City Crimes

The thunder strikes the pillar. Light blinds my eyes and I look away. The wind whips around me as I hang there in the chilly air, my tired arms finally slipping from the black tungsten surface. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the prophecy didn’t mean anything after all. 

(credit: Unsplash)

* * *

The pillar is always guarded by the top samurai. I remember asking my father why they would just stand there when there was nothing to do. He would respond, Karusho, it’s not that they are doing nothing, but that they make sure nothing will ever touch that pillar. 

There are a few other things of the city that are also guarded, but not with actual people. 

They are guarded with trust. And fear. 

Never touch the Prophecy Scroll. That was our first lesson as samurai in training. Nobody ever said it brought bad luck, but that’s why I know it hasn’t been touched for the past 100 years. 

That is, until I touched it. 

I remember the shadows that hung about the room and the darkness steeped in the corners, threatening to give rise to a sudden human shape. Bamboo screens sheltered the space. The scroll glowed faintly in its place hovering on a stand at the other end of the room where I stood. I didn’t know why I was there. I didn’t know why my feet walked up to the scroll. I stood there. My heart was beating in the silence. I knew it was of my own will when my hands reached for the scroll and touched its crumbled yellowed paper. It was my own fingers that trembling unraveled the scroll and whose eyes feverishly seized upon its design. 

They found it after the last end time. They say that each person who read it died the next day. 

A strip of red in an archway swept across the scroll. And then there were little arches underneath that, in subsequent colors. Orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. 

The colors are still imprinted in my mind now, as I crouch with the other samurai ready to fight. We’ve been waiting for hours and will wait for hours more, until there is no more waiting. 

I was puzzled about the image for days after. The only thing that I could connect it to is the puzzle we all think about: the end times. 

God had destroyed the world twenty-times over. He had been destroying the world every 100 years, for almost 3 millennia, to be precise. We knew because of the documents and the diaries that were left behind amid a disordered earth, the often fragmented buildings. 

Every 100 years, this god destroys the world differently. 

The first year, the climate grew too hot. People baked to their deaths. 

The second year, the entire population just vanished, like ghosts. 

There were never any bodies. 

Each destruction became more and more predictable. The god fed off our worst fears. 

We had all predicted the curse of the century. There was only one lifeline of the city, and that was the pillar - it gave us energy out of its inexhaustible source. 

It was the greatest innovation of mankind yet it was also our downfall. 

We knew where the god would attack next; courageously, but futilely, we prepared again to fight. 

I shift in my armor and readjust my sword, my katana. I am not tired. I have waited many nights like this in the cold and the dark with my heart beating from always running, sweat slowly seeping out of my armor. 

It is almost blackout and I know I must take my chance. If I must die, I will die watching the great powers of a god at his fullest of wrath. I jump into the dark unknown spaces where I do not see the shining silver of the samurai armor. I know the city by heart, and my destiny is the Samurai Tower. I have passed by it many times in the daytime. 

My armor clinks along deserted cobbled streets. I can imagine the people inside, huddled around a fire, chanting their last words. Maybe this time, a prayer will affect the god. But my eyes are fixed on the tower. The tower is black, pinpointing the clouds, its tungsten yelling against the white and pale blue city’s structures. 

The world goes black. 

I miscounted. My heart beating, I blindly feel my way in the direction of the tower, its darkness flashing in my mind against the pristine white city. We’d had blackouts for 3 nights in a row, around “magic hour” - the time when the god always struck. We had a blackout so people wouldn’t have to watch their loved ones die. 

When it happened. 

No time to think about how stupid the blackout is now. The thought suddenly strikes me when I realize that it could be a vanishing year. I imagine forms of people fading, becoming one with the darkness. In that case, there’d be nothing to watch - not with the blackout. Yes, I was stupid. 

Nothing happens and I continue stumbling along in the dark before I nearly crash into a wall. Brief contact with it and its smoothness and then I instantly know it is tungsten - Samurai Tower. 

But something isn’t right. 

There aren’t guards surrounding it. 

It is the first time I have ever touched the surface. Here I am patting the tungsten tower.

Where are the people? I wonder. Then I know.  

Yes, it is a vanishing year! Heart beating, I wait. 

But I am still solid. 

Heart pounding ever more quickly, I slide my hand on the tungsten surface. No guards. 

I find a gaping hole, an open space, a…doorway? 

Half expecting a blade to come crashing down on my outstretched arms, I push through the doorway, stumbling on stairs. 

The god will strike any minute now. 

Gripping a railway, I begin to run up the steps, feet pounding in the silence and the dark. 

I keep expecting the yells of samurai any minute, but the only sound is my feet pounding onto the steps. 

My lungs begin to gasp for air, my legs are failing, and faintly I hang onto the rail but do not stop. 

And suddenly I am greeted by a crisp coldness that envelops me. Chilly mountain air. 

They hid it in the clouds as an offering to the gods, my father had explained. It’s our energy, our life blood.

My sister whispered to me, they say it’s as cold as the Antarctic!

All of this was true. But what they hadn’t told me was that the rails. 

There are none. 

I fumble in the dark, reaching out, and as I turn around, my legs trip behind me, sliding behind into air. My upper body falls and slams against the smooth tungsten floor. Slipping backwards, I claw at the smooth surface. And I am balancing against a sharp edge, my legs scrunched up under me and arms gripping the smooth surface. I know it is impossible to get up; my armor is too heavy. 

There are sparks flashing in my vision. The lights grow until they streak. 

I realize it is not my vision but flashes of lightning. Slivers of light briefly ignite the city. 

It’s the end of the world. 

For the first time, amid the crackles of light, I see the pillar. It stands in the middle of the circle of the tower, a similar cylinder shape, in which something glints like diamond. 

My gripping forearms begin to sweat. The armor metal against the tungsten metal does not offer a good grip. 

The image of the scroll flashes in my mind. 

A rainbow, my sister is saying, inside my head, the story she had told me long ago. God made a rainbow in the sky. It was a promise that He’d never destroy the earth and all of its inhabitants again. 

I remember the archways of all kinds of colors. 

I remember thinking about what the puzzle could have meant. 

A rainbow? 

So…we’re not going to die? 

I feel hope. 

My arms jerk an inch back and I strain to keep grip. Lightning flashes when I briefly glance down below at the miniature of the city. The earth will swallow me whole. 

Too late, Karusho. 

I scrunch my face groaning. 

Lightning falls like rain, except the rain is loud. White thunder pounds its feet into the earth. 

I am staring at this city for the last time. 

Lightning and the thunder dance across the city, coming closer and closer to the tower. 

The thunder strikes the pillar. Light blinds my eyes and I look away. The wind whips around me as I hang there in the chilly air, my tired arms finally slipping from the black tungsten surface. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the prophecy didn’t mean anything after all.