The man with a trumpet

The world comes to end... The man with a trumpet is there blow out the notes of the end

The city below was on fire. The garish flames reaching high into the sky. Billowing clouds of black among the red, orange, and yellow flames. The glass and steel towers of downtown melting downward towards the ground, flowing in slow motion as they burned away leaving greasy marks where they once stood. Hell had come calling with all the demons walking the city streets. We watched from the mountain side looking the east as a second sun rose there lighting the eastern sky like a false dawn. A nuclear false dawn of the megatons beyond the horizon, they who were slaying and dying here barely noticed it's brightness, before it faded away into the background of the slayers, slain and dying.

Sweat poured down our faces as we watched the armies of the pit on the march all around. All gathered in the tiny dark space seemed to breath as one, panting at the hot toxic air. We hid from the demons. Twisted dark forms eyes ablaze with the blood of innocence spilled across the altars of fallen and forgotten gods. On to many legs they came walking, some crawling in their own slime or the blood and bodies of the slain. Gutted homes were blown apart by the striding of the giants among them. The byways and freeways were masses of screaming forms trying to run and finding that they were helpless prey. We watched as hovering ray shaped things covered with gaping hungry mouths drew writing figures to their dripping maws with impossibly long fingered hands that sprouted from their undersides. Nameless night terrors flew as misshapen things through the halloween coloured skies in hordes, dipping down into the sea of flames to rise with a twisting turning body held in their talons. They took some of those that they dropped upon whole, others they we could see trailing out a rain of blood and entrails. My stomach dropped as they moved onward towards, a tiny mouse of fear become a huge raging beast that set my heart to pounding so hard that I was sure that it would burst from the strain.

The war was over. Humanity had lost is age old battle with something that it could not see, but that had always been there waiting for the stars to turn in their ways across the heavens so that the gateways between worlds would open. Hell had run free from the stars and from the empty spaces between the worlds. It hungered for souls, flesh, and the minds of the living. We would serve quite well as meat for the feast, cattle to be herded along, and the blood letting promised ages ago. They reveled in our fears, bathed in the juices that ran from roasting corpses that silently screamed out from huge piles gathered before the places of human faith. Those faiths had failed before those that roam between the walls of the worlds.

With fearful eyes that reflected the souls of the damned we took in the scene that seemed impossible. The twisting of the ground and sky themselves into strange shapes that made the mind ache at there wrongness. The skies and winds themselves seemed to shieking out in horror and dismay. The earth bled not molten rock but black blood that smeared across the streets in waves. Of those few of us who watched from the shallow mountainside caves most fell to their knees at the sight of the world turning itself inside out trying to vomit up the vile things from it's surface and it's skies. Those who fell to their knees burst apart burning from within, their bodies consumed in a moment of agony becoming but piles of smoking cinders where once there was a living person. The stench of their deaths filled the close air of the little hole in the rock, and lit the close rock walls with garish green light that turned the faces of those standing into the visages of the decaying dead.

A woman looked at we who still stood, her once pretty and fear stricken face become a anus spitting up her organs one at a time. Blood trailed them down to the floor and they landed with horrid liquid sound. Somehow still alive she tried to crawl towards us. The others broke and ran out of the cave as she advanced on us the sluglike form of what she had become reaching out with a long slick froglike tongue.

I didn't hold my ground as much as I was unable to move. I shivered with the need to run, to find anyway out of this scene and make it just a half remembered nightmare. My mind could not command my body to run frozen by both terror and the insanity of what was taking place. I vomited unable to control my horror, the wrenching gagging shaking me from head to foot. Half falling from the effort of trying to empty myself of my innards I leaned against the cool of one of the nearest cave wall. The long slippery and foul tongue of the womanthing licked the side of my face and then slurped up my vomit from the cave floor.

I could hear the screams of the few people who had been left alive run from the cave. Their screams did not last long but became gurgling shrieks as a rain of acidfire pitting them to their bones and then to nothing but stinking puddles of what had been once living humans. That fetid liquid mixed with the foul rain and gathered in steaming puddles that collected and then ran down the cracks among the wet stones. There would be nothing left of before this hell came to a end, if it should ever end.

There came a mighty bellow from the heavens, and the whole of what had once been reality stood still. The skies outside the cave grew a glowing pure white, and the air was rent with the a sound of horns. Trumpets blowing out a single powerful resounding note that seemed to linger after it had been blown. It seemed as if the rocks, and air came to attention and awaken from this evil dream at that the sounding of those notes. The sluglike thing that had once been human shivered and slowly faded as the brightness from the mouth of the shallow cave fell upon it.

The light fell upon my skin and the warmth of thousand childhood dreams ran through my body. The screaming in my mind subsided away at it's touch. Ending with a deadly whisper that drifted away into a humming silence. I glowed from within the light allowing me to borrow it's strength so that my heart felt as if it would take flight.

Willed by that strength I walked to the opening of that tiny shelter and looked out upon what had been a great city of men. All that was had vanished. The demons gone, the buildings on which they had alighted vanished, the streets as if they had never been. It was now as it had once been, a great stretch of open golden desert. The native plants astruggle to survive in the harshness of the desert sun. The rattlesnake sunning itself  upon the stones of a dry riverbed, it's animals and plantlife renewed. The light mellowed until it was merely the golden glow of the sun upon the western horizon.

Through white clouds that soared across the azure bowl of the heavens the orb of the sun shone. Far to the west there were thunderheads reaching to the far heights and delivering rains down to the deserts. They were filled with the glowing hammer strikes of lightning and their thunder rolled dimly across the far miles. The winds rose to blow the stench of fear that I carried away, and I turned to look up the mountainside. There above was a whirling disc of color and light.

Standing upon that whorl of light and colour was a man. His skin dark as ebony, his slender and slight form wearing a old tattered pinstripe suit. I could barely stand to look into his eyes, they were the color of amber, and as he turned his gaze from the far horizon to mine it was as if he was looking into me. I saw there a billion worlds adrift across the seas of time, uncounted souls like bright flames burning without being consumed on worlds without number. His skin was wrinkled as that of a great lizard but he warmth, kindness and heart that he exuded were as that of a grand old traveler come home for visit, truly happy to have come, and bearing with him gifts beyond compare.

He tipped his old black slouch hat to me, showing a single gold tooth bearing a eight pointed star within a circle as he smiled to broadly fromear to ear as if he had done some grand trick that he was rightly proud of. Held loosely in his right hand was a trumpet.

He inhaled and the sound of it was like the wind from a far range of mountains blowing across the spring blossoms and freshly grown grasses after a long hard winter. To his lips he placed that battered old trumpet and blew out a series of notes that rang clear across the desert skies. It was the call of freedom, of dance, and of love. It seemed as if the whole of the world struggled to remember something forgot and now only a dim memory that lay just beyond the reach of memory. Behind him drifted a thousand thousand thousand souls clad in gleaming gold and silver.

I fell to my knees still looking upward as the bright souls faded away into the darkening blue as day faded away into night. The notes he played echoed from the sky, from the ground, from the light of the sunset, from within myself. He faded into the skies drifting as smoke before being utterly gone. He left behind himself only the ghost of those ringing powerful brass notes. That did not die away totally but seemed to flow again and again without ending their cycle around the whole of the world.

It seemed as if years passed away before I stood and turned to the setting desert sun that painted the skies a deeping scarlet and indigo. There among the stones at my feet lay carefully folded the robes of a wandering soul. The colour of dust, of growing new grass, of the skies before the storm comes to wash through the dry desert riverbeds. Atop them was a simple blade that I drew soundlessly from it's oaken scabbard. It's blade shone dimly in the twilight and bore the name of a fallen and risen goddess upon it. I took up the robes and donned them without ceremony, returned the blade to it's scabbard and turned to the east again to being my long walk.

And there is the tale of how I came to be the guardian of these lands by the hand of the trumpet player, and the fall of those whose pride over took them. Now it is time that I return to my home among the coyotes, the desert sands, and those who still watch the thunderheads come over the mountains to feed the thirsty desert lands.