City of Soul

Nasha loved letting her little legs go. Hearing her feet slapping the streets. Leaping over carts and cobbles and barrels and weaving between merchants and their horses and their aurochs and darting through streets and past houses and amid market stalls. Not a feeling in the whole of Amar like speeding around its bustling streets. Her cheeks were stretched wide from the glee of it, whipped by strands of messy hair from her fringe.

Ilanum was fast, but Nasha was the fastest person she knew, and he was getting slower the older he grew - he hadn't caught her for three days of play, which was her new record, but in a way it made her sad. She'd seen a Medicine Man and an Herbmage visiting his family's manor. Her mothers had warned her not to get too close to him. Something was wrong, something bad, but there was just as little she could do about it... at least their game of chase got him out of the house.

Lost in her thoughts, but still running as ever she was, Nasha was suddenly thrown back; crashing into a thick, firm, still leg. She fell, knocking the back of her skull on a particularly jagged edge of cobblestone, letting out a pained screech, one hand clutched tight to her chest, to her talisman - the talisman her father used to wear, on a chain he gave her, before he went missing. They said he was in there still and Nasha had never let him get scratched.

She blinked, creaking her eyes open, outright furious at the nerve of folk to not see her coming. With a waving arm, she gazed up, up at the profile of the worried face of the woman clenching her hands, who was gazing up, up at the sky.

Nasha followed the woman's line of sight and saw it. The asteroid. The Doom of Amacarth, descending in an infernal cascade, slowly swallowing the calm azure sea of the pale sky, incinerating all trace of fluffy cloud in its wake. Now, Ilanum had a huge statue-adorned house; it was nothing beside the enormity of the great Pyramid of Talbyth Terzi'lur Byldai, itself a comparative speck compared with the reaching Tower of Argent Glasses. But this chunk of black-and-silver rock, peacefully floating downward with the majesty of ten thousand suns and just as much heat, engrossing all the world, from horizon to horizon, seem no larger than Nasha's hand.

'What...' Ilanum had arrived, panting like a dog, squinting up at the shadow-falling sky, beside Nasha and the growing crowd of awed Amari citizens. His jaw fell. 'What the--'

A huge shard of shimmering stone crashed into the nearby barracks. In an instant, stone and wood and splinters of buildings and streaks of seared flesh were launched into the air, the adjacent stables ablaze; fireballs of half-melted barrack set alight the flesh and colourful silken cloths of those unlucky enough to stand where they had. Nasha saw a man as old as her father had been, crushed under an inflamed, aurochs-sized boulder, screaming desperately.

Suddenly, the world was not beautiful. The pungent aroma of cooking flesh of beast and man and stone stained the air in a miasma of abhorrence. People began vomiting in the street. But nothing prepared Nasha for the sheer intensity of fright that came with mass panic.

An orchestra of terror, played in all notes on all instruments, filled the semi-silence, drowning out the calming aria of the burning heavens above. It was swiftly followed by an extended section of anarchy - skin against stone, sandal against skin, skin against skin, stone against stone, and the world was swept up in a human wildfire.

Ilanum was tugging at Nasha, trying to get her up, at least so that they might get out of the path of the juggernaut of chaos, but she would not budge. She could not. That thing - the asteroid - the bane of all hopes, was coming, and it did not matter what--

Ilanum's tug became a lurching drag, lifting Nasha, before sudden nothing. He vanished into the sea of faces, into the noise of dying, only the faintest trace of something he might have said lingering. She wasn't sure if she imagined it, but it did not matter, he was--

A thunderclap shattering interrupted the symphony of fear. Nasha darted to its source: the distant silhouette of the Tower of Argent Glasses had collided with something, possibly already with the burning sky, or an offshoot meteorite, she could not tell. It did not matter. The Tower fractured instantly, throwing deadly sharp crystalline blades out in all directions, some bigger than the biggest houses, big enough, Nasha realised, to kill houses full of families, and worse, as some shards were melting in the air, showering vitreous, molten rain. She watched, dumb, numb, as the mists of death rose from burning places, as the sky fell like night, but far the bleaker, highlighting roaring fires spreading out as far as she could see.

The air was dense, smoky, hard to breathe. People knocked past in all directions, shoving, pushing, bustling like the market was host to the most desirable product ever, being sold in random directions. All Nasha could do was wish.

Father... She held the talisman in her hand, wishing she could see his face. Or even the faces of her mothers. But no face came. Closing her eyes only emphasised the throbbing between her brain and her skull. Her father was not there. Yet, she held that talisman as if it would save her. Little wet tears rolled down her hands, into her sobbing mouth, mixing with rivers of phlegm down from her nose. Nasha collapsed to her knees, a mound of flesh just the same as those burning and crushed. There were no stars. There was no sky. There was only that object--

A knee thumped into her face, her skull again hitting the embrace of stone. Gripping tight onto the talisman, the little girl felt another impact, this on her cranium, a boot perhaps, she did not know, her eyes squeezed shut as they could be. The underside of a stride crushed her weeping cheek, blood mixed with tears mixed with the green brine of mucus. Then an explosion echoed from somewhere, and by method of man's oversight, or by way of the unyielding power of nature's most peerless destructive force, suddenly everything was silent. Nasha felt a little warm before she felt a lot cold.