Continued from DELIRIUM PART I

“Holy water cannot help you now Thousand armies couldn’t keep me out I don’t want your money I don’t want your crown See I’ve come to burn your kingdom down”-(Seven Devils)Florence + the machine

He reminded himself that he was safe inside the cottage, picked up his pen and continued writing. The next day he woke up to find that there were two of them and four the day after that. And thus the mudmen seemed to multiply every day. They never strayed far from his cottage. At first they just stood there facing the little man who was visible through the window as he went about filling new sheets of paper in his indecipherable handwriting.  After a few days of silent staring, if you can stare without eyes that is, they began to shriek uncontrollably.

It was an inhuman sound that would have woken up the dead if even a trace of them had remained in this new world .The gloom created by the mudmen’s unrelenting shrieks spread like an infection that seemed to blanket the entire world within its grasp. The brightness of the sun seemed to dull as days passed by. Plants began to wither until they were nothing more than dust. It appeared as if this poisonous wave of sorrow consumed everything in its path and left behind a necropolis in its wake.

The little man silently watched all this, bewildered at how everything he had worked so hard for came undone in front of his very eyes. He wept silently and cursed the mudmen and he cursed the day he had picked up that pen. In the old world he had been a reporter of very high stature, but his little stature had made him the butt of many jokes. He went places where no one would and saw things that no one in their right mind would possibly want to see. The rest of the world was content to read about it in the papers or watch it on television. Everyone commented on the drastic condition of the human race and everyone agreed that we were beyond saving. So when he was given the chance to undo everything that god had done and to create a new world from scratch, if that was what he wanted, he jumped at the opportunity. How can humanity hope to survive when one of their own decides that they are an unfit race, unfit to walk this earth?

His first order of business was to create a hell where he could banish anyone who stepped out of line. He emptied the prisons as they were overcrowded and took up a lot of space. At first he was content to banish the scum of the world but he soon realized that they were a never ending breed. There was something inherently self destructive about his race. He tried to create a world of harmony but humans struck the chord of discord. The beautiful order he had created was overwhelmed by chaos. He could not bear to watch as the beautiful world that god had envisioned for us and he had tried so hard to preserve went up in flames and all one could see in the distance was a mushroom cloud.

When the wars finally came to an end, only a spectre was left of the planet which had so bountifully nurtured life. The wheels of time had spun backward and humanity was once again shackled by their own ignorance, bound to the dark ages. And now, even he after all that he had done, these monsters had appeared and no matter what he tried he could not banish them. Maybe he wasn’t the savior of this world after all but the destroyer. He wasn’t the person who had created a masterpiece, he was the person who had set fire to it in sheer jealousy. He thought he could play God, but he now realised that it was the devil who had been playing him all along.