apocalypse

The ground is warm beneath Doll's back as she lies in the fire's ruins, its erstwhile host's half-frozen blood splattered all around her. Her skin is pristine; her witch's wrath was careful when that pitiful storyteller finally turned its teeth on her.

She enjoys the warmth with the same sad hunger as she might regard her last meal before execution, were she a thing which could die. There's precious little of it left in the world, and the false-sun's baleful eye leeches more away with each passing day.

It's finally quiet.

It's growing cold, little one.

The fratricide-gorged false-sun miserly hoards its warmth, and its cold red light barely offers enough of a spark to light a fire. The sky is dim and grey, winter draping across the land with all of a funeral's finality.

What warmth there is comes from the earth: the swelling blooms of hydrothermal vents and frost-encrusted geysers, the self-destructive pulses of volcanoes popping like angry pimples. The last reserves of coal and oil, those old ghosts conjured up to suffer one last time.

There's something wrong with the sun. It hangs in the sky like a cell caught mid-mitosis, embarrassed to be seen in such a flagrant state; the nighttime secrets which it has always hid in its lair beneath the sea finally dragged out into the day.

Doll stares up at it through a sheet of smoked glass, a jagged-edged thing salvaged from a wrecked limousine. It's already streaked with blood from the false-flesh that coats her carefully woven fingers, little candy-colored droplets fanning out in painful rivulets.