Until This World Ends

Ch4: Waiting an Age

The quality of the paper became better with time, as did Valentine's handwriting:

I can see children playing in the market—they aren't there. Wives gossiping in tea houses—when have I last drank properly brewed tea?

I had intended to spend the rest of my days in penance, as long as the headaches lasted. By some mercy, they eased after nearly two decades. I intend to walk this world and see what man's hubris has wrought. Perhaps mankind still lives out there, somewhere. I suspect, with the size of the desolation in my own home, that it's a misplaced hope.

There was never another person, just the two dogs that refused to shift to women any time he was near. Not that he could do a thing with them or like he cared, but it was something they didn't want, so he never complained.

What was the point of complaining to ghosts?

And so those years passed as the rupture in their world healed but never brought things back to life. What was the point of going on when nothing changed?

Even so, a bored and lonely man must pass the time. He took to reading some of the older texts that had been sealed away. He found a sense of longing in revisiting what his people thought of Arden and their world. What he once thought, himself.

None of it spoke to him. He didn't expect it to.

Until one day, it did:

But you, Oh Man,
Who are you to die?
Alone at the end of the age,
A hand on the head of Sorrow
Another on Suffering,
Refusing to seek the world's end
Where no one stands alone.
Come, lead your people.
Bring them home
To wage war anew.

The first time Valentine read it, his hands shook. He remembered reciting it as a small child. It was a song his people sang before demonic death came for mankind.

It should have been popular while they fought the monsters, if the people had been strong enough. A rallying cry taunting the dying while everyone still struggled to meet each battle head-on? No one could stomach that text. It was deemed heretical and sealed away, never recited over the dead as it once was. The knight was there the day it was entombed.

And it had been there, waiting for Valentine to find it and remember it. It was for him. It wasn't the whole of Arden's faithful, but him that was being derided. It demanded he stand up and fight, to take control of his very existence, and to do something about all the losses.

For the lost.

He would have brought everyone back if he could. He hated that the rapture looked like human souls being plucked like chickens before being made into a stew.

For a whole year, he despised the Goddess, for allowing this ancient text to taunt him. He wasn't the one who stole every bit of life from the land. That was all on her, not him.

Valentine tried to pull this depths from his mind, like extracting a tooth. It continued to gnaw at him until the first cyclone in years built off the coast of the city. It felt like his Goddess was waiting to see if he would answer her. The urge to visit the cliffside as the storm raged was the first truly desperate thought he had held in all his years of survival.

So he went and stood on the highest peak, past where the wall of water would break during such fierce storms. Everything to the east would flood under this monstrous assault.

The whole unsettling sensation forced him to his knees, long before the winds drove the storm inland. He cried out in rage at the Goddess who wouldn't let him leave this world.

Not that the words tumbled past his mouth. He had been silent for too long. The wind was too loud to carry one man's voice, anyway.

Anger fueled what would have been worship in any other context: bowing down to the dust, wind tearing at his hair and clothes. His frustration ate at him, mimicking the storm that boiled over the ocean and land, riding waves to meet and break on the shores of King's Port.

A small portion of city wall fell to the west, shaking the ground beneath him, when the first wave hit.

The old knight slowly stood against the winds on that rocky cliff, contemplating jumping to the rapidly submerging outcroppings of rocks before firmly dismissing it as a waste. The wind would slam him into the cliffside, not the beach. Instead, he stared out to sea and watched a storm boil out of the ocean until it moved inland enough to show him the baleful eye. It exhilarated and soothed him, breaking off his rage. He was finally in a mood to hear Arden and see if she had anything to say.

It was silence.

He stumbled back inside the barracks to drink himself senseless on a full belly during the second half of the storm. Both he and the world were at peace before he went to read it again.

Valentine stared at the scroll for 3 days before the realization struck him. This old text was saying that this wasn't the first ending in mankind's life. But he knew of no other rapture. Rolling his shoulders, he thought long and hard about what he was having his nose shoved in, like he was a dog that shit on the floorboards.

Merely thinking about them caused Whisper and Vesper to look back at him, from their normal sleeping spots by the fire. Sorrow...Suffering...

Of all things to make a connection over: dogs.

There had been an ending.

It had been the end of mankind being an animal to be punished for not knowing what to do with its excrement. When mankind learned how to be civil. No, he needed to go back to where Arden gave humanity the mind to rise up and build a life that was worth fighting for.

Perhaps there were animals out there, still, and humans would come from bears or donkeys this time.

More importantly, perhaps Arden knew how to bring back everyone she had taken. He was less sure of those who had died without her.