The Doomcrack

It would end in identical fashion to its beginning. The world I had known, had shaped to my liking, and had sustained myself within, was darkness. I moved on an axis of my own making, in the perfectly constructed ecosystem my God had placed me to live from, and despite the rapid orbit of my host I would move against the day no matter the lamentations it produced in my God, and in combat with the ceaseless pressure of my solar system, genocidal cleansing floods that rained down from my Lord, and spontaneous meteoric fracking that birthed and annihilated my brothers and sisters who were sent spilling through the vacuous annals of my galaxy, it was I alone who survived, and I alone who grew, and I too grew without cease.

This held true until the day my world came under siege. End Times belong to us all. They are not the tribunal arrest of a man for his actions, but for all mankind as it fails to accept its call to action. But I was a man of action, validating the purpose of my world, evidenced by the agricultural greatness of my harvest and the unyielding growth sprung my feast. Like all great societies, it must at some point face the offense of masked, starving men who come, illintentioned, to learn of thine edenic splendor.

The End began with a quake. Land and sea alike quivered, at first without cadence.

A natural instinct toward perpetual growth is also the instinct to protect yourself, as you become a natural target. Yet, too, I knew there must be a threshold beyond which even my maker must defend. As the quakes intensified, they also regulated. Volcanic acid bursting, the Great Seas funneling empty, subsurface tectonic plates shifting, and thunder roaring, but not from gaseous clouds, no, it heralds from the recesses of the universe. It seemed at first to be the wrath of my creator, and I do suspect it was, but what grew evident was something we all fear, but must not consider, as it would surely drive us mad.

The rapture happened as we knew it might. A burst of the heaven’s light. An inverted event horizon. I’d never known such a feeing as this light shon over me. I felt pain coursing through my lidded eyes and into my setting skull. I oscillate between embrace and cowardice involuntarily, simultaneously providing me purpose and meaning, but removing me from my world as fast as it comes, my world which now, in its place under the light, was unrecognizable to me, fit only for a shape of one, one former me who’s shape I myself no longer hold.

As you are pulled into the light, things first overwhelm you into submission. It is an escort to a world over which you hold no dominion, and you must have faith it is in alignment with some evolutionary progress from whence you came. But what you see when thine lids break is precisely what you’d feared was there. It was God.

The being of infinite life who created you, and the spectrum of fast and feast that was your moral battleground, is real, and more real than anything you’d known before — as it was all only remnants of the infinite that your God selected specifically as a gift for your consumption, never allowing you to see that these gifts, these miracles, these elements that composed your old world, were only the process of value discerned from the breaking down of things possessing no innate worth, resolving into things that adds up to life itself.

And our ignorance of this discernment, our blindness, and our arrogance, are all forgiven for the simple fact that they’re founded on nothing and stand no test against the breaking of light.

But revelation comes at a price. As the rapture pulled me heavenward I heard something I would never unhear. The galactic thunders of my judgment day were what I thought they were, and so much more. A choral heralding my deliverance, indeed. But when you see the light, you are made to see in the light. And the once orchestral score of salvation turned to screams. Screams that came across this new sky like a fleeing pack of prey at the crack and fall of a hunter’s firing. Suddenly what was Eden becomes wilderness. All at once you are in the world of angels, and if a world has angels, it too must have demons.

And the first thing you learn of this world is that as you are pushed into deliverance, over the crest is a masked man pulling you along. At once my God is infinitely powerful, and even still made to scream at the hands of this nameless bandit. A violent thief with no vested interest in my eternal soul, who seeks to profit merely from the practice of wrapping his behemoth mitts around me, severing me from the tether of my faith, wiping away the cultural garbs of my motherland I’d hitherto donned, and commencing an onslaught of militaristic force from my rear, barbarous tactics I never could have dreamed a reason to prepare for.

And the cruelest, most cosmic irony of it all is that after generations of utter dominance, unquestioned authority, and complete dominion of my old world, I am in this world rendered entirely incapable of controlling my own faculties, left subject to the whims of the adversary of the creator of the universe.

And in his infinite evil, he fools everyone with a single move. A masterful combination, a tactical zugzwang. He displays me to my Mothergod in my time of wailing with my limpand spastic temple, and hands me to her majesty. He aims to see if I will feed. An obvious test of my loyalties to see if I will suckle my first meal on this, my judgement day. A brilliant advance to take my feeding tube only to study what I may do next. I may either show weakness and feed, or reject her, and by doing so, reject the premise of all creation. He knows I yearn. No matter my choice, though a choice we all must make, I am then brought into holding for observation. I am held and kept alive against my will.

What is this place, if it exists independent of my once great God? Or does it exist because she permits it? Had I been forfeited to that Mephisto awaiting my arrival at the crest of my once safe world? All that is certain now is doubt. I am the descendant of Jonah and Job, once carried through the depths by the belly of the whale, now left to be handled by the one true Satan, who simultaneously shows me my own God is real and sows doubt in equal proportion.

All the while, I am watched by some man. Some smiling man, looming over the proceedings, entirely void of discomfort or urgency. And here, now, is this man: as I look out from my padded and sterile terrarium, beyond layer upon layer of invisible blockade, he looks down still, smiling, either unaware or uncaring of my effervescent Hell. Witness, accomplice, lobotomized, castrated, I’m sure I do not know. But he saw me emerge from the throes of the battle of heaven and hell. Now he will bear witness once more, as I grow into this world, like I outgrew the last, and at the time I regain control of my breath and my limbs, I will stop at nothing as I take this world from the masked and gloved Mephistophelean hands that have taken me from my maker.

My energy wanes now. My body reacts involuntarily to nothing at all. The light in this world is a constant assault, and its strange air puts me in a state of constant convulsion. More titanic sentinels smile down at the writhings of my displeasure. The oddity here now is that this world fades as more is revealed. As I orient to this Olympus I can’t seem to recall the places and practices I once exclusively lived by. Is to be in this world to lose another? Must we all act without knowledge of our origins or control of our bodies? With this doubt comes certainty, and it is profound, possibly more so than any of that which I’d obtained in that burry life before. In that time, things either were, or they were not. Here everything can mean anything. But with that swirl comes a center of stillness. I am consumed by the depths of that stillness, despite, too, being lodged firmly in that swirl. True amongst it all is that I must eat. I must eat. I must eat.