Valormist

The City That Burned

The first brazen bursts of honeycombed light burned away the fog, banishing the luffing tendrils that wove like searching spirits between the trees. Its warmth stirred the air with a new melody, lifting a cloak of honeysuckle and dewy grass above the city that would soon be lit on fire.

Clouds rehearsed the part of drifting smoke, chagrined to know that soon their little trifle of an act would become the people of Valormist’s reality. They puffed and huffed, dotting the sky with trails of slate and streaks of charcoal until the sky became a foreshadowing of the trials to come.

With a groan of displeasure, the wind swept the lands, swaying the treetops into bowing arcs of warning and snapping the stalks that would soon transform under the destruction of the fire’s reach.

Even the moon would play its part on that night; already, within the growing brightness of day, it had begun to redden. Soon it would swell and burst, leeching crimson into the cresting morning, painting the world red as a civilization came to its knees.

It was not as if they had not been warned.

The signs had been foretold in the rinds of oranges turned sour and the voices of elders brought to shame. Every crooked alley and dishonest patron had the warnings written upon the canvas of their being. Each threat was laced between the peddlers’ shoestrings and encapsulated in the babies’ broken rattles.

They knew their days were numbered, and still they chose to remain. They chose the end that was coming for them.

There was a time when it had been different. When folk of the air and seas had dwelled in homes that smelt of sawdust, wiping fog from rounded windows and snagging mischief from the air like children haggling for their favorite sweet.

The harbor had once been alive, dominated by brightly cloaked merchants and wayward sons, a buzz of thrills and wares that were never quite what they seemed.

Trails of chimney smoke once came from burning logs, not dreams. Doors were once entries, not blockades. Lanterns were once lit, not snuffed. And children? Children were once treasured, not discarded.

There had been a time, however short, when the ways of many were good ways, and the villains of old belonged to stories, not gazette front pages. In that time, milkmen still sang, and clouds puffed merrily by, an accompaniment to the sun, not its replacement. The melding of worlds became as seamless as interlocking fingers, a peaceful harmony that ruled above the noise.

Valormist had been the city of bridges. Sea to sky, land to dreams, father to son. It was created by joined voices and clasped hands, tied in a thousand invisible threads to the world around it, weaving the make of all together.

Now, destruction ravages those lands, and fire burns away the threads, snapping them in one tumultuous cut. Winds roar, the moon bleeds into the heavens, and smoke writhes through the dawn. The play is turned sharp with reality, a war waged against the city that fell from such height.

If only the villain had remained in her storybook. Then the skies would not be forced to carve her name into the ruins of the city she had come to love. The city she broke with a single touch.

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