The Exiled Empire - Prologue

A man sat alone, thinking in silence as he gazed upon the end of the world. He did not weep in fear and loss, nor did he rage at his time cut short; he merely sat and watched as it happened. The ground had been trembling for hours now; a low, chaotic spasm that emanated from deep below. The very air quaked in terror at the coming destruction, but the man was not afraid. In truth, the present moment was oddly calming. The knowledge that there was nothing more to be done, that nothing more could be done, was nothing short of liberating to him. There was a shift in the dusty air, and the man ceased to be alone.
“How much longer?” asked a voice.
“Minutes.” replied the man.
A hot sigh rushed over the back of the man's neck.
“You'd think it wouldn't take so long...”
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.”
There was a moment of silence, broken only by the soft crunch of gravel to his side.
“Are you going to look?” the man asked.
“What?”
“Are you going to look... when it happens?” the man repeated.
Another moment of silence; a tepid breeze stirred ash behind them.
“No.”
The man turned to appraise the woman standing next to him. She was... well she wasn't beautiful, but she wasn't unpleasant to look at. She was the sort of woman who was quite unremarkable at first glance, but possessed a familiar look that slowly grew upon you. It was one of the things that caused him to realize he loved her.
All at once a wave of despair broke over him. Not from the impending annihilation, but from the crushing loneliness that would soon be his once more. Now he wept; great heaving sobs that he hastily attempted to hide from his wife. Warm, pillowy flesh enveloped his back as the woman embraced him. Despite his tears he couldn't stop a small smile from crossing his lips. That was another thing he loved about her, she was too clever to fall for such simple tricks. The woman said nothing, there was no need to. Her touch expressed the love her words couldn't.
They sat there, entwined in silent empathy for some time, until greater tremors snapped them from their rest.
“Finally.” the woman huffed.
The ground writhed in death throes, the winds clawed at them in a wild frenzy. Mountains on the horizon buckled and tumbled, trees falling like rotten leaves from their sides. The very sky heaved as clouds swirled around the growing crater. It was time.
The man stood, and the woman followed suit, moving in front of him with her back towards the ensuing chaos. For a moment the man considered watching it again, if only to remind him what was at stake; but in the end, all that mattered, here and now, was her.
He smiled at his wife, and to his surprise and delight, she returned it ten times over. He gazed at her, drinking in her loveliness, even as his hair began to stand on end. Gravity was already shifting, the first natural law to break under the strain of the end. But the woman ran her hands through his hair, her nails lightly scraping his scalp, soothing itches he didn't know he had. He reached around her voluminous waist in turn, smoothing the flaps that also waved free from gravity's death.
Another quake, less a tremor than a violent seizure, followed by the ear-rending noise of cracking crust. Trees bent towards the crater, rocks began to roll and converge to a single point in the distance. But the man didn't see, not this time; the woman's face was coming closer. Her smiling lips slipped into a half-closed pucker, her eyelids setting like twin twilights. As he closed his own eyes, the smell of dusty chocolate breath washed over his face.
They kissed. The kissed forever as time halted and space faded away. They kissed with tears of joy streaming down their faces as the world breathed its last. They kissed a bittersweet goodbye as it, larger than the horizon, more terrible and beautiful than the darkest night, crawled out of the depths of the earth; and, with an primeval scream, unfolded wings that eclipsed the dying sun.
There was light.
Then there was darkness.