Six o'clock, TV hour, don't get caught in foreign towers

[al_shairan]

Click to view

An August Evening; The TowerMy daughter is ready; and so am I. Matters have come into alignment. There have been various points throughout the history of this little lump of rock when stars, skies, oceans, calendars, however one marks time, have read that this is a time of Ending, rather then Beginning. Many have tried to make use of those times

Comments

[mister_foxton]

In the hall, the Chronophage has stopped. Time has been eaten. The roof is falling in - quite literally, in the attics, with the ticking of deathwatch beetles. Grandmama has gone beyond my reach, and the skulls and jawbones in the Middle Room are all but silent. Mrs Betton is in bed sick, and her wretched cat -

I swallow a little: absurd to be at all moved by its loss. It's hardly as if it's a sign of anything beyond normal animal mortality. Still, I prepared its little body for Mrs Betton's sake, so that it can be a small indistinct presence in the house in these final days.

I wish that I could speak to my father. His skull doesn't answer me. I should stop wavering. This is the hour that we have prepared for, and so I go out to the Tower at last, the Tower that will not yet be shattered, though I can see La Tour Abolie plain in my mind. I was born for this, the last and strangest of us, this final turning of the great Wheel. It will be different, when things begin again.

[al_shairan]

I let the tower door open, and hear him ascend the stairs. I leave the tower room empty, aside from a smell of ashes and brimstone.

"Foxton Manqueller, servant of the end," I say precisely. "You have come because it is time. Are you ready to work?"

[mister_foxton]

Many things can look human. It's easy enough to see past the shell he's wearing.

"Yes," I say simply. I am very tired. I've been working my whole life. But I want this final push into nothingness and then - whatever comes. "What do you need? I have generations behind me." An offering of everything: all our work. He is the final piece, the last cog fitted into the gears of the clock to bring the final resounding turn. The power of him, so thinly constrained. I swallow very discreetly, to try and stop the ringing in my ears. I have been around powers, and Powers, since I was a child at my nurse's knee. This is simply the Last.

[al_shairan]

"Destroy everything," I say, after looking at him for a moment. "All your work, and your father's, and your father's father's. Make it into nothing. That is what you can do." He and his family, they have been carefully building for generations. What use is that? All I need now are sacrifices.