At its top, one lonely Deathless remains. Their eyes meet—Deathless eye to emerald eye—and no words are shared.
He places the crown on the once-throne of the Queen, and he doesn’t smile, and he doesn’t care. Fire may not touch the damned, this much he knows is true, but as his Queen was the ultimate example, the damned still burn.
A squint of his eye, and the Deathless rises to his feet, departs the tower. It’s a curious thing, that the Deathless did precisely what he thought it ought to do. As though compelled … As though its Anima received an unseeable, unknowable message. Quite the coincidence.
This coincidence inspires a nearly undetectable smile.
To the throne and the Black Tower, he sets it afire.
Beautiful, the rainbow of furious colors twisting up into the grim sky.
To the barnyard and the buildings and the prisons and the factories and the walls and the churches and the tall signs that once proudly boasted the names of family-owned businesses from the centuries of Humans Past, he ignites them with the twist of matches. Patiently, piece by little piece, setting his dark world on fire.
The living bones in the earth, still reaching.
The Well and the silent wall that hugs the city like a sad, dead friend.
Of lost lives and death.
He is surrounded by nightmares.
As he walks calmly, carelessly, soundlessly out of the city, a stray whip of fire catches him. He doesn’t feel a thing as he burns, uncaring. The harmless fire wrapping him like a cloak, bathed from foot to face in glorious fire, he leaves the city of the dead forever. Into the burning horizon of a sunrise he cannot see, a sunrise shared by Human and Undead across the world, across an abyss of desperately reaching dead, he’s gone.
The Beautiful Dead Page 28
