Phantom

Phantom 

Smoke wafts lazily up into the gloomy sky. Clouds block out all sun, but no rain will come. Not even the gods are willing to bless this desolate earth with the cleansing liquid, not after all this destruction. Not after all this death. The smallest shadow of a man blinks briefly upon the ruined walls of what could have been a house, but is far too destroyed to tell for sure. The man is walking slow, even slower than the lazy smoke. Calmly and gradually he passes through most of the debris, taking note of every piece of broken civilization that he passes. 

He does not have a name, if he does he surely cannot remember it at this time. He’s never seen his face, or his feet for that matter. All he sees is what lies before him in the ruins of a town. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember his past. Nothing except what is present remains in his head, that’s how it’s always been for this man, as long as he can remember that is. This man does not remember what it’s like to speak, he hasn’t ran into any humans to converse with, causing him to abandon the thought of speech altogether. 

He walks slow, taking in the ruins around him. Wondering what could have caused all of this destruction. The man struggles to keep his train of thought, trying as hard as he can to keep ahold of his memories, but alas they slip away once more. The man absentmindedly wonders what could have caused all of this ruin, and what the world might have looked like before the war. This stops the man in his tracks for a second as he soaks in the small memory he’s recovered. The war. He loses the struggle once more and begins to wonder what could have destroyed the areas around him until he reaches a great chasm in the ground, preventing him from moving forward. 

The man cannot see the bottom of the abyss, nor can he see the other side of his roadblock. Briefly the man wonders what kind of disaster could have created such a hole before turning his in tracks and walking in another direction. A broken window to the mans right throws the reflection of someone the man cannot recognize, the initials R.T embroidered on the mans breast. The man ignores the image and walks onward, vaguely wondering what could have broken the window as more smoke crawls upwards from a smoldering heap to his left. A sound reaches the mans ears, a small thunking sound coming from the ground in front of him. Slowly the man looks down at the beautiful stone before him, taking in all of its precious colors. Suddenly the man is no longer looking at the stone, he’s looking at a battlefield. 

War. A war like no other seen on this planet before. And over what? The man wonders. A small stone? To have a rock that looks pretty sitting on our shelves? The man watches the same human he saw in the window pacing around his office, his brow furrowed in frustration. Angrily the man begins to curse something called ‘The Dig’, yelling out all kinds of obscenities at something called the Omega. 

The man watches on to a scene of utmost destruction. Fire rains from the sky, mushroom like clouds erupt out of the ground in every direction. There is a screaming in the distance as the ground begins to shake. Buildings in the town begin to crumble, fire plumes from the earth in an angry protest, taking everyone and everything down into the earth below it. All that remains is a large chasm. 

The shell of a man is now back, standing in the ruined world he started out in. The stone he gazed upon flickers faintly and then turns black. Strangely the man can still remember everything he’s just seen, the declaration of war for the stone, the crumbling of the earth as the men dug dangerously deep into the stones, the horrific destruction of the world while bombs rained from the sky. For no reason at all, the man continues to stare at the stone, watching it intently as it begins to disintegrate before his very eyes, leaving a thin layer of black dust in its place. The mans stare intensifies as he watches the young sapling sprout from nothing, its small and frail body cringing briefly at contact with the bitter air. 

A small change takes place in the phantom, his memories flooding back to him in on painful breath as he looks upon a world that he created. The town he was born in, blown to smithereens. The man he hired to do his dirty work, lost in the depths below. The endless terror the world went through upon discovery of the stone, and, ultimately the erasing of human life. The man feels numb inside as he counts his sins, not even bothering to remember his own name, or what he looks like. With a small gesture, the man smiles at the thriving sapling, knowing that it will survive in this hard, dangerous world. 

The sapling continues its rapid growth as the man begins to walk away, its leaves billowing in a nonexistent wind in a wave of goodbye. Slowly the man behind the greed that overtook the world walks onward into the unknown, disappearing into the depths of uncertainty that he put so many innocent lives through as he lived.