Angelus

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The sky was dark, and death was in the air.

The Father could smell it, taste it on his tongue. The sun was high, but he couldn’t see its light — the clouds of smoke and dust were too thick. A sluggish, sickly night-time was sprawling towards him from the far horizon, lit with stuttering flashes.

Those sparks were getting closer, he knew. Some of them were lightning, static electricity ripped from the skies by all the particulates in the air. But many of them, the brighter, straighter ones, were not electricity in any form recognized by nature.

They were anger, those lights. They were rage and revenge, and they were directed at him. For what he had done.

He turned away. He had a cloth held to his mouth to keep out the worst of the stink, but the miasma of burned rock and roasted flesh was getting too strong. The last city had been immolated just minutes before, the bright beams lancing down from the sky to lay open its protective mountain and boil what lay inside. How many of his children had vaporized in that searing attack, he wondered? A hundred thousand? More? It was impossible to tell. He had spent a year in that city and had never explored one tenth of it.

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