1 Methane
In a land far away from reality. In a time thousands of years before the modern age. In a world of magic and harmony. A man stood at the epics of hell. His lover in his arms. Blood seeping from a gaping wound.
He was the strongest. The greatest. The best.
His eyes silver. Glowing pearl. Shining brighter than the sun.
---
Skyscrapers floating upside down. Bodies dancing in the air. Blood falling like rain, spinning in circles, around and around. All filling to one source, the center of the catastrophe.
Corpses lay like dry kelp. One atop the other suspended mysteriously in the sky, the dark dark sky.
He stood alone watching the empty vast expanse. He stood watching from the cliffside, the white fog bouncing off the neverending black cave.
He reached for his head, an empty socket where his right eye once sat.
He pulled out an ancient knife, inscribed in ancient text, glowing of ancient words. He tossed it. Bouncing, falling, scraping, breaking. It fell to the bottomless pit below.
A floating man in red clapped.
The skyscrapers crumbled. The dried bodies fell along with it. The bottomless void slowly filled. One atop the other. Blood like cement, cement like stone, stone like brick.
Bodies, rubble. The silence drew long. The cave became dark and moody as the blood rose from the cracks and holes. A single source emanated from a single man. The floating man. He floated in the sky. His body upside down. Arms out stretched. Legs straight as an arrow.
Cross.
He was covered in blood. Long red drapes flowing into the endless nothingness, with long white hair flowing above it, and two golden eyes.
Two golden eyes
"Axel!" (Gabriel)
Two golden eyes.
He slowly floated to the rumble below. A graceful landing. He stepped forward, his gargantuan white scythe reaching into the void behind him. He rose it to the sky. It touched the endless above, the long pole swaying back and forth.
He swung.
Stop.
The one-eyed man stood staring at this figure in red. His right eye bleeding. His face frozen still. His silver eye exploding with power. Holding the scythe in place. He stepped forward from the cliff. He stepped onto the rubble. He pointed at the golden-eyed man.
A gust of wind blowing the red drapes to the sky. A velvet carpet, a blood-soaked wall filling the invisible.
He stepped up to the golden-eyed man. The man in red. Face to face. An inch apart.
He opened left eye. Silver.
The golden-eyed man opened his eyes. Golden.
"You have run out of time my lost friend. Your eye of death will not see again." (Gabriel)
Life started flat, an empty vacant lot of a forbidden world.
"To find her, kill the four remaining souls. The four horsemen across the world. Do so and you will receive what you have lost." (Gabriel)
Thousands of years later.
"Farewell, for now, the clock will be ticking." (Gabriel)
Gabriel disappeared with the crashing rain of blood. The silhouetted one-eyed man stood alone, the red covering him, his face in black shadow. He clutched his empty socket, the stinging ring, the fearless pain. He collapsed to the rumble below.
---
A year later he lays in a cold dry bed, under the warm roof of an unknown home. He looks with his only eye. His left eye.
The cold bed sticky to his touch, the warm room stuck to his deathly stare. He throws the covers across the floor, his naked body bare to the air. He rushes to the door, slamming, hitting, it doesn't budge.
He falls back, staring at the ceiling.
The room was silent. Four walls with no windows. A stuffy fireplace raging with steam and ash. A door strong and tough, built to hold.
He laid silent, his eye still stinging, ringing, painful bliss.
He fell asleep.
---
"Is he alright?" (Unknown Girl)
"Hold him up, quickly! Get him on the bed!" (Unknown Boy)
"He's heavy how did you get him here in the first place?" (Unknown Girl)
"I used my Dad's cart. I found him stranded in the ruins out in the woods. It was no pressure though, I'm strong like that." (Unknown Boy)
"Sure you are…" (Unknown Girl)
The one-eyed man opened his silver eye. He looked around the room. He turned to the two people next to him, the boy and the girl.
The boy wore tough rugged ripped clothes covered in dirt stains and patches.
The girl wore a bright luscious dress, unfamiliar to the ugly setting around her.
"Hello, can you speak?" (Unknown Girl)
The one-eyed man grunted and sat up, his black hair a mess against his chiseled face. He immediately gripped his missing eye hole. He looked around the room. The two staring at him.
He screeched at the top of his voice falling back in pain.
"Ah oh shit! Mel what do we do? You're a healer, right? Heal him!" (Unknown Boy)
"It's his eye. It's missing. I can't fix that!" (Mel)
Mel looked around the room in a fitted hurry before dashing out the front door and into the abandoned wilderness.
The one-eyed man kept slamming back and forth, the bed turning, breaking, shaking.
"Sheesh, dude chill out man! Calm down! It's only-" (Unknown Boy)
The man suddenly stopped. His movement ceasing from reality. His hand lifeless and limp to the cushion below. The boy sat still, his face bewildered by what just happened.
"Oh shit! Mel get back quick! I think he's dead!" (Unknown Boy)
Mel rushed back into the room with herbs and other ingredients used for healing. She stopped at the bed, tossing the ingredients onto the wrinkled blankets. She leaned in, looking closer at the one-eyed man, at his silver eye, at the missing eye.
"It's a curse." (Mel)
As Mel spoke the silver eye glistened in the dry blood surrounding it. The man's face stiff as a rock, a white light shining bright. Brighter and brighter and brighter.
Blank eye piercing the heavens. An eye so strange and so unusual that nothing could withstand it. Mel had never seen anything like this before. An eye glowing bright in a warm lit room. It twitched, falling about, looking in all directions, glowing brighter and brighter and brighter until.
"Harry go get the cart quick. We're taking him to Albatra." (Mel)
"Really? Why?" (Harry)
"Just go get the cart already, idiot!" (Mel)
Harry lunged out the door. The brightness turning to epic scale.
Mel in a last-ditch effort flung her two hands in either direction. Retaliating in her own ritual of sorts, screaming words of an unknown language in an unknown way.
The cabin spun in two bright colors. White upon red, red upon white. They mixed into an array of pink and purple. Harry stood staring in awe, the shine dancing to the stars above. He stood motionless, unable to move, unable to speak.
