and here we are

Thunder rose and raged. The wind was loud and howling. The fire was searing. The air smelt burnt. The darkness was overwhelming, lit only by the orange glow of the simmering flames. The ground was mud and dirt. Bloodied by fire. All life but for two forms, those could barely be counted, all life gone. The world was in chaos. Nature was claiming her arrears. For too long, she had given, they had taken. Now they were in debit and it was time for her to take her dues. The balance was weighed heavily, the scale was falling, nearly broken by the weight. Now it was her time. Now everything was going to burn. The forces of nature, those horsemen of fire, thunder, wind, and water were riding the lands. They had not taken their full forms yet. Soon. Everything was coming to a close. Everything would soon be done and dusted. Burnt to ash. The board flowed. Purple. As all things must. Fire and water. Jinn and insaan. Good and evil. Red and blue. The source of the color of the universe in its magenta glow. The men sat hunched. In deep thought. Motionless. As still as if they were dead. The circle the board surrounded them with, to protect them from the elements was now visible. And visibly strong. Everything was going according to plan. Everything would be according to plan. The big question though, for everyone that was a player on this final board, was - what was the plan? No one seemed to know. None of the humans at least. Not the rajah. They all thought they knew a plan. Or some of them did. They all acted according to theirs. But to see the bigger picture. Not even the conduits of power, those two men that had been groomed for this play for years, for decades, and were now husks of their former selves, only their brains remained sharp. Not even those two knew the plan. No one could see the bigger picture. The bigger picture was a convoluted mess. And no one knew it yet but those with the capacity to see, those who had even the remoteness chance of putting the pieces together, when they were needed, those were the one that had been erased, booted off the board first. The first wave of atrocities that had spread across the world. Those people had been driven to insanity, driven to murder, or been murdered. Now all that remained was a hodgepodge of characters that were just mixed, as if nothing was the matter. It was unfair. One side had a mini gun that had ripped through the defences of the other, and now there was little to do but to watch. The remainder stuck like glue. But that was not to say that the other side did not have its own weapons, or it’s own edge or handicap. The game was a quagmire of handicaps. One edge over another. That seemed to balance each other out. And here we were.