Chronepsis

What once resembled a man appeared. Wrinkles tore his face into streaks like tears which through an eternity of anguish had burnt scars into his flesh. A head, bald, outside of a sprinkling of hair as fine as the thinnest of spider's silk. Nails as rippled and brown as the most wind torn dunes of the most scorched deserts of the world. Fingers rigid as talons hung flat beside his waist. Feet that, if they stood any more crooked, he could not walk forward. Upon his shackled shoulders rested a loose and dreary patchwork of tattered rags which did little to cover the cracking wax paper skin beneath. The palms of his hands held the stains of blood from a murder long forgotten. He donned a gown from collar to foot, within itself a spectacle to behold, a blackness that contained the timeless eternity of lives untold. That if one should dare to look within, one would relinquish the course of one's life to another author. Before him, a stage, and the understanding that he must reach the center, to stand before a podium and present a eulogy.

He glanced out to the world beyond and saw men and women, young and old, rich and poor, like sand strewn to the endless horizon, gathered, homeless, before a shattered horizon of red and black. Standing upon smoldering craters and the corpses of their fellow brethren. His face unmoved, his eyes an unblinking yellow void. Guitars, in the hundreds, recited a desperate requiem as it began to rain and all retreated to their shelters. For every step he made the people rejoiced in a thunderous rapture and it felt as though the ground split open and the spawns of hell crawled out before them. He heard a recurring chant: "The Watcher!" "Chronepsis!" "The Dragon!"

An eternity passed before he reached the podium, the imminence of death always before him.