A Vicious Cycle
A story by C. E. Bone
Browse all of the stories produced at Guardian Summer School here
The sun had barely crested the mountain before Destruction arrived to begin her work.
Rays of Spring sunlight crept into the city below, laying a spotlight for her steely gaze. Dull eyes roamed over the sprawling patchwork quilt of voices, colour and spices; the faint sounds of Kathmandu emerging from sleep echoed in the shell of her ear. She leaned back against the mountainside and closed her eyes, tilting her pasty face towards the sun like a withered sunflower in sepia. A smile contorted her feature as the sun blanketed the city in warm beams. The sun was an old friend.
“You’re never going to tan, you know,” a sharp voice sliced the stillness of morning, shattering its peace. Destruction’s eyes snapped open and glanced at the offender, raising an unimpressed eyebrow as Chaos grinned back at her. Chaos raised his hands in defeat, a breathy chuckle oozing past a toothless grin and charred gums. “I was just wondering what time you were actually going to go down,” he continued, barely sparing a contemptuous glance at Kathmandu before turning back to her, a sly smirk stealing its way across his pale, fish-like lips.
“Patience is a virtue. Besides, I was waiting for you.” Destruction rolled her eyes and faced Kathmandu. The laughter, the shouting, the car horns all mixing in an urban orchestra. A web of lives, all interconnected, and she would snip the threads until only a few remained. “Ready?”
“Lead the way.”
They rose into the air, suspended for a moment as Destruction gazed for one last time on Kathmandu before rushing down to smother it. Chaos following Destruction, they sped towards the forest of stone faster than light itself. Destruction felt alive, excitement zipping through her skeletal body like livewires. Destruction was galvanised, sparks shooting through her brain as fireworks exploded in her core. She could ride on breezes and float on hurricanes, she could twist elements, become them. Tsunamis melted into forest fires, only to be extinguished at the smallest tremble of an earthquake. An earthquake. An earthquake would do.
Destruction was relentless. She split the earth with her harsh laughter, temples crumbled under her touch. She reached in through a window and pulled a ceiling down on a family, their shrieks of horror already dying as she thundered through a door. A familiar symphony of cries and yells followed her wherever she went, an overture of terror ringing in her ears as people fell at the flick of a wrist. People streamed out of their homes like locusts, their faces white with dust and panic. Blind, they stumbled like sheep through the streets, tripping over wreckage and trying to dodge the meteors of debris. A raging fire licked up the side of a building and a man flung himself from his balcony into the street below, staining the pavement with a pool of blood. Houses toppled like dominoes, crushing the people within and without and creating a tomb of rubble.
The attack continued for a day and a night before Destruction finally ceased. Huffing a sigh, she sank down on some rubble, her throne of ruin, and chose to wait in the city for Chaos to finish weaving his confusion. She usually retreated to a nearby mountain or lake, turning her back on the horror she had left behind. Sometimes it took days, sometimes it took weeks. She waited indefinitely.
Scanning the deserted square she was sat in, Destruction gazed at what she had left. Eerie silence was her only guest and broken homes her courtiers. Muffled silence reigned once more before a devastating howl pierced it. Destruction sat bolt upright, eyes wide and scanning the wreckage for any sign of life, hands itching to smother it before holding herself back. A woman crawled out from under a fallen piece of timber, her white mask of dust and panic striped with salty tear tracks and punctured with bruises. She gasped for breath, sniffled, and began searching the ruins. Just as the sun began to crawl beneath the cover of the horizon and the shadows began to stretch, the woman dragged a doll out from the wreckage. She clutched it, its limp arms dangling as the gut-wrenching wails began afresh. It was only when Destruction curiously peered closer that she realised it was a child’s body, broken and battered.
A deep wave of sadness crashed over Destruction as the sun finally dipped beneath the edge of the world. No birds sang as the mother sobbed into the melancholy blue of twilight. Destruction watched the woman more intently and tried to picture a world without her own children. What if Loss and Grief were no more? The mere thought of it sent a shockwave of fear through her.
What if… what if she gave up? Defied Fate? Just for a day, of course, but she could. She would.
Hours of agonising deliberating turned into days. The woman fell asleep at some point during that first lonely night, cradling her lifeless child. As the sky dawned grey, she shook off the veil of sleep and carried her child away with leaden feet. As the days went by, more like her emerged from the shadows, survivors of unimaginable horrors. For the first time, Destruction looked on with pity, sympathy softening her gaze.
After three days and three nights Chaos returned, plopping himself down next to Destruction and releasing a sigh. They sat in companionable silence for another night, the hours meaning only a moment to them both. Eternity was the only timeframe that meant anything anymore. As the silvery light of dawn slipped through the mounds of metal and bodies, Chaos rubbed his meaty palms together.
“So, where are we off to next?”
Destruction immediately bristled, bony hackles raising and golden eyes burning under the shadow of her hood. “Must you be so flippant? Do these humans not matter?” she growled, the hoarse noise shaking the earth and dripping with danger as she glared daggers at him.
The huge, lumbering form recoiled slightly, the precise lines of his body blurring and shivering as he wobbled on the tightrope between fear and surprise. Chaos recovered though, and his black eyes narrowed into shards of onyx, hardening as he studied Destruction’s tense shoulders and unwavering gaze.
“Oh, come now Destruction, you can’t possibly care for this?” Chaos spat, throwing his arms wide and gesturing to the remains of Kathmandu. A gale of wind followed, rattling the charred husk of an overturned car and whistling between the cracks in the pavement.
Destruction forced out a humourless laugh, the broken sound in harmony with the rising wind. “Can we even care about anything anymore?” A pause. The wind swirled in the empty silence. “I’m not going.”
“What?”
“I want to stop constantly causing so much sorrow.”
“But we must!” Chaos erupted incredulously as fury boiled over inside him. His eyes bugged out of their sunken sockets, shards of onyx now bottomless wells of scorn, toxic and petrifying. “You have a duty to carry out Fate’s will, we all do. You can’t just ignore such things.” He continued in hushed tones, the icy wind whipping Destruction’s robes and snapping at her heels.
“Is our duty right, though?” Destruction’s anger brewed as her fists shook and ripples of tremors rocked the surrounding buildings, now mere shells of concrete.
“Of course it’s not right, but it is how this world has worked and always will work. You can’t just unravel the thread of the universe.” Chaos sighed.
“But why is the balance of the universe so cruel then? Nothing you can say or do will move me.”
The ferocity of her conviction halted Chaos in his tracks. He tilted his head and appraised Destruction, as if trying to see her in a different light or perhaps to see her point of view.
“Alright, fine, I’ll leave if it’s what you want. But Fate will find out, and she will go ballistic.” Chaos shrugged before leaping into the air, a stout silhouette against a vast grey sky. A wink, a flash of a grotesque smile and Chaos whirled away, off to wreak havoc somewhere else that Fate had chosen as her victim.
Completely alone, Destruction breathed in deeply, drinking in the dusty air. It had a peculiar smell of blood and pain. And freedom. For the first time since sunlight first touched the Earth, Destruction had a choice. She had freedom, and she was going to use it to her full advantage. She soared into the air, whooping with joy as she hurtled over mountains and dove into lakes, trailing her spindly white fingers in the freezing water.
Destruction flew around the world and learned more about humans in a day than she had in eons.
She watched as young couples lazed under the dappled shade of trees on a warm morning, wrapped up in each other. A boy gave his wailing younger brother the last crust of bread even though Hunger clutched them both in his suffocating grip. A woman saved a stranger from drowning, both collapsing on the beach exhaustion as the morning tide swelled, sun in their eyes and sand in their mouths. A girl cooked breakfast for her mother, whose tired eyes and aching feet welcomed the respite. A father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a friend, a stranger, a lover. Humanity’s capacity to love wasn’t endless, but it was vast. Destruction wandered the Earth wide-eyed. How strange it was that love had no definite meaning, but meant so much to humans. It was a drop in the ocean and the ocean itself. Intimate and immense, it had no limits, no restraints.
Destruction looked on and felt something she hadn’t felt for thousands of years: she felt wonder. New-found childlike curiosity that grew the closer she looked. The strange beauty of humans drew her in deeper, deeper until she found herself back in Kathmandu, where her amazement became incendiary. Strolling through the manic midday sunshine, she spied two children kneeling in front of a mountain of painted timber. As she approached them, it dawned upon Destruction that the wreckage was actually the remnants of a shrine. There the children were, having lost the bed they crawled into at night, the father that swung them over his shoulder, the street they had played in, yet they still hoped. The heat burned their knees and snatched their breath, yet they still hoped. The sun still hurled its blistering heat onto Kathmandu and the people were thankful they had survived to see the sunrise.
Destruction left the children and meandered further afield, following the twisting ribbon of dirt that was once the main road. She turned into an alley to find a respite from the blaring sun, sighing as the cool shade soothed her. Leaning against a sagging wall, she drew a breath, eyelids slowly slipping closed –
A scream shattered Destruction’s tranquillity.
Racing towards the sound, Destruction turned into a dingier alley and stopped short. Two men were struggling in the shadows, one sprawled on the ground and the other standing triumphantly over him, pocketing a dirty wad of money. The standing man had his back to Destruction, sweat trickling down his neck as he adjusted the jagged piece of rock in his hand. The man raised the rock, holding it in the air. Its cragged edges stood starkly against the unrelenting sun. A whimper came from the man on the ground, his wrinkled face twisted painfully in fear and intense pain. Blood gushed from his temple, dripping off his jaw. Mouth gaping in horror, Destruction turned away as the younger man brought the rock down onto the old man’s head. A wet thwack, a yelp, and nothing more. The only sound was the soft hiss as Destruction’s acidic tears seared the stones beneath her feet.
Was it simply desperation? Destruction scoured the globe, looking for an explanation for such cruelty, searching for the love, kindness and hope she had seen before. Little by little, the veil of wonder was ripped and torn by stinging words and heinous violence. A boy being kicked to the floor in the playground, tears mingling with the tarmac. A woman being smacked by a lover so hard her neck cracked. Violence. War. Rape. Flashes of horror filled Destruction’s mind as she trudged around the Earth, burning tears flowing thick and fast.
When she next lifted her eyes from her feet, she started. The square looked almost exactly as it had done the day of the earthquake. The throne of rubble still remained, although she was less inclined to sit on it now. She remembered the woman and her child. How she had caused that pain. How another human could have caused that pain.
“Are you done reminiscing about the fairness of the world?”
Destruction whirled around to face Chaos, anguish plain on her face.
“I can’t make the world any better.” She said softly, wringing her hands and tears of frustration brimming in her eyes.
“Ah, but you’re not making it any worse.” Chaos smiled gently, laying an enormous hand on Destruction’s bony shoulder. The touch warmed her slightly as the sun began to set and the chill of twilight crept into her bones. “You can’t control humans. Without you, they simply carry out your work. There has to be a balance, and believe me when I say you do not want to give humans any more control over this Earth than they already have.”He plopped onto the boulder beside the throne of rubble and patted the space next to him. Destruction gave a tremulous, watery smile before sitting next to him.
They sat in companionable silence as they waited for yet another sunrise, silently watching the golden disc crest the mountain shrouded in mist.
Destruction had seen thousands of sunrises before this dawn, and would watch thousands more to come. This same star had risen and set on entire civilisations, just as those great empires inevitably rose and fell. Yet one day, even the sun would age and ripen before Destruction would pluck it from the sky. It would rot in an inferno of dust and fire, engulfing everything in sight. The universe would burn. After that…even she didn’t know, couldn’t know.
Destruction, with her jaw set and world-weary eyes, stepped forth once more to deliver Fate’s will.
