TERMINUS
What are we but specks of sand compared to the infinitude of time?
I ponder this many a time, as the waves of time slosh upon the grains of reality. We stand so gallantly, so close to the edge and the far abyss below us, and yet here we are upon this rock we call Earth. Why, I ask myself, does man still live on in this endless venture of chaos? When all we come to know comes crashing down every millenia, as the very meaning of life becomes less so human, and we give ourselves over to artificiality? A constant state of emptiness, a world forged in digital codes, ones and zeroes, and endless multitudes of narcissism take away our sense of humanity. But now I see a dead world. Ashen plains replace the dystopian cities, where many suffered, where our lives deteriorated and we saw no hope for the future, for the days to come would be grim and dark and cold, and what were we to the cruel world? Our leaders spoke for the people, but they spoke only for the people who’s wallets were getting heavier with each election. I title this Terminus, for the end of a civilized time is behind us, and man now reverts to the stone age. The bombs came, and our fears for a better tomorrow were washed away, replaced by a maddening terror for survival. Oh the first days were indeed grim, for whom of us could have foreseen the fate that awaited man, when all we looked for was a better tomorrow? Was this world one of our forging, built from the hateful vendettas of the almighty and powerful and vengeance of the men in suits and jackets who thought only of their survival? Or was this the bane of God, a wrathful hammer demolishing His failed utopias, while the world burned? I do not know, I can only speculate, think, for that is the one sane thing in this new wasteland ahead of me. I am but one man against a nighted world of madness, fear and hate, where only the greedy and the lucky survive. I say to you now, dear journal, that as I write from the ruins of man’s greatest structure, that this is not judgment day- for judgment day has already passed, that we live in the wastes of His greatest, and failed, creation. You, my dear reader, may call me Crane, and I exist now as a fragment of the world before the mutagenic bombs of 2081 scorched the pitiful Earth. I was born in 2058 in New York city, and as I write this it is dated March 25 2084. In 2072 I was sentenced to prison for arson. I was snetenced to serve 10 years in a pitiful excuse of a prison, and survived the bombs by hiding in one of the concrete cellars whilst the world was blazed and torched above me. When i stepped forth from my foxhole, i saw battered walls of concrete where the walls of the prison once stood, steel rebars and hinges where jai; cells once sat damp. Fires blazed around me as I laid my youthful eyes upon the debris– the melted corpses of my jailmates, men who were scum and lowest of the low, and a gas rose through the air. I became loopy, collapsing after inhalation of the mutagenic fumes. I woke, I daresay, a week after, finding myself in a concrete bunker. A squad of soldiers had found me, men who were fully unaffected by the gas as they claimed, though I suspect they lie. They had been dispatched from a small army outpost, and were sent to look for survivors in the small town around the prison. They found only I- an arsonist, a maniac, the deluded. Their doctors nursed me to health with a smug disregard. As soon as I began to walk, talk, and eat on my own, they let me wander about the camp. Several other civilians were there, and they were unrecognizable- the gas had caused pimples of inhuman proportions to appear on their skin; scabbing and lizard like. Their necks seemed elongated- more snake than human, and hair had begun to fall in clumps as a horrendous change occurred in their jaws. Their mouths had begun to split, forming mandibles of a sort, four mandibles decorated by ghastly teeth, and their eyes were yellow. It filled me with fear, disgust, horror. The soldiers feared them, too, because they always looked uneasy around them, sweating intensively, clenched fists and quiet words of dissent. Some of them saw the civilians, whose number grew continuously with more survivors being encountered, as humans who were simply disfigured. Others saw them as filth- tainted by the fire of the devil. How silly they were, clinging to the fabrics of a sane world like children.
See the Full Story on the forum.
What are we but specks of sand compared to the infinitude of time?
I ponder this many a time, as the waves of time slosh upon the grains of reality. We stand so gallantly, so close to the edge and the far abyss below us, and yet here we are upon this rock we call Earth. Why, I ask myself, does man still live on in this endless venture of chaos? When all we come to know comes crashing down every millenia, as the very meaning of life becomes less so human, and we give ourselves over to artificiality? A constant state of emptiness, a world forged in digital codes, ones and zeroes, and endless multitudes of narcissism take away our sense of humanity. But now I see a dead world. Ashen plains replace the dystopian cities, where many suffered, where our lives deteriorated and we saw no hope for the future, for the days to come would be grim and dark and cold, and what were we to the cruel world? Our leaders spoke for the people, but they spoke only for the people who’s wallets were getting heavier with each election. I title this Terminus, for the end of a civilized time is behind us, and man now reverts to the stone age. The bombs came, and our fears for a better tomorrow were washed away, replaced by a maddening terror for survival. Oh the first days were indeed grim, for whom of us could have foreseen the fate that awaited man, when all we looked for was a better tomorrow? Was this world one of our forging, built from the hateful vendettas of the almighty and powerful and vengeance of the men in suits and jackets who thought only of their survival? Or was this the bane of God, a wrathful hammer demolishing His failed utopias, while the world burned? I do not know, I can only speculate, think, for that is the one sane thing in this new wasteland ahead of me. I am but one man against a nighted world of madness, fear and hate, where only the greedy and the lucky survive. I say to you now, dear journal, that as I write from the ruins of man’s greatest structure, that this is not judgment day- for judgment day has already passed, that we live in the wastes of His greatest, and failed, creation. You, my dear reader, may call me Crane, and I exist now as a fragment of the world before the mutagenic bombs of 2081 scorched the pitiful Earth. I was born in 2058 in New York city, and as I write this it is dated March 25 2084. In 2072 I was sentenced to prison for arson. I was snetenced to serve 10 years in a pitiful excuse of a prison, and survived the bombs by hiding in one of the concrete cellars whilst the world was blazed and torched above me. When i stepped forth from my foxhole, i saw battered walls of concrete where the walls of the prison once stood, steel rebars and hinges where jai; cells once sat damp. Fires blazed around me as I laid my youthful eyes upon the debris– the melted corpses of my jailmates, men who were scum and lowest of the low, and a gas rose through the air. I became loopy, collapsing after inhalation of the mutagenic fumes. I woke, I daresay, a week after, finding myself in a concrete bunker. A squad of soldiers had found me, men who were fully unaffected by the gas as they claimed, though I suspect they lie. They had been dispatched from a small army outpost, and were sent to look for survivors in the small town around the prison. They found only I- an arsonist, a maniac, the deluded. Their doctors nursed me to health with a smug disregard. As soon as I began to walk, talk, and eat on my own, they let me wander about the camp. Several other civilians were there, and they were unrecognizable- the gas had caused pimples of inhuman proportions to appear on their skin; scabbing and lizard like. Their necks seemed elongated- more snake than human, and hair had begun to fall in clumps as a horrendous change occurred in their jaws. Their mouths had begun to split, forming mandibles of a sort, four mandibles decorated by ghastly teeth, and their eyes were yellow. It filled me with fear, disgust, horror. The soldiers feared them, too, because they always looked uneasy around them, sweating intensively, clenched fists and quiet words of dissent. Some of them saw the civilians, whose number grew continuously with more survivors being encountered, as humans who were simply disfigured. Others saw them as filth- tainted by the fire of the devil. How silly they were, clinging to the fabrics of a sane world like children.
See the Full Story on the forum.