Storm Front

There's a storm coming. Clouds gather on the horizon, so grey as to be almost black, as lightning flashes just beyond sight, illuminating their bottoms with a fitful, cold blue-white light. Thunder rumbles just on the edge of hearing, softened by distance, while the gust front gathers in the heavy air, stirring it about as it builds itself, still but a ghost of the fury to come. The world itself grows strangely silent in a breathless anticipation, waiting for the inevitable, bracing itself.

Moments in time, each building on the one that came before, drawing energy from each other, feeding the tempest that growls and snarls, waiting to slip the leash. Louder now, the thunder rumbles like a freight train as Zeus hurls his bolts, a sound of profound emptiness and exquisite rage. Trees creak and groan in the growing wind, their shivering leaves rasping dryly one against the other in vain protest and denial of that which is almost here.

Go ahead and lie to me. Tell me you care, tell me I'll be missed, tell me whatever it is you need to say to make yourself feel better. Tell me I matter, and lie to the storm. Plead with that quiet moment before it breaks, offer a mistake, a momentary lapse of reason, but it doesn't care. Beyond truth or lies, it is a living thing existing only for itself, to give voice to what has remained voiceless for so long. The rage that it embodies, that gives it life is, in the end, the only truth that matters.

There's a storm coming, and it shall not be turned from its path, nor does it care if even the beautiful and the virtuous stand before it. A cleansing, a reckoning, the innocent and the guilty are equal before it.