Board

Chaos swirled around the board. Now it just glowed. All around was darkness. Stifling, smelly, overpowering, darkness. Each shadow a different tint. Thousands of shadows. Prowling around the board, hungry. The two men were shadows of their former selves. Bones and skin. Hollow eyes, lit only by the glow of the board. The game had always been coming to a close but now it was ending. 

The air was rough, like sandpaper. Fires everywhere. Flooding torrents. Cackling electricity. Nothing was right with the world. This place most of all. It seemed the epicenter of all the tragedy. Not that it was born to it, but that it was drawn to it. The men played, their purpose naught but to draw out the sketches that would be played in the world. Their purpose naught but to make a model of what was going on across the world. They saw, they understood as did those who also saw, but they no longer held any sway. Their work was done. Now all that remained was to play.

The pieces were cracked, mostly nubs. Marble and stone dust lay on the side of the board, some on the board, making desserts of sand. But they knew. Those who saw knew. Which pieces were where. How the world would end. And end it shall. Nothing lasts forever. And man had started the destruction of his world with the burning of furnaces. When Hephestus brought down fires for man, he had unwittingly writ their destruction. All that their revolution, such big names for such terrible things, Industrial Revolution had done was to start the burning chimneys of their own end. The cycle revolves and the snakes of time shed their skin and shed themselves of all remnants of their past life. The cycle revolves and when the revolution ends, life begins anew. A thousand experiments, thousands of experiments, to find the perfect set of coincidences and conditions to create the final form. This was not it. They would die. They should die. This was not the worst either. But they deserved to end. For destroying the bounty that had been given to them by Gaia, for destroying the lush, for turning the green into black and brown, for using too much red. They had painted the canvas with too much red, and now the picture was nauseating.

The board trembled and vibrated as the games continued, naught left but to play till the end. End of time, end of the larger game they were meant to represent, till the end. The sky shivered. The ground shook. All around, the world was coming to an end, new shadows were being born everyday, even when there was nothing to breed from, no solids, no moving shapes, no shapes, the world was slowly being grinded down into one plain landscape. Yet the shadows kept coming. The Rajah no longer stood by the board. He was off, flitting from one place to another, watching over the place that would be entrusted to him. soon.