Portrait of A Red Sunrise

Across the endless planes of dunes, across the mountains and rugged chapparal that was the wastes, there was an unatural silence. It was not, as many would recall thereafter, that people had stopped their clambor, nor silenced their ever-present music...No, indeed, the eerie silence only served to make people tighten the veil of sound tighter around themselves, a reasurance stemming from a fear they couldnt explain.

The people had not gone silent.

The silence was something deeper. There was no wind, to rustle the trees. The animals, and birds, and all things living seemed to have retreated into stony unmoving stupor.

On this day, the music was hollow somehow...on this day, dread coursed through the veins of the world. The silence was a buildup to a crechendo, a climax of fear and destruction that no one, save for one, would bear witness to.

For most, the shape above on that day, apearing only momentarily, was a shooting star, a comet, something irrelivent in the grand scheme of things... But there, silueted against the beams of a sun, staining the sands red, a single figure careened down to earth.

A boy stook, looking up, as the figure sped down towards him. A wanderer, an outcast, banished by his own volition. Someone deemed utterly unimportant.

The impact of the falling figure made not a sound, and yet, the true depth of its influence would be felt around the world.

When the debris settled, and the smoke and charred rock floated gently to the ground, there was but one figure. A witness and a herald. The bringer of catastrophy, the painter and shaper of another war, fit to change a world. A single moment, caught in time, a portrait, of a red sunrise.

The world was going to change. And it had began with a single seed. A union of two beings into one. A new beggining to mark an end. The sun was high in the sky now. It beat down on the sands that covered the ground, Not a single living thing was to be found. There were no corpses....there had been no slaughter, but rather it seemed that everything that could had simply fled.

In the middle of a crater nearly a hundred feet across, there stood an orb. It was pure white, and perfectly spherical. It was as smooth as polished marble, and it should have been beautifull... Instead, it seemed wrong....dreadfully wrong. It was an abberation, a rip in the beauty of the world. It radiated such immense horror, that to look at it purposely would be nearly unthinkable. The orb was wrong....all wrong...and it was growing larger.

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all across the world, certain people began to become troubled. Some felt it in the earth... some smelled it in the air, or heard it in the waves... Something was coming, and it was very, very close.