Tungsten
Though the great trunks swayed and creaked not, trunks they were, and atop them branches, bare and unruffled by the breeze from the hardened oil, containing rotating, beating wings that had been retro-fitted to the sand smooth walls in this enclosed forest. Trunks that carried great loads as the canopy so thick as to be a smooth solid mass could be supported. The veins in them carried the grains and specks expected in white granite as it coursed through the black solid masses of the wide tree-frames.
The mulch that littered the floor was long cold and a sparse collection of detritus at that. It sat upon clay so hard that the worms that once populated it were visible only as cracks in that empty shell that had once sheltered them from the oppressive day, and seeking mouths.
Across this mesa-plateau ran rivulets, laid straight to compass point of tufted red grass, hemmed in tan folds, warn at the edges and parched of colour from not receiving the light of care. The verge gave ever way to the desolation surrounding it.
The vines inhabiting this dead woodland supported rigid but reflective hives that no insect escaped but that birthed forth the majority of both light and sound in this cavernous grove.
In the sheltered bows was variation, though geometric, and warn by age, dust and uncounted clouds of burnt leaf. In-fact the difference in colour as well as texture was so subtle as to sight it was hard to tell where the empty hills reached their peaks.
Refrain from this grim air was not leant by the limbs to trees that had been made to kneel for the pleasure of the seat of liars, necks craned to the altar, centred in the immense empty space.
I walked past every enslaved element to pay homage.
The one thing that was left alive under the tungsten glow graced that altar, and I had to remove it, had to remove me, I had to rescue it, I had to rescue me.
* * *
Cupping my hands beneath it, and taking soil too, I stole from the flowerpot that sat precariously perched on the gleaming counter-top amongst leaf after leaf of paperwork marked as confidential and out of date display feathers that were well past their best and marked by rings of spoil and mud. I stole the last life in this place and I took it with me.
Particles of earth spilled out my calloused fingers where gaps emerged between the hunger ravaged extremities, the crimson carpets welcoming the nature being warn into the pile that had longed for what it had been deprived of for so long.
I fled along the cardinal line that headed to the west, and the glow of a signal that promised escape from a non-present danger, and passing prayer boards adorned with warnings about harming brains already devoid of thought, and for generations without the ability to communicate, such signs were splashed messily across every dark stone pillar, and many other surfaces that had the gall not to be entirely obscured already.
I ran further and faster between the pews not in use at present but devoted to the ritual of waiting for an individual blessing from a service assistant themselves only a messenger of a god in some office far above.
Kicking aside service announcements and cigarette ends I passed out from under the strip lighting and towards the final gateway pillars that shrouded within the cliff that contained them a way out of this corrupt cathedral.
From under the tungsten I emerged back onto the rutting trail of the feral humans that was the congregation of the building I had just left in such a desperate hurry.
Spinning on my heal as though to the sonorous thundering of a bears roar, I took one final look at county hall and departed through the night, passing denizens and lairs, bankers and nightclubs. I was near my refuge. I headed, swiftly to the edge of the city, toward life.
