The Burning Man

2

The Libertarian stood on the fifteenth floor of an office building just north of Euston Square and watched the black smoke rise up from the West End, fingers of crimson and gold licking the crumbling masonry. The vast shadow of the Riot-Beast moved across the face of the city towards the east.

Enough had been done to set the mice scurrying; the End was already in motion.

Behind him, every square inch of the room seethed with spiders. Everything was right with the world, finally, and that could not be allowed to change. There was order and cohesion and singularity of purpose. The debilitating terror of meaning and hope and yearning could not be allowed to spread, for that only caused chaos and uncertainty. He could not begin to comprehend the motivations of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. They were terrorists, trying to overthrow a system that worked, that made people happy. How could they justify the suffering they were inflicting on their own kind?

He vaguely remembered the time before he had been plucked out of the vast superstructure of reality to become an overseer of stability. Adrift from the ordered procession of events, it was often difficult to place memories in any consistent pattern that made sense, but he had a clear recall of emotions. Some images came back to him, of a kiss in the light of the setting sun, of a slow drive into the countryside with music playing, of his father pointing out his present next to the tree. He remembered the face of the girl who broke his heart, and his first dead body. In those days, when he was lesser, his existence had been shrouded with doubt, unease, depression. Now there was none of that, and he felt the better for it, as anyone would.

‘This place,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘is characterised by two things: lights and the shadows they cast. Once the former is extinguished, there can be no darkness, no misery, no suffering, and so the work I do is right. I shall not rest until the last candle is snuffed out.’

Behind him a shiver ran through the corpus of spiders.