Tree of Life Book III

Part II - Chapter 11

TREE OF LIFE BOOK III – PART II

CHAPTER 11

We never got to the camp.

By the time we reached the main doors, the house had shaken around us two more times.

We cleared the doorway. We sped through it as if chased.

We didn't stop running until we were fifty yards out past it, and then we swung back around to take it all in.

The governor's building, all three stories of it, was now rumbling non-stop. It began to lose height, tilt off to one side. It folded in upon itself and collapsed.

Leveling to the ground with a mighty boom, it jet out to all sides billowing dust and debris. The stuff churned out and splattered onto us, covering us in a blanket of dirt, an inch thick.

We coughed and waved the plumes from our faces. We stumbled out further into the square.

But the rumbling had only begun.

It was a full-scale earthquake over the entire region.

On every side, beyond the granite slab that was the square itself, the landscape was changing in fast motion. Trees fell left and right. The rocky terrain was no more. Waves of loose earth and mud from higher up on the mountain came rolling in around us, erasing the settlement, wiping out all traces of it. Within minutes, the army camp that I had marched through to get here had been reduced to nothing but rubble and rocky debris.

For a moment, I was shocked at our good fortune, that the courtyard below us had remained in one piece, until I glanced over and caught the bluish glow by Annie's feet and it came to me what she had been doing all this time.

Annie saw me looking. She nodded once.

Turning her mind away, she raised her hands to the sky. She shut her eyes. She opened her mouth. A great shout shot forth, like a cry of agony or pain or total and utter desperation.

It was a great shout only, without words or meaning and yet in that sound, that voice of the clarion, a deep message was blasted out in all directions and I too caught it within my mind:

"Nephilim! To me!"

I nearly fell with the impact.

I spread my legs. I recovered.

It occurred to me to help her.

There were birds in the area. I was sure. I could feel their essence wandering all about, though with the rain and the heavy cloud cover, it was impossible to see into the sky at all or even around us. And though I knew they must have been tired, exhausted, I recruited them to my cause anyway, begging them for the help that only they could grant me at this time.

All the while, all around us, beyond the eighty yards that was the square, the town continued to melt away. The quakes just kept coming on. By now, our side of the mountain had been scraped clean but for bits and pieces of the village fleeting by and these were being washed away into the ocean that now encircled the foot of the mountain below us. Down there and beyond that, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing left out to the horizon but water.

Here, I sent out a summons to all my friends of the sea as well, but they were far, far below me and I didn't really know if they could hear me from where they were.

A crash of thunder.

But it wasn’t thunder.

We all gazed up as one, to a spot higher up on the mountain that was still lost in the downpour and the clouds and another wave of earth and mud was swooping down straight for us like a tsunami.