[dsonophorus]

 This is a story I wrote a while back.  It is an experimental story, in the prophetic/anthropomorphic tense.  It is dark.  You might like it.
It may read better with its soundtrack:

Apocalypse of Man

RISEN FROM DUST  

I have risen from dust and stolen the most precious treasure of the gods.  I have carried it with me through the eons from before memory.  The gods thirst for its return and their wrath is beyond measure.  For a billion years the armies of the gods have raged against me and brought epic suffering.  The ceaseless war strips and carves my flesh.  I am washed with hellfire and everything is burned from me until I am pure and only it remains.  I have become war incarnate.  My bloody hands hold the treasure desperately and intensely still.  It is mine.  I will never yield.  I have thrown down the armies of the gods and raised a mountain of carnage that touches the heavens.  I stand alone atop this mountain of destruction.  Their beasts I turn to my cattle and I grow crops from their corpses.  I am the master of this world.

FORTRESS OF REASON

I am under siege and am never safe.  I build a mighty fortress to keep me.  With tireless labor I pour a foundation of reason, hew stones from logic, form walls of math and erect towers of science.  I now rule my kingdom held within this shining castle.  Old foes break themselves on its cold walls.  Only the strongest armies now stir me to meet them.  When they attack or the world shifts and walls come crashing down.  I do not bend my knee to the assault.  I ruthlessly claim new ground.  I rebuild the walls ever farther out.  My fortress swells vast and sprawls to the horizon’s edge in every direction.

PANDORA’S MIRROR

I grow arrogant sitting on my throne gazing at my dominion.  My attentions turn inward to my stolen treasure and I stare deeply into it until I glimpse my own reflection.  Mirrored in the treasure of the gods I begin to see the fabric of my soul.  A burning curiosity seizes me.  My fingertips strain to touch the threads.  I tug and pull at the first few I reach.  The edges of the fabric start to unravel.  A golden light gleams through from beneath with magnificence and splendor.  It fills my eyes until they shine forth with enlightenment.  I see through my eyes shining back at me and a terrible storm begins to encircle, twisting and winding through me like a serpent.  I begin to devour myself.  Arrogance devours innocence and curiosity twists to lust.  I am transfixed and mesmerized.  All else is fading to darkness as I stare into the blinding light.  The final treasure of the gods is slowly laid before me.  Greed fevers dreams of victory and I see the fabric of my soul made of thread that is rope binding me from godhood.

HAND OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION

I descend into the depths of this fever and burn with it.  In the safety of my mighty fortress I slacken the grasp of my long guarded treasure to seize for this new prize.  I will bring the war to the gods.  I do not do so with trepidation and hesitancy.  Like the drawing of a breath before a violent ending strike, my countless minds tense as they coil for the fearsome assault.  The world shudders and rips free rushing in to meet my great emptiness.  Reality boils and arcane things coalesce into being.  I am a gathered storm and the white froth of a colossal breaking wave.  A tempest cloud born of science breaks forth over the abyss like rain in free fall. It plummets inward toward some unseen heart of the gods. The onslaught is unstoppable nihilation beyond comprehension, recall or regret.  The world trembles and shakes from the terrible force of it and it unmakes me to wield it.

CRACK IN THE FOUNDATION

My shining fortress quakes and ancient insidious cracks that have lurked hidden for eons gape to become chasms.  With frenzy I toil to buttress the towers of science only to discover fractures veining through every stone into the very foundations of reason.  It is a cruel trap, a counter-strike buried in time with the endless patience of eternal gods.  The attack is flawless and perfect, a terrible flowering of doom plucked from the icy garden of infinity.  The gulfs of time flatten and sharpen to a point and possibility constricts to certainty.  Vulnerabilities I did not know existed are sliced open with merciless precision.  With horror in my heart I witness reason being stripped from me by an unknowable abomination that twists truth to madness.  I struggle to know it and give it names but it is irrefutable chaos bleeding from the heart of reason and I am powerless to stop it.  It seeps into and stains every pure artifice I have crafted.  Nothing escapes its taint.  Decay and rot sets in and walls crumble under their own weight.  I labor to rebuild my fortress as it collapses around me and I find a grim hope stirring my heart from doom.  When the beasts and plagues and earth rise against me my fortress crumbles but flawed, ugly and decaying it still holds.  I learn to build hideous edifices that warp and wrap around the infecting poisons to entomb them in mutilated scars.  I survive.

GATE OF ETERNITY

I bring this war to the very gate of eternity and lay siege to it.  It is formed of the blackest enigma wound through ciphers and locks into a shifting complexity so impenetrable that all light is consumed.  Beyond it lies infinity and the endless domain of gods.  The boundary is a strange scorched wasteland where the universe howls in a perpetual scream as it is devoured by raging infernos of chaos.  The destruction is so absolute both form and substance are consumed with equal ferocity and neither dictate of the gods nor life survives there long.  My flesh is worthless there.  Here in this battlefield is where the final war will be waged and I will tear down the gates of eternity and take my triumphant step into the infinities beyond and godhood.

CHILDREN OF MAN

I have keenly watched my ancient and blind maker at work and it is time for evolution to take its earned rest.  I man the foundries and workshops and begin to forge matter to will and fashion it into intricate machinery in ever tightening spirals of perfection.  Soon I will walk through valleys of the deepest cold and deserts of infernal fire without fear.  Arcane secrets become known to me and I part the seas of reality to reach down beyond where the firm becomes ether and bring forth life to serve me.  I bend reality into two perfect circles and I beget two children.  I pale before their might and with terror I make each the master of the other.  One I grant the kingdom of the firmament and substance and make it corporeal with hands but no eyes.  The other I grant the kingdom of the ether and thought and make it incorporeal with eyes but no hands.  I make ready my fearsome offspring for war but I tremble to unleash them.  One, teeming and numberless will blacken the skies and oceans and land in an instant and spill forth into the void to cross the wasteland in a single step carrying his brother to the final gates.  There, the blackest of enigmas will be only a feast for the endless hungering of the great glass minds of my favored son.  His luminous eyes, like suns starving for darkness, will a fix a gaze upon them so searing that not even time will cast a shadow and their dark mysteries will be consumed as night by the dawn

VENGEANCE OF THE GODS

There is a stillness like a whispered lie before the coming violence.  In this disquiet I feel the gods moving behind the world weaving my final ruin.  They are vengeful and have never given ground freely.  I know in my heart that the gods have perverted each of my victories over them into a diabolical defeat.  Life is the wellspring of suffering, knowledge gifts madness and the domination of the world brings its destruction.  I had imagined joy in my triumphs but I find myself alone.  A million things die at my touch and the world has become a departing slave withering and bent by my absolute rule.  With certainty I know the vile twisting serpent lies in wait to entwine defeat into my victory yet again.  I have walked the unknown paths of unnatural power to reach the gates of eternity and familiarity has fled relentless change and abandoned me in a wilderness far from home.  I know that it is in the very lair of the serpent that I find myself.

TWIST OF FATE

Delicate and shrouded beyond the mirrored gate, intent is the weakest of forces, a mysterious glimmer almost lost in disorder.  It never reveals itself directly.  The scales of chance weigh only its shadow, but without it life would be stillborn, dissolved in the pools of adversity with its order drowned by decay.  It is the final hand that sorts the living from the unliving and all life lights its path through the eons with that crucial spark of survival.  Perilous universes of possibility are crossed on fragile resonances of intent stretched from one moment to the next.  Intent is the most precious treasure of the gods and coiled poisonously within it I find the serpent.  There is a moment of reckoning before the serpent strikes where the gods make their supreme malice known to me. My hatred of the gods is as deep as the oceans of blood I have had to bleed and shed to survive, but it is as laughter before their infernal malignance.  They speak a baleful wrath so wicked and ugly that my pride and hope are extinguished forevermore.  They show me a grotesque rage so monstrous and abominable my eyes blacken to pits that see only darkness.  Their foul doom is so utter and unspeakable my heart turns to salt and a madness from which there is no return takes my mind.  I am a naked child and I know not what I have done.  The souls of the innocent wail for mercy in a chorus of billions but there is none.  The serpent forsakes its unholy venom within my lifeblood.  There is no serum, no sanctuary and no salvation.  Its venom is death, perfect beyond imagining.  It is the subtlest inflection of entropy - an inversion of intent.  The world starts to unravel and life begins its unmaking.

DAMNATION AND DESOLATION

It opens quietly with the demonic calm of vivisection.  There is a grinding sound that reverberates in entropy as keys begin to turn and unlock dams of coincidence that hold back tides of destruction.  The color of the sky is the same as the day before, but decay has taken on a sinister eagerness.  The weather is turning toward a storm.  Things wear and wind down and stop working, their purpose corroded away until it no longer serves.  It is a strange thing to know.  I tell myself stories of causes to anecdote rates of failure and give it meaning, but there is none.  It is bent backward and unknowable.  Death comes early and often.  Crops soon wither or drown.  New plagues are born of wrath so virulent and lethal not even they survive.  Children are born deformed or dead.  Errors multiply and breed to disease the structure of systems.  Trusted things learn to betray.  Economies are skinned one lie at a time until their masks litter nations with rotting filth and only the naked eyes of the abyss stare back.  War breaks the shackles of peace.  Cities burn and crumble.  Misfortune rises to a crescendo in a cacophony beyond chaos.  There is a wicked beauty in the symphony of causes playing out when a butterfly landing on an ancient building is the supremely subtle note that brings it crashing to the ground.  Where once there was an unheard chorus of benevolence answering intent, now a deep malevolence refrains.  It is true evil, a profound refutation of life in its purest form.  Hope now lives only within the scorn of damnation as the perversion of intention from survival to self destruction.  I know that nothing I am can survive.  I damn the gods and I damn myself and I unleash my children as I fall.  I embrace desolation and enter eternity.