Remnant: We Burnt Down The World And Blamed A Dragon
They built a machine. A tower. It drilled into the afterlife or heaven or someplace that took the name. Sure as hell they lied about it to anyone who asked, but after anyone saw what was there, what was coming out they stopped asking. The machine heaved, and out came pure color. Undiluted and vivid hues that burned the naked eyes, singed the nostrils with it’s sweet perfume, and they doused the world with it like a sauce. Whatever the stuff was it was FUCKING flammable as hell.
When the fire started it covered the world, rendered it to ash. It all went away in a metaphysical firestorm and only the tower and it’s shadow, bless it be, the spiritual equivalent to a shining oil rig, glimmering and proud in the middle of a night sea ablaze, was spared. All that was left was an ash caked remnant.
Every poor soul wandering out of the Ruin, with a bit of color in it’s gut and heart to light it’s way, is just that, a soul. A ghost getting a little more real as it comes closer to the tower and the last bit of real color in the world, their noses following the fumes still leaking out of the bleeding hole in the charred sky. The body needs it now, they all do.
The fire took the heaven color, took whatever color was there before too because fire does not stop when it’s belly is full. Whatever made us people before, the stuff that sustained the soul without having to ask or take: it all burned. Now that the excess is gone there isn’t even enough to just take in naturally. You gotta drink the shit straight. It shimmers with the wan hue of gasoline, the pretty hues look nice dancing on dead eyes. You smell it almost everywhere, but not enough to tell you a baquet is on. Just a hint, a reminder. It’s a cloying odor when you’re hungry and a stench when you think about it too much. Spend enough time near the tower and it gets in your skin, fogs the brain and curb stomps its cells. You NEED it.
You do it because the burn left a hole in everything, and that hole let the Ruin climb into all of us.
It isn’t healthy. Drinking it doesn’t sustain or uplift. It curdles and burns and as it sits in your soft, wasting body. Color makes you feel warm and alive, filling your head with thoughts of what was, giving you a life you might have had, making you see the people around you as they could have been. But it doesn’t last. Eventually the fire it makes in you goes cold, and the Ruin howls somewhere distant, and the shivers take, and you try and make due but eventually you gotta light the flame again. Suddenly that memory you had of yourself, of the people you knew is a little further away, a little less pure, nothing but cold comfort. When it finally goes you don’t even feel it. You certainly don’t remember it. You cry sometimes over nothing and you won’t know why. Take another drink.
All a body gets from drinking color, pulling on the pure shit, is a burn in the soul that feels like being somebody, while your humanity drifts away a cinder at a time. It scorches you, turning your skin ash white, making you drab as the world over the lip of your bottle. Your lungs belch smoke from that part of you burning away deep within, and when the fire blacks up someone’s eyes it’s time to keep a close eye on them. A structure fire in the shape of a man in an ocean of smoldering timbers and concrete rubble popping and whistling from it’s own internal heat. You go that far and you’re the Ruin now, all hunger and howl. Don’t even think about it, you cut that shit out and toss it over the wall before it melts and becomes a stain. You toss anything it killed with it to be sure. Stains don’t come out.
They blamed it on a Dragon you know. All wings and flames and heat and hate. The world burned down and they blamed a Dragon. Maybe there is one now.
Sometimes the hot stagnant air rolls through in waves and it feels like something vast and terrible beat it toward you. The ash was the world after all, and the world was all of the things that were possible. All that potentia is just right there in the air around us but no one thought to ask it to do anything other than to scare the shit out of us, to be every fear on every scale anyone ever offered up. Maybe you don’t even need color to make the magic happen, to make something be, but at this point everyone is such a threadbare addict you just try and tell them they can smile without taking a pull? Not gonna fucking happen. So maybe all that fear and hunger and color haze works on the world a little bit, everyone wailing and hungry and scared, and the ash fog gave a little shrug and said “If that’s what you want…”
We curse the Dragon and we hail the heroes, the martyrs, the fellowship. We lament the beast turning on them and burning the world down, telling stories to look backward so we don’t have to dream up new nightmares about what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Or, hell, maybe it was just a guy after all. Maybe the Heroes were a bunch of guys and maybe they all pushed the button to stick their silly-straw-dick-metaphor into the sky together and they all had a good suck.
Man, maybe it worked. The clouds shit color into everyone’s brains and maybe it was just so impossibly good for a while. Heaven on earth, heaven spilling onto the earth. And we all breathed really deep, rolled around in it and got so fucking stupid.
And then someone lit a match…