The Son

Wrath incarnate, he slowly dragged his hornless Father by the hair across the Earth.

His name was Slaughter.

The land sizzled and smoked as he trod, his eyes calderas of dudgeon.

Animals fled as he approached and he would fling his cargo round and round if they tarried. His Father moaned. A broken King.

Cities toppled, people ran, vehicles burned as Slaughter passed. A walking wound. A whiff of extinction. Armies puffed.

He would stop to roar at his grumbling burden and bare his mouth of dagger fangs.

"Quiet or I will eat you!" he would bellow in his red face.

"I cannot undo what is done my Son," replied the limp figure.

Slaughter walked on across the world leaving a dark track of charred land behind him. Everything ended in his path: nothing left but the cinders of hate, the carbon of death.

"You betrayed me Father!" he screamed as they descended into the ocean, searing the saltwater into towering castles of steam where he stepped. 

The sky filled with billowing vapour. The water gassed leaving the ocean floor a writhing shroud of mouths opening and closing.

"It was my turn!" he yelled into the chasms.

On he went with his bumping load, flopping over rocks and coral as Slaughter looked downward to the depths.

He trudged into the deepest trench until the surface of the Earth was but a rumour of stone and he dug.

"We will both perish," he whispered as they spiraled down through the mantle, a molten tethys where souls burn.

But not the devil's or his son's.

Slaughter reached the core as night teetered over the world.

"God will miss us Father!"

The boy hurled the broken figure into the raging core of iron and followed.

It slowed for a split second as if confused. The devils stretched across its ferrous slopes and wove into the infinite. They were gone.

Hell fell.

Morning came, brighter, on what was left.