The Great Day of His Wrath
This vignette was written in response to ’s September prompt to “Write an Afterlife!” Though the aspect of utopic paradise was lost once pen hit paper, at least from a certain point of view.
The painting above is part of a triptych that includes The Plains of Heaven, an idyllic landscape of clear blue lakes, mountains, and verdant rolling hills. More appropriate for utopic paradise but it always struck me as a little too wishful. Heaven, to me, is most likely going to be beyond any human understanding and all the ideas we tell ourselves are just to fill in the blank as it were. Perhaps that is heresy. Anyway, on to my afterlife myth. Enjoy?
From thence it came. The great sundering of the earth and the splitting of the sky. We shuddered in our hovels, the Last Men of Our Age, of all Ages, and felt naught but terror. Clouds boiled above us and the seas drained away beneath us. Barren were the plains of our land. Poxed were the branches of our fruit trees. I shuddered. His terrible power forbade me to avert my gaze as the sun grew and turned blood red and grew some more before turning foul and black as night. The mountains fell. Hewn apart and sent careening into the once verdant valley below. This was the end. This was the beginning.
For all things come and go and must come again. That which is divided must unite, that which is united must divide, that which lives dies and that which dies will live again. And so it came to be. For whatever is written of those times is falsehood made of ill-formed memory and wishful thinking unguided by prayer. For through prayer will you know it and from prayer will you feel peace knowing it. That great and terrible truth that all things will perish and all things will cease only to be reborn, for better and for worse. For upon the Great Wheel all is known and woven, all that is new is made from the old and all that is old frays apart to become threads for the new.
The Last Men of Our Age know naught of prayer or peace for such things are forgotten by them, as it was by their fathers before them, and their fathers before them. We wretched of the earth will come to know the end and the beginning and the tenebrous land betwixt the two. The unimaginable chaos of an old world dying and the order of a new world being born. For that is our curse, our burden, our responsibility, and duty. We Last Men cannot become First Men, those who craft the new world from the ashes of the old, just as spring follows winter.
The world will return to ash. The seas evaporate. The stars vanish. The lands barren. Day and Night will merge and naught will be suffered to live, save Us. For a time. And as we, with our hollow chests, rot and become ash as well, the First Men, the New Men, will come, those who remember the past of their forefathers and imagine the future of their children. Guided by reverent prayer and knightly faith that does not waiver. Does not shirk against the darkness.
How many aeons will We, the Last Men, wander the ashen dark I know not. I know only that we must for this is our afterlife, our curse, our judgement. For here we walk and tell the same story to ourselves whether waking or sleeping, though there is no difference in the two. Our dreams are ash, our world is ash, for we died long ago and no nothing but this one tale and the long wandering of the barren earth. An earth without joy or sorrow, faith or scepticism, rage or peace, for it simply is.
The long and terrible aeons that spread before Us are destined to end and we will crumble into thread to be spun anew. And so it will come to pass that the day will be separated from the night and the First Men will rise from the ash, a burning heart within their chests, to craft the New World. And the Great Wheel will turn another notch.
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This painting had a profound impact on me and the scripture its from, i want to say revelation 6, is harrowing to the bone! Had to comment up front, but im reading now!
I've often thought about the Afterlife and the End Times. Though we hear talks about 'we live in the End Times' (at least I do), I don't think we really understand how it must feel to be the last people to live before the universe is absolutely destroyed.