The Plume

 Holding hands, the brother and sister, within the darkening Priory grounds, they first sensed the plume as they were dressing.

It arrived softly, it's ashen fingers spidering their still naked parts, caressing like a tender shroud, a mellifluous veil.

But then it hardened, the smoke gripped their limbs and widening welts forced open their skin, large angry pustules oozing thick red and black matter.

They both screamed but the dense woodland on the estate's edge was too remote for anyone else to hear, their illicit tryst secret from all but they.

Their time was up. No homilies. Just nothing.

Only the evil made it through the morning, immune to the toxic nimbus of the plume.

They shambled and ran towards it's source in the far plains beyond the hills, chattering like hyenas in the grass.

Thousands, millions, the wicked ones wandered across the spurs until at last the plains came clear before them, a limitless flatland of decaying flora, the cacti weeping blood as they withered.

Here the plume was gargantuan.

An endless tower of necrosis besieging the sky and defiling the sun, who's sacred beams faltered as would cherubs in Hell.

The terrible assembly gathered and looked on.

They fell to their knees and bowed without stopping, their necks fracturing in the mad devotion for thier god.

Before them lay a corpse.

A carcass.

A body of such enormity on its side, as if a range of hills erupted from the earth, their dark crimson bluffs of steaming putrescence decaying before their eyes.

The scarlet giant was rotting. 

It's dereliction the plume of past malignancies burgeoning in the heavens above the massed sinners.

They too began to decompose, laughing as they readied for entry into Hades, the homeland of the twisted and the blood-soaked dream they'd longed for all their baleful lives.

For here was their deity reducing and rendered.

It's plume had brought them. 

Surely this was their passage, the glorious transit of the damned and villainous.

But it was not.

For Death itself had intervened. No End of Days, no darkest rapture.

The Earth was dying and so it's idols.

This was the last orbit, the globe full ceasing. 

This was it's final afternoon.

It's requiem. It's pall.

And thus, beneath the poisoned squall, before the giggling hordes lay prone the well-spring of lies, the killing joke, the Lord of Flies.

His left eye open,

Here was the Beast.

The Fallen One.

Here was Lucifer.

And like everyone else, he was dead.