The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T4.2 The Ëchüha Incident (Parts 2+3)

The apocalyptic landscape left in the wake of whatever had happened here, showed on a holoscreen, did no justice to the direct experiencing of it, full-force, in the flesh. Standing there on what could have been a wide avenue or any number of other kinds of spacious areas, assaulted in all five senses directly by the torn up landscape, the tableau once painted on screens and VR Jacks truly became real, and the horror of it hit him like heavy artillery.

Nothing was identifiable. The city had truly been blasted into a literal oblivion. In what could have been a wide avenue, where he stood on one of countless scattered piles of indeterminate fragments of unknowable origin, everything lay in ruins, littered with rubble, burnt wrecks of vehicles, bones of the long dead, and half-decayed corpses devoid of any fly, maggot, or colony of other such foul rot-eaters, each half buried or scattered in myriad pieces amidst partially intact remnants of fallen structures. In that street—or, he assumed it was a street—all he saw in every direction was selfsame devastation. No matter which way he turned, all he there was were broken shards and fragments of the unidentifiable.

Under layer upon layer of ruddy brown clouds so thick daylight barely shone through, a diffuse, ochre twilight seemed to cast it all in amber, further amplifying a visceral surreal terror to the environment. His brain knew time was passing, but the unchanging, unmoving, stillness of his environment screamed the opposite. The was air still and dead, without wind or disturbance. The only sound in his ears was the persistent ringing of his tinnitus. Despite the emptiness of all sensation, Hvórþ couldn't help but feel like the uniformity was not a product of what was not there. It wasn't a void of sensation he was experiencing, but the destruction of all its parts, the reducing of all sounds and sights, all sensation, everything to its most basal form before being amplified to its absolute limit, each component part cancelling another other out in total destructive interference. Simultaneously overwhelming and empty, deafening and silent, still and frenetic, in stasis and tachyonic, everything destroyed into nothing.

Hvórþ tried to clear his head, but found he couldn't. A buzz built behind his eyes, burrowed deep in his brain as he surveyed his surroundings, attempting to locate where they were amidst frames or twisted pieces of buildings still standing like fingers raised, rudely gesturing their defiance to gravity, each one noteworthy and yet forgotten as soon as he looked away. Some still had their lowermost floors half-buried in the cataclysmic aftermath of a manner of apocalypse Hvórþ had no name for. No...he had it...it was on the edge of his mind. For this...this was not the aftermath of war, not even the Rimworlds' totalising armaggeddons in defence of their homeworlds held even the saddest of matchsticks before what conflagration had consumed Ëchüha Tvì Éshà.

Insatiable rage had blasted even the bones of this world to powder to feed the cannons mounted atop Har-Meggido. No quantum of blood, no throne of spines, no ocean of eyes, no fists harvested by the reaper's scythe, no sickles broken over iron fists, no offerings of death placed upon the altars of enmity, nor skulls stacked as thrones to Lords of Strife would ever have sated such hate. The compulsion that drove this world to such self-destruction would never be satisfied by any measure less than the full summoning of war incarnate, so as to bring forth true gods of battle sleeping deep in the molten hearts of every world, to shower their blessings of absolute finality upon their enemies as glorious shards of the One Truth.

There was no life here. Nothing. Not even the lowest rat, maggot, bacterium, or spore of slime mould floating on the wind or feasting on a billion dessicated corpses trapped in amber light in the ashen wastes left behind. In the aftermath of the one war to end all others, this was the shape of peace, the shape of death triumphant. Only when glaciers quaked and plagues rained would the dead decay once more. This place was—

"Boss!" Ichika shouted from the bottom of the hill. "You alright!? Just standing there!"

"Yeah," Hvórþ answered, shaking his head. "Hell of a view!"