wonderland • wolfstar

35| the tale ended

He had an ear that he used to his benefit and always, he never showed an ounce of abashment. It was pride that he felt as he spoke because each word was formulated with the greatest care.

The garden grew over a short period, flowers entwined with one another until stems forever bonded as one and it seemed that - as soon as Noah was able to settle with his work in a newspaper he was given an opportunity to write for - it all came crashing down suddenly.

The mayor and his board were arguing and based on what Oliver had told him one night after a performance, it was the norm. Except tonight, the dispute at hand was being toyed with like nothing although it was bigger, bolder, more threatening than it had ever been. Oliver spoke nonchalantly, like the anger sizzling within his ruler of his town's blood was nothing more than the usual sensation.

Noah didn't say much; instead, he observed.

It's funny how things can be so luxuriously simple, then sooner than one would believe possible, it can worsen so horrifically that it cuts deep past the skin for the rest of eternity. However, even that sounds too soft, like an echo in an alleyway at midnight. More accurately, it slices through the mind's sounds, forever tearing two parts of conscience in half as if they amounted to nothing. You hear nails on a chalkboard screeching among broken violin strings. A sickening symphony bIt's almost as if a mind isn't the most intricate paintings of all time.

It was greed, you see, a seething, twisted avidity for power and money that insisted on a lack of safety for everyone. The people of the town were pressed against the box of their control and it was shocking how the majority of them were so accustomed to the ordeal.

Every regular person went about their days normally. Their dollhouse lives were perfect in their dollhouse town with their dollhouse jobs.

Until the barrier broke.

A drunken brawl, a gunshot and then, for the first time in weeks, the mayor's crumbling team was silent.

Just a second, before all hell broke loose.

A full moon hung that dreadful night in the sky and oh, how he, with a face paler than usual, sighed knowingly down below at the land and the flames eating away from the inside out. He watched a while before stealing away and drifting in to a hazy blue sky. His actions were different from the feelings of the humans, of the explosion that would rip through the next morning.

He was calm, so irritatingly at peace as songbirds sang shrilly.

Blood. Everywhere. It was quite the sight, really. A painter might say it was like sad crimson romances over concrete hearts, or ribbons of the softest silk that bind all the demands of life round colossal marble buildings of existence. It's weeks of unqualified terror so extreme it seeps in to your system to contaminate the surviving smithereens of a once intact soul.

Bayer's Grove, a town of the rich and the musical and the creative and the future stars, was a death bound to be written in gold ink.

Before our story finished, Noah stood amidst screams and sobs alike and became a simple ghost of his reality.

The world fell inwards, crushing people with lives and commitments and jobs carelessly. Funny how places were put in the hands of fools.