An End To All My Dreaming

An excerpt from a chapter of this book. Told from the mind of Allen Gaffendale - The Protagonist.

       

FOR AT LAST I HAVE SEEN

By

Louis M. Warde

        I gazed up to the stars and I saw a great gathering of things great and wicked.  I wondered and was in awe of the horrific display of the stars jostling out of place.  For the night I would be out among the shadows watching the universe disintegrate.  I languished through the nocturne.  So filled was I with the hope of tomorrow that I failed to collect the symptoms together.  I was as ignorant to the severity of an ever worsening condition within the world and within my soul as was a child to the heartbreak that no doubt lurked somewhere in their future.

         No longer could I dream of happy times, for my dreams were like the vast reaches of the unknown that sprawled before my eyes.  They were a pile of wreckage.  Torn were they by the foolishness of me to stain the past and present with greed and of all things... pride.  

        The goodness withered from sight, not of choice but necessity.  No love could linger where life could no longer flourish.  A beating heart is only sustained by the breath of life, which is in essence love itself.  For those things which I had done there could be no love within me.  Reflected in the calamity of the crushing universe my beating heart sputtered for a moment.

        In the stars I saw a reckoning of greater proportions than any creature could fathom be they from the beginning of our race or the far stretches of the future.  The twinkling sky was a great maw widening for the final clench.  A last supper for the world to bid farewell to the disease I had come to nurture unknowingly.   

        I awoke from my dream of this to find myself in a sheen of sweat.  Strangely and without recollection, I was between the fine layers of my bed.  When last I knew I had been on the mezzanine for a calming drink to wind down from the tumult of my life.  

        The satin sheets had plastered to my glazed flesh as a fine red film.  It looked reminiscent of blood emblazoned by ribbons of dawn.  I could no more shake the vision from my head than I could forget the horrid sensation that I would not see the end of this new day alive.  How I wished that I were wrong.

Author's Note

I apologize for poor execution if you see it as such. A shortened time slot and a nervous tick only satisfied by writing left me in a hurry for a fix.