THE 24T MOMENT

 

 

© 2003-present Dragon (Rayvn). No infringement on the characters created by Richard Stanley are intended or presumed. This is a non profit work of fiction.

He had a name once. Every now and then, he'd remember what it was. Invariably, it was his father's voice calling him from long ago. It was not a sound he recalled with affection. The feeling was once somewhere near loathing. Once, there was simply a sort of hard void he would fall into for a moment before walking away from the memories. It didn't even phase him anymore, really. Not much of anything did.

There was no one now to speak his name. John Smith, Bill Jones. It didn't matter. It didn't matter what anything was called, any more.

The Nomad looked up into the expanse of the night sky and watched the dark layer of haze that obscured the stars through his pitted sand-goggles. The whole world and everything in it looked pocked, distorted, ravaged and corroded through them. It looked the same when he took them off. He'd seen the moon only three times in the last ten years. Each time, something happened. Something significant. He had no actual proof at the time, nor any idea what that significance might be. Looking back from "this moment" was his only point of reference for what it turned out to be. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to tell whether he was looking backward or forward. It was like that time when that boy had asked his father if perhaps the Book of Revelations had already happened, a long time ago. His father sent the boy out of the room and had him do penitence in 'the cave' for a week, for asking such an impertinence. That meant sitting alone in the dark, naked - down in the coal room of the basement of the big house where they all lived. In the dirt and coal-dust. In the shivering, cold nothing, while the world went on around one. He was quite familiar with that room, once. It's part of why the light hurt his eyes, now. More than that, it was poisoned light. Sick with the fumes of decay and rot of the world rising off it's surface.

Now and then, there would be a shooting star break through the blanket of haze. Someone had just died. No doubt there were more than he could see, himself. He came upon the dead now and then. Mostly his own kind, now - the ones they called the 'zone trippers'. Some dead of the tell-tale puncture wounds, others - much worse. The words to an old Doors song crept into his mind just then. "Out here, in the perimeter - we is stone cold immaculate." Out here in the Dune Sea, where there was nothing to contaminate except the sand itself. He wasn't certain how that line fit, but it did. What lay beneath the Dune Sea, he once knew. But it was no longer important. The last city he'd visited was a city of the dead. To anyone else looking upon the results of the havoc, it was a nightmare incarnate. But to him, it was what had to be.

Earth needed time to recover from the ravages of mankind. Mother Earth was dying. Inevitably. Slowly at first. Faster, now. They never learned. Never. Those fools in the Rama Empire and Atalan blew themselves off the face of the earth with their warships, laser and sonic weapons, and the iron thunderbolt. But the lesson got too far away from the common knowledge of the people. The people became too lost in their own little worlds and lives to look outside themselves and see it was all happening again.

More insistent than the single memory of that line in the song was the 24th chapter of Isaiah. The words of the first six verses were branded into his mind by the fire of an angel's will. "Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. The earth is also defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left..."

And so it was.

The last time he'd seen the moon, he fell into a rare state of sleep that comes only to a chosen few. In truth, it is not sleep as we know it. It is a state of stasis, where the world is stopped and in fact, the 'dreamer' is awakened to the other side of reality. The side that goes on underneath and in-between things. And an angel of the Lord appeared to him in that dream, speaking those very words. The angel was Uriel, the Angel of Destruction, with a flaming sword. From his forehead sprang another angel, as dark and terrible as Uriel was brilliant and beautiful. This was the Angel of the Desolation, Azrael. In his metal-clawed hand, he held the skull of a strange thing of metal. Something recognized from the War. The killing machine. There was lightning in it's black, blank stare and then light exploded everywhere. He saw the place where it was. He understood Uriel's arcane, whispering tongue echoing through his mind. "You have been chosen."

In a way, he'd failed his mission. But, perhaps not. He had put it within reach of the proper person to carry out what was intended. Perhaps the mere reactivation of the thing brought it's potential closer to the surface of men's collective consciousness and caused the subsequent rebuilding of the thing in mass quantities. In the end, it took out even those who created it. "As with the servant, so with his master."

It was coming for him, as well. One of them, anyway. They were one - of one purpose and intention. One was the same as another. It didn't matter.

He'd served his purpose and now it was time to get out. Idly, his half-gloved fingers traced symbols he did not know in the sand that lay before him. Words came unbidden to his lips, and he was lost for a moment in some realm far away. A shiver coursed through him and the wind rose. Sand buffeted his back. He pulled his blanket up over his head and shoulders as the strange glyphs disintegrated in the wind and normal consciousness returned. He looked up at the sky, feeling his eyes grow heavy. They were tired of looking. Tired of seeing....

And there it was. A hole in the clouds. The crescent moon hanging there like a bloodied sickle.

The Nomad smiled, inhaling deeply of the moment, and let his eyes fall shut. The first true peace he'd ever known settled over him...and it was good.

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