The Serpent
From the heavens above, the key fell with grace. By what mechanism—what slip of the hand—what tilt of the table—what prank of a youth—the key had fallen was irrelevant. Only that the key had fallen after one-thousand years, as was promised.
The serpent beneath the grate stirred, its coiled body sliding over itself as the metallic sound of key entering hole rippled through the hollowed ground. Listening carefully, the serpent turned as still as possible, awaiting the sound of a chain above to make its rattle and for the lid of the prison to be torn away by merciless hands. But no such things came. And the serpent, after much time, reached upwards with one of its claws to open the tomb.
One scale at a time, the serpent rose from the hole. Only the air stirred the overgrowth that had buried the serpent's prison. Generations of neglect had allowed an entire forest to arrange itself beside the underground sleeping quarters, unbeknownst to the occupant beneath. No guards stood in wait. No Angel accompanied the key into its position. The serpent breathed heavily, a sulfuric exhale wilting the leaves beneath the hot nose.
The trees had grown so tall that the city between the mountain and the water was nearly impossible to glimpse, but the serpent knew the way, and the forest was parted for the first time in many years.
The entry to the city was almost as unkempt as the prison, and equally unmanned. The door opened without force, the squealing hinges shedding rust at the slightest push.
No time was wasted meandering the emptied landscape. The serpent knew which streets to ascend to bring the temple into view. The hall was high in the city, where the treeline began on the mountains. The temple’s door already sat ajar. Walls of earth-red jasper stood on all sides, the evening light making them look suffocatingly heavy. The hall’s smooth floor let the wind blow crumpled leaves easily to every corner. The wind rose with the serpent’s arrival and the hall swelled with a vortex of debris, the serpent at the whirlwind’s eye, standing before twenty-four empty seats.
One crown laid on the ground for each throne, the laurels having withered and warped, their forms shrunk and twisted in a manner ill-fit for any human head. In each seat lay cloths mottled with the yellows and browns of one-thousand years of worship, the clean radiance of the fine linen only a distant memory, lore to be told to a generation absent from assembly.
The collar felt tight on the neck of the trespasser.
Split open before one of the thrones was a giant book, faced down, the spine spelling Liber Vitae in dull gold leaf. The serpent used a talon to flip it onto its spine. Empty page after empty page flittered in the wind. The tome made to dole judgement on all, was only marked with the palimpsest of names removed.
When the serpent turned around, Gog was leaning on the doorway, a giant hook dangling from a slack jaw, skin pulled loose and wrinkled from a lifetime of being yanked around. The face was held somewhere between a grin and a grimace. Behind Gog, lining the streets from the temple to the gatehouse, five armies raised their fists to show their readiness. They thrashed and spat, their foam dribbling to their chins and then to their boots.
The serpent led them to the top of the mountain, where the camp was as empty as the pages of the Liber Vitae. The armies howled with their arms raised, shields and spears and swords clattering in victory for a battle that ended before they had arrived. Their yelps and whistles told the serpent that the soldiers needed no consoling for having been deceived at the prospect of earned glory.
Looking over the edge of the mountain, the serpent was in search of what was left of this world. The sky was clear, the air at the mountain’s peak uncharacteristically clear. What was once the lake of fire, which once felt very distant from the camp of the saints, appeared very close now. The flames had been smothered, the stench of scorched bodies having drowned out the fire’s life. Heaps of charred beings lay upon each other, their faces withered and warped in a manner ill-fit for any human head.
The serpent had to strain to recall why it was he emerged from the hole in the ground.
Turning back, prophecy had begun to show its inescapable clutches. The serpent watched as Gog’s mouth was wretched open by the hook, soft esophagus exposed and contracting, the entire figure struggling under some unseen force. One by one the members of each army perished from a burning within. In their wake, a single grain of sand for each. They were piled on top of the mountain, as though the sea itself had followed the soldiers up the slopes. The wind cleared the camp, blowing the grains into a valley where time would give them a burial under refuse.
This left only the serpent to watch the flocks of birds above, their hunger for fallen flesh ceaseless in the aftermath of a feast.
The serpent descended the mountain. Passing the bare temple, walking by empty homes guarded by shadows of empty towers, crossing the forest that had marked the millennia-long burial, the serpent reached what would have been the lake of fire.
On top of one of the many heaps, the serpent coiled as tightly as the walls of the pit had required. And there the serpent lies today, its fate inescapable, its punishment infinite. In the perpetual light cast by sun or moon alike, the serpent sits on the remains of a time forgotten, forced to look over a dead world, the cannibalistic scars improperly healed into dark lines, their sting of wet brimstone far worse than anything the serpent found while sitting at the bottom of the pit.