Page Thirty Eight: The Beast of Butterfly Wings

'Kip!
'wake-up!'
'Shit'n'derision!'
'Have you got a problem?'
'I was about to get fucking laid!'
'Nevermind that, we have got work to do.'
'Blue, have you any idea how rarely I get laid in the Realm?'
'I am sorry, I did not think. Do not fret, I will make it up to you sometime.'
'!'

…marooned in the waistland. The Shadow shimmered and wavered in the heat-haze rising from the black Tarmac as its energy boiled and vaporised into the atmosphere. Slowly it was being defeated, without a fight. With each moment under the relentless Sun, the solar radiation weakened and sapped its strength. It looked up to the Sun, its long begotten son, and called upon the very essence of Despair, the raw elemental Despair from which all human despair is forged, the Despair that created the Shadow. 'This is not how it ends!' It screamed. 'Destiny will have to re-write her history!' The Despair flew into the air, dragging the dust from the crumbling concrete with it, tearing into the molecules, ripping out base elements, splitting and renting large atoms into lighter elements in controlled fission, absorbing the released energy to further feed the reaction until the Shadow holds a sphere of pure hydrogen in a field of Despair. Then it reverses. As the father once taught the Sun to fuse hydrogen into helium, it now shows more of its power as oxygen pulled from the atmosphere is combined with the hydrogen. A small ball of steam is instantly created that rapidly condenses into a miniature cloud hovering a few meters above the ground. The seed is sown, now chaos is in control, the cloud billows and swirls, and the mist descends, spreading over the landscape. The reaction is self perpetuating, the mist becomes a fog and grows ever thicker. Soon the earth bathed in shadow, blacking out the Sun. If the Shadow had a face, it would smile…

…"And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit - Revelation 9:1"…

'Hurry, or we will be late.'
'Late for what?'
'Not for anything, just late.'
'Oh great, now it's riddles.'
'Riddles?'
'My first is in pissed-off but not in happy.'
'Kip!'
'What?'
…
Ouch!'

…chaos begets chaos. It is the way of things. The fog engulfs the highway, and the traffic panics. Startled automobiles grind synthetic fibre against steel to the shredding squeal of rubber against Tarmac and the sickening crump of metal against metal. Amid the wreckage and concertina'd carnage, there is life and death, in between them, there is despair and the Shadow responds with veracity…

Gripping the cat tightly, hugging him to her chest, Blue vaporises. Solid matter becomes plasma. The weak bonds between realities are pulled apart like zip-lock and they slip through to instantly emerge into a dense cloud of fog and burning rubber. The air is thick with the cries of the dying, the tears of the dead and the howls of the undead whose souls had been ripped from them. Late. They are too late, the damage that has been done cannot be undone. They drift from wreck to wreck, tending and consoling the injured souls trapped in broken bodies. The cat's spirit guides the uninjured to care for the physical needs of the casualties. In the following days, the newspapers will be full of stories of unbelievable heroism and courage as the survivors are rescued from their crashed cars by other motorists who, blinded by the acrid smoke, tore at the solid metal with nothing but their bare hands. Blue treats the soul-less undead swiftly and painlessly, where she sends them they can never rest, but they will be safe and will have no need to walk the earth. For the dead, all she and Kip can hope for is that their souls found release and are now in whatever heaven they believed in. Blue stops what she is doing and looks to the east. From there, a wind arrives, the cat cannot tell if this is natural or at her command, but slowly the air begins to clear and the full extent of the devastation can be seen. The people stop and stare, some drop to their knees and weep. For miles in both directions the carriageways are blocked with the tangled wreckage of hundreds of vehicles.

'Who did this?'
'Apollyon.'
'Who?'
'My brother.'
'But why?'
'I do not know.'

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