Fic: Along This Crooked Road -coda (5/5)
This is the truth of Earth-That-Was:
There is a desert, on a world that's little more than a tiny blue marble floating in the vast, black emptiness of space. In the pale, washed-out sky, the moon is a razored smile, faded against the blue that shades to white on a horizon chewed at by distant, jagged peaks. Sand lifts on the furnace wind, whispers as it winds and twists into shapes that could maybe be faces, if there was anyone there to see them.
They could be laughing, or crying, or maybe just screaming.
The air smells of scorched rock, hot iron a metallic tang that rides underneath the dry, dusty taste of nothing. The gore that's splashed across the sand and sharp boulders is long dried, desiccated far beyond the point of decomposition or rot, but the smell of the desert has never been so very different from that of blood.
In the middle of the blood, there's a patch of sand fused to glass, unimaginable heat burned right down to the bedrock. In the right light, the shadows in the glass could be feathers, wings, maybe, frozen forever in the middle of nowhere. Fossilized remains of ancient things, long dead and gone in some distant cataclysm that should have burned all the life out of this small, insignificant little world forever. That was the deal.
At the very apex of the sky, a light forms, grows brighter until it rivals the sun, then surpasses even that. There is a scream that could tear apart the world and the ground shudders with a convulsive tremor as something falls out of that light, folds aside the fabric of time and space and claws its way out onto the dust.
It is a man, burned, gaunt and emaciated and on his back there are two scars, thick ridges of shiny tissue that ripple as if something is trying to grow beneath them. He pants, gasping hard until he can lift his head with a hoarse groan of effort and his eyes shine brighter than the suns. If there was anyone there to look closely enough, they might see flames there, dancing white-hot and furious.
Deals were made to be broken.
epilogue