Sheets of ash cascaded over her black-bouldered walls, her once lush, green slopes and inviting crater-wellspring a maelstrom of magma and blazing buckets of peat.

From above the mountain only an impenetrable ceiling of inky smoke could be seen, through which rocks hurtled and glowed white hot like noontime sun on island beaches.

Beneath the ceiling and across the valley, families swarmed, faces covered in hot soot, fleeing the frothing peak and stumbling through the fast-cooling subterranean foam.

Within the city library, the records burned, melted, demagnetized, and fell into disarray as if the archivist's nightmares were lingering and falling in perfect time with the hard, black rain.

Children and mothers froze mid-step, now creatures of ash, looking out to the city walls with a statue's vigil and on their faces the reverberation of screams.

The city had fallen silent, its ears and mouth fully plugged with the cries, explosions, and rumblings of a Hadean thunderstorm, a splattering of Osirian paint.

As the dust began to settle, an unfamiliar sun, a now cold blue star, light oozing slowly through the remaining shroud, illuminated the backs, the scalps, and the upward reaching arms of a flat, mile-wide and frozen amalgam of voiceless, gray end.

A buzzard, having just alighted on the wastes, pecked.