Desreal: DONT YOU SEE THEIR BODIES BURNING?; STRANDWOLF/ALL

"This is not a test
This is cardiac arrest
Of a world too proud to admit our mistakes
We're crashing into the ground as we all fall from grace"

The Hyena’s shoulder hits the sand. Beyond him stands a golden figure, for the moment strangely subdued, with a moment’s pause in his amber eyes and a stricken expressionlessness on his handsome countenance. Framed by crimson tendrils, time stands still. The motionless buckskin body still pulsates with static, quivering remnants of a once-mighty Lightning. Baraqel doesn’t understand this lifelessness.

He doesn’t understand anything then aside from the notion that nothing will ever be the same.

He takes a step as if to move toward his fallen friend, but then, suddenly, there is a crack of Lightning and he wheels, lurching into a gallop with mane and tail ablaze and crackling with electricity. He is a comet – a streaking fireball, devouring everything in his path and no more conscious of his direction than those selfsame balls of wayward earth.

The clouds congregate overhead and the path behind him burns as he runs, his hooves flying carelessly over the sands, and he continues on heedlessly. His hooves pummel truths into his mind as they strike the earth and ignite it. He runs until he gets to the edge of the cursed forest of Desreal and there he stops. For a moment there is a strange pause – the thunder overhead ceases, even his conflagration stops for an instant as he gazes with conflicted enmity into the depths of that forest. Somehow, he blames it – it and all the demons it conceals.

From Desreal shall come the end and he knows it, and he feels it, and there is no more time for carelessness or frivolity.

He bows his head, examining a small sapling at his hooves. “This is the way the world ends.” He heard his sister Stymie quote the phrase once and thought it was terribly dramatic. “Not with a bang,” Strandwolf’s image won’t leave his mind. “But with a whimper.”

His head lifts. There’s a strange gravity in his eye, a wild and reckless smile – “Screw that shit.”

He throws his head skyward and the sky explodes. Lightning rains down and Fire leaps up to meet it, a tremendous crest that forms a mushroom-shape, converging upon the thunderheads above so that Fire and Lightning become one and together aim to devour everything in their path. Fire scorching, consuming, a paroxysm and a finality.

Through the smoke one can see nothing, save falling embers that come to rest in resignation among burning trees. Baraqel is gone.

The Firestarter – called Riot-Child of Pyromania by Brishen, who alone foresaw his future – leaves thus, and the bonfires left in his wake are only a terrible precursor to what is to come.

It seems the world really does end with a bang.

GLD. B A R A Q E L;
the Firestarter;
I'M ~~GOING~~ DOWN IN FLAMES