𝙃𝙄𝙎 𝘽𝙐𝙏𝙇𝙀𝙍 𝘼𝙉𝘿 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙊𝙍𝙄𝙂𝙄𝙉𝙎 𝙊𝙁 𝘼 𝘿𝙀𝙈𝙊𝙉

Chapter 7: Beginnings

CHAPTER 7 - "BEGINNINGS"

The pain Damascus was feeling was horrendous.

The falling ash burned his skin and the heat scorched his muscles, it even singed his once soft, beautiful blonde locks to near nothingness. Smoke blanketed the sky as the volcano Vesuvius had erupted only minutes before with an such force and with such devastation that everyone in Pompeii had thought the world itself had exploded. When the ground beneath their feet shook with such violence, it was as if the gods had forsaken, giving them to the fiery depths of Tartarus for their lack of worship.

Damascus had known the city's true nature, but he had chosen to turn a blind eye. But apparently the Gods had not! The Gods were always watching, always witness to the city's inhabitants - to what everyone was doing and to whom they were doing it to. And this, he had decided, was the city's punishment for defying the Gods benevolent kindness that was bestowed upon this once peaceful bay city.

Chaos, destruction and total devastation incarnate was Pompeii now!

Pompeii was a lude, dissentient and sexually decrepit place, filled with adulterers, cretins, charlatans, thieves and many men and women of a crude and self-arrogant nature. Oh, some were honest, hard working people, like Damascus's parents, but most of Pompeii's citizens were immigrants from other regions of Rome and had become complacent in their ways, defying the Gods, engaging in licentious and lecherous deeds of a self-supplying wrought - and the Gods hated not being worshipped!

Much like another civilization in the ancient past who then tried to conquer other lands - Pompeii was not building an army - but they were part of the greatest empire the world knew: Rome, said to be cruel to and violent people. And Christians condemned it, often crucified for their belief in one god - The God, who believed in peace and understanding and equality among the masses. And this "natural" destruction was the Christian God's way of taking "revenge" on those who prosecuted so many of his faithful children, despite his teachings forbid such an act. But like all God's, they were known to change their mind on a whim.

Damascus didn't know and didn't care, but suffered like the rest.

His mother and father were dead, killed by falling debris - fiery boulders launched out of the neck of the volcano, soaring high into the air, through the clouds that masked the sky, then fell down into the blackness that encompassed the city - crushed to death, their bodies incinerated in seconds in their own home.

Damascus had managed to survive his parents fate by the volcano because he was outside at the time, only to run away into a field that quickly burst into flame, showered by tiny, whistling meteors falling from the sky - his body burning, his clothes chard black as soot, his skin melting from the intense heat. And he tried to crawl to the water's edge of the bay to soak himself. But he body hurt; tears crusted up the moment water formed, his left eye bubbling whiteness down his face from exploding inside his skull from the heat.

And yet, he was still alive.

He crawled, and crawled, using his arms and elbows to dig into the soil, his legs burnt and black and no longer working. He had been hit by a piece of iron in the spine that had been flung at him, when a tiny, fiery stone dropped from the sky, and he feared that the impact had shattered his vertebra from the waist down. He knew he had urinated, his bladder no longer able to hold any liquids like the rest of his body; the heat soaking it all up as soon as any liquids escaped.