demise. In the waves of the displaced, the terrified and the terrible that spread across the land they pooled into great centres of refuge and defiance. The greatest of these cities became Aeurous, a vibrant pastiche of throbbing activity and exchange. Around this urban axis run out to a web of towns and cities cast along an immense system of canals and waterways that began from the iced mountain peaks and end as a great cascade into the Tear of the Earth.
There is anger, there is bitterness and a soul destroying sorrow of loss that howls across the great deserts but above all and beyond all there is hope