Kingdoms fall around us,
                          All that’s come is gone,
                          The gates of heaven tumble down,
                          The house of cards undone.

I just thought it was a children’s rhyme, like the humpty dumpty of my youth. Unfortunately, like in that rhyme I heard so long ago, nobody could put the world back together again. I should introduce myself, but I quite frankly don’t have the time. You see, the world is ending, not your world that is, not yet. I came from your world, our world I suppose. It’s been so long since I left the world where fairytales stay in books. I miss it sometimes. But then in this world I have my own princess, something I never would have managed in, (reality?) the Earth you live. I’m rambling again, and I don’t have time. The world is ending you see, the fairytales became a dream, the dream became a nightmare, and finally, someone, something, somewhere is waking up. The only problem is that my princess and I are going to end with the fairytale nightmare, I wonder if this happened every time I closed a book on a happy ending? I don’t know about happy, but this is very surely an ending.

These are my last few precious moments.

The neon lights of the fantastic city flicker sporadically now, it’s so different from our world, no cars pump fumes into the hanging streets among the great sky towers, guns are a silly concept in this place, though people have never needed guns to kill each other in our where and when, and they certainly don’t here and now. I’m sure there are many terrified beings, ruing their existence, reliving every last mistake they made. What a waste of an apocalypse! To me the streets are empty, as empty and hollow (soulless) as I’ve always imagined the great streets of great cities to be, pavements where success and wealth is the one true Faith. In some ways this world is not so very different from our own, God is not called God here, but Pepsi is still Pepsi. Speaks a lot for what really matters to people, doesn’t it? But those screaming masses are invisible and soundless to me now. There is only her and I, as a great glowing sign sails by in it’s earthbound flight; it flickers happily one last time, illuminating her pale face in soft pinks and reds, then blues and gold, a kaleidoscope of beauty, the only colours in a black and white movie scene. The sign glows its last then embraces its downward destiny.

Pepsi the taste of a new…

Only us on this grey balcony, only you (my princess) in this monotone opera of the end. All the romantic thoughts my feeble and practical brain tries to assemble, but nothing can capture this moment. Nothing I can say… So I lean close and I kiss you, we don’t close our eyes, nothing of this can be wasted, my senses are on fire. Our lips touch and our breaths mingle, had I forgotten how sweet and precious the air in your lungs was? It tastes like the silken threads of a thousand fairies, candyfloss spun of dreams. I indulge in these final pleasures, there are not many breaths left, for either of us, for anyone else. But no-one else matters. Only you, only those soft lips, a pink so soft and vivid, your skin is silk. I push the feeble words away, and just revel in the moment. I’ve got so few left with you. Not enough, every one eternal and beautiful in their fleeting brevity.

A cautionary word, to you, who shares in these last thoughts of mine. Fairytales can come true; they just don’t ever end how you’d imagined them. Maybe that’s their allure, their magic. Oh and by the way neither magic nor silk-spinning fairies are quite what you imagine they’re like either, trust a dying man on that. Where was I…?

                      The child-king’s building castles,
                      The cross that breaks and bends,
                      The saviour and the seven sins,
                      Watching as the world ends.

I once read in a book from the world I once shared with you, that true love is like an addiction, a terrible and powerful drug. And like all drugs it grows boring, to all those you aren’t experiencing those seemingly repetitive kisses and caresses. To the lovers however, it has an energy, sparking breath past lips on fire with passion. Her eyes held me, as I held her. The darkness was brighter, the colours were blinding. And all the sounds and dangers, all one would associate with the unravelling of existence, all of it was very far away.

              This the deafening silence, this the reverie.
              This the final rapture, this the melody.
                                Lost in you.

I will bore you no longer with romanticism; time is malleable, but finite. I will use it well. So we avert our eyes from my erstwhile final kiss. The stone of this city is the blue-black of night, wondrous at first, studded as it is, or rather was, with glowing lights, like stars. Like the grey cities of our world however, the magic of a place is not its towering blocks of society’s advancement. These sky towers seem to muffle the true sky and its stars, always. Even now at the end. So we don’t look up to the sky above. Nor down from the heavens to see the Kingdom or the ruinous scars of Ohz, haunted as it is by metal-soldiers and murderous stitched-together men, tall and fearsome like scarecrows. No, I will indulge you in the locality of this strange world, here in Grymm, crown of the Kingdom. This is a world of magic, of a far away place and time, a world that still has the taste, of a new generation, soon to join, in the nightmare turnings of Ohz.

                          Ohz was the first to fall,
                          Broken wizards and shattered glass.
                          And now that land leaks,
                          The madness and the green.
                          Left without a hero,
                          No heart, no courage, no mind, no home.

At the end of the world people will become more guarded, more conservative and cautious. The propaganda of the two, near-warring, political parties of the Kingdom were strikingly alike. Especially concerning the stringent plans to contain Ohz and its refugees. The Lord Wolf and his ultra conservatives strove for a near state of marshal law, and so near to the end he was welcomed. However, his opponent had one thing apparent in her campaign that gave her even footing with Wolf’s promise of safety, the Lady Riding offered hope.
Her Redhoods were more liberal. Or so the poster claimed. It seemed to me that these, now inconsequential, faces engraved in paper screamed at each other from page to page, arguing for control of a world gone mad. They argued over the cards, even as they fell. Cards have a certain significance in this world; they have a superstition and power of their own. The very vault of this world is by legend sustained by a house of cards, but cards are folding, falling, and the house is crumbling away, away, away. And no amount of politics will bring it back.

                              The thirteen constellations,
                              Falling from the light,
                              The seven suites of power and cards,
                              Rising in the night.

It is at this point that the relativity of time decided to assert itself in a most wonderful, terrible (illogical some might say) manner. Time, perhaps all of it, jilted. It became patchy and excessive in its variation. One ribbon of time caused a bridge on a nearby tower to neatly unbuild itself, heedless of the screaming masses I didn’t know where there, but I’m sure they were. The vast Pepsi billboard sailed upwards past our position, as slowly and luxuriously as it had fallen and shattered against the tower which supported the balcony where we watched the world end in our peripheral vision. You were more beautiful still against the backdrop of…
I should introduce myself, but I quite frankly don’t have the time. You see, the world is ending, not your world that is, not yet. I came from your world, our world I suppose. It’s been so long since I left the world where fairytales stay in books. I miss it sometimes…
…the unravelling of existence. Threads not pulled but torn apart.

                             Jilt and sundered, Time parts like veil.

Time in the close vicinity is not quite, whole [It is at this point that the relativity of time decided to…] so to say. So I will tell you that this is not an obscure possibility. This can, and will happen to our world too. It can be stopped by the thirteen of the seven. But I am the last of that sad troupe. This world is all run out of heroes, (not run out of time, that just runs sideways and in circles) and it can’t be saved. Not by me, I’ve tried and failed. I’ve stood on the slopes of The Last Mountain at the edge of the world. Thirteen of the Seven, but there’s just us left and what came before is yet to come. Or it’s happening now. There is no time when all of Time is one. But still we kiss and time stands still for us alone. For us on the ledge, for us the last, for us held in sweet embrace. An embrace of body, and lips and mind and soul. One that lasts forever in every second, always something new, that is always the same. Always beating with love and a desperation to enjoy it for as long as it lasts. Not long now.

                               Breathe,
                               Take me away,
                               On wings,
                               Clipped in the storm.



I’ve run out of time, a figure of speech more clearly out of place there never was. Suffice to say, it’s over. And as the greatest show there ever was plays out in the background, I hold your breath in my lungs; I savour the last of you as the nearest sky-tower implodes silently, in reverse. Time becomes harmonious again, seeming to rush to a conclusion, a frantic dash as it too draws to a singular final close. A thousand sunrises, a million words, half-heard, mere whispers. An endless solitary masterpiece. Everything I can’t describe, laid out in the simplest terms, if God believed, or was believed in this place, or any other, I would say his greatest work was undoing his creation. It’s quieter than I imagined. The ending was, is, beautiful, not the warm blissful beauty of you, my princess at the edge, but the awe inspiring and unimaginable beauty of something so perfect, so absolute, so final.

                              All the shattered mountains,
                              Oceans left to dry and run,
                              The final panorama,
                              The house of cards undone.

                              Thirteen of the Seven.

All rhymes have an ending, as all tales have a start. Just word of wisdom, to those who live to tell, the end is swiftly coming, to all worlds and to hell. A cautionary lesson, to you. Live every last moment, love with your remaining breath and blood. Count life in seconds. [I love you, your wondrous hazel eyes reflecting the halo of the end.] Don’t count signs or horsemen; you’ll know when dark days come. Hallowed halls unhallowed, the whore cries with the nun. Nothing sacred, nothing sweet, nor nothing bad or evil. What the children learn in youth, may guide you past the storm. If not…
The world unravels.

    Kingdoms fall around us,
    All that’s come is gone,
    The gates of heaven tumble down,
    The house of cards undone.

    The child-king’s building castles,
    The cross that breaks and bends,
    The saviour and the seven sins,
    Watching as the world ends.

    The thirteen constellations,
    Falling from the light,
    The seven suites of power and cards,
    Rising in the night.

    All the shattered mountains,
    Oceans left to dry and run,
    The final panorama,
    The house of cards undone.

    Thirteen of the Seven.