The days of barbarous treachery

There, now you have seen the title of the current chapter which I have already put down to the tune of 1100 words in one sitting earlier this evening. I was literally excited, like the proverbial kid in a candy store, when this chapter rendered itself in my mind earlier today. I was drastic in my search for a voice recorder to jot down the words that came to my mind - it was racing and I was fearful it would be lost by the time my little pickup wound through Cornell road and toward my home.

But the title stood out as did two basic sentences. the first was actually not even a sentence just a concept incorporating the lack of a 'pied piper of peace' those four words stood to me as a way to not blame the death of Earth on a convenient anti-hero known throughout the religious world as the Anti-Christ. That is lazy and too easy. But I loved the words pied piper of peace, so I wanted to use them in this chapter.

The truth is that the chapter is somewhat inspired by the criticisms of other dystopian, post-apocalyptic works which seem to lack the requisite suffering that must exist when we are reduced to bands of wandering survivors with pre-historic mentality wrapped into our exponentially more capable minds. Songs? Shakespearean plays? Maybe we will crave those things after the world has been decimated by unimaginable death tolls, but somehow I doubt our lives will center around such trivial remembrances of a past which can never be brought back. We will be in survival mode for quite some time, and that does not include the soothing sounds of Rachmaninov.

So I wanted to create a different story of what happened and that requires some barbarians and treachery - hence the title of the chapter. And along with that title and those ideas, comes my own brand of story-telling. Here is the first paragraph of the chapter. A side not, there is an earlier chapter titled "The days of being prepared" which is referenced once again with the first sentence of this chapter:

Father had indeed prepared me for an end time which he felt was surely on the horizon. His wisdom was a half-life of truth as there were no anti-God figures sporting themselves through the world as some false pied-piper of peace promising hope while bringing the world to its knees in a vainly desperate attempt to reconcile His own version of Good over the God of a book which had launched a million deaths or more through the atrocity of war. It would have been quite sufficient to tell the story of a worldwide flu pandemic, or seven magical plagues and natural disasters that systematically destroyed a globe full of sin as Father had told me would occur. That would be too easy and too concise a story to describe the death of over ten billion people across the world and would seem more a fairy tale than a truth.

It bears mentioning that as a person, I am indeed a Christian. Now, no one will confuse me with Tim Tebow, but my Faith is not to be denied. However, in this piece, I felt that the concepts of Christian tribulation is well documented and has been told by so many people that I wanted THIS story to be its own thing and not some rehashing of a story which could indeed be just that fairy tale.

I extrapolated a bit and changed the world population to ten billion. truthfully speaking, I find it rather trite to use something like a flu pandemic to kill billions upon billions of people. I find the concept of zombie apocalypse to be children's fodder more so than strong fiction. The end of the planet will either be a very simple natural disaster, like an asteroid, or it will come from a series of interconnected events, yet not be a singular pandemic.

I went on with this paragraph:

There were no wide-spread pandemics, there were no easy excuses for the demise of a once vibrant species which had allowed itself to separate their existence through prideful stupidity. There are millions of citypods which suffered a fate not dissimilar in its outcome, yet no two the same in their derivative development. There was indeed a tribulation. , it just did not transpire as Father had imagined rather becoming a million tribulations in a million cities, each slightly unique in its own right. It is difficult to come to a summation for each and every city that fell prey to death from within, I can only testify to that existence which I watched evaporate before my eyes sucking the shallow heart from my chest as a million tears began to fill a fallen District of Pearl Citypod within the larger Portland Regional Pod within the state of Oregon a ratified member of the United States of Carthania for some nearly one-hundred-seventy-five years hence.

I wanted to mention the word tribulation to point out that no matter how the end of the world occurs, there will be some form of tribulation along the way. It may not be plagues and earthquakes, or wars and rumors of wars. There may not be the same predictable patterns across nations and continents; but there will be some form of tribulation. In this world, however, that tribulation will be followed without reward or hope. The end is just that - the end.

So, that was my excitement today. Wars and rumors of wars indeed create the setting for the end, and in that there is hope that can be found.