Epilogue
It was Sunday morning in Metro City valley, but the sun had not risen. The railcars didn’t seem to notice or mind, as they were busy about their business running to and fro like so many streaks of lightning in the dark dawn. The sky was clear as crystal, yet no star shone. It was as if someone turned the Stars off at bedtime, and never switched them back on. No one seemed to notice this either. If it was because the vast majority were still asleep in their beds, sleeping off a long night of festive revelry in the desert, or if because this was the people’s normal disposition––to never consider the heavens–-or if it was because the artificial lighting of Metro City so effectively obscured the natural lights, one was not likely to ever determine for sure. But the morning sky was black all the same whether Metro City saw it or not, and this blackness extended itself throughout the valley, covering mountain ranges, and the desert floor up to the point of what must have looked from the outside as a great dome of artificial light over the city, illuminating the water vapors overhead just so as to look rounded like the arching sides of a dome.
From Mt. Olé an onlooker would have perhaps died of fright at the sight of what followed. The blackness of the sky started to part or one might even say rip apart as like a black veil is torn or cut through by a stabbing knife, which revealed a mass ever growing brighter and more saturated in color, a thing like an ember glowing red and orange and pulsating between these colors in veins or fractured lines of black throughout; only, this ember of molten metal and rock was growing in size and was soon so massive the sky could not contain it. The blackness of the sunless sky was giving way to this falling rock––the figure or form of which reminded one of an old flint arrowhead dug up from the ground. The unfortunate onlooker would have thought the sky was not so much falling as being eaten.
And indeed that was what was happening. Soon the air was all flame from the friction of the massive body entering into the atmosphere. The sky was on fire! But no one in Metro City noticed even this much. What finally got their attention were the seismic disturbances. The great speed of the massive body–-were one to put a quantity to it, probably the magnitude of half a lunar body––was such that the earth only now was feeling its effects on the great sea of magma beneath its crust. The Rock had the effect of squeezing and pulling at this great body of molten rock and metal like the Moon pulls on the seas, and was presently bringing the springs of lava to the surface where none had existed before.
Soon, lava could be seen by our onlooker on Mt. Olé rushing down out of the north along the valley floor, flooding the lands between the mountain ranges like an irrigation dike full of flowing water. The disruption of the earth’s crust by these phenomena sent a ceaseless succession of earthquakes through the valley, and shook to ruination the feeble structures unable to withstand the violence. The metal railcar rails swayed back and forth and finally snapped like toothpicks; apartment buildings crumbled like houses of cards; Temple Row looked like a war zone of heaps of rubble and clouds of dust; and people throughout Metro who were awake and about and not dead underneath their houses, were screaming and running hysterically down streets and up streets, trying to escape the crashing and carnage all about them.
Looking out over the Metro City Valley our onlooker would have seen the lava flows like oceanic tidal waves, pounding down the valley toward the city, glowing hot, alternating red and white, and throwing its dread light onto the mountain range as it flowed down. Turner’s Steel Mill––presently reduced to heaps of twisted metal and debris and dead bodies––would have recognized the sight all too well.
The black sky had nearly been swallowed up in atmospheric fires and with the sight beyond of the arrow head spearing through space toward its appointed target. Were our onlooker somehow able to survive the horror of the spectacle so far, nothing could have prolonged life by what followed.
The atmosphere of Earth now nearly burnt up, deadly gas filled the air. Pungent fogs and clouds of sulfur were rapidly replacing and filling the void left by the burnt oxygen and nitrogen, and choking the life from the surface of the earth.
Were any alive to see it, there before the falling rock was one puffy cloud, a fluffy white cumulus effortlessly and gracefully floating down in front of the mass of black and red glowing rock behind it. Seated upon its soft cushiony seat of vapor and light was Tulu holding a Toddler upon Her knee, who bounced up and down as like a frolicking tot at play. On closer inspection, one would have seen He held what appeared to be a rattle which he shook and pointed, again as like one at play, but which was actually a solid diamond scepter, gleaming with rainbows of light. He was commanding the elements as the cloud approached the earth, directing the lava, the gases, and shaken earth, the winds and the lights, like a conductor at a symphony, orchestrating the final movement of his composition. All the while Tulu looked on smiling like a doting mother, and would have clapped to cheer Him on but for the fact that Her hands were full with the Son of God.