@geraniumgunman
Colossal skeletons rise and twist from the devastation, black-blasted even in the brilliance of daylight, like damned souls clawing for salvation denied.
Fist of an angry God, some tabloids called it.
Don't you know he was trying to save you? He loved you. He loved all of you, even if you damn well didn't deserve it--
No one cares, no one listens. Better to lay the blame on a scapegoat, particularly an infamous one, no matter how the tales of Vash the Stampede were fabricated to show him the worst of humanity, to drive him to desperation, to this reunion.
All roads led to JuLai.
The whole of the city sags, slid from its mesa precipices and drawn to the center of impossible gravity, a creaking hulk bowed beneath the weight of the profound, the profane.
Two weeks on, and the baleful violet still glows in the crater's depths. At night it is a nebula studded with hundreds of thousands of glimmers, star-like reflection and refraction on the remains of alien flora and human bodies. The shapes are so intertwined that they are impossible to discern, carbonized masses and atomized shadows on surviving slabs of concrete, all haloed in faceted crystals.
The last memories of a people lulled into complacency, part of a monstrous plan, etched in stardust. Pawns in a game they did not know they were playing. Not everyone was innocent in a world that makes demands of its survivors, but they did not deserve this.
It might be radioactive, the prickling feeling in temples and fingers and lungs.
It might be some sort of resonance, echo of an echo: sorrow and rage, a lingering presence like the crushing horror every time he set foot in Knives's sanctuary.
It might be guilt. Awareness.
Maybe it is all of those things.
Down, down. Nicholas picks his way down the rubble, walking in the molten-then-cooled obsidian glass shot through with phosphorescent veins, listening for anything at all beyond the arid creak and groan of nothingness.
Searching.
Who better than an Undertaker to answer the toll of the dead?
