ESCHKATOLOGY

This is a short interactive fiction-style game in its current form, though I hope to develop it into a more intricate choice-based narrative. For now, dive into the world after the end.

The Devotee had been asleep for days, or years, and they had no memories of the apocalypses that have since ravaged the Earth. Their little chapel in the woods has been destroyed, and everyone that they know is gone. Missing. They found no bodies, and the further that they move from the chapel, the further the thought of finding them sinks. Their old life lies buried in their stomach, a small and dry seed of faith under fear, solemnity, and the eerie quiet of the ravaged terrain spreading out before them. They live like a ghost, haunting cracked, dry roads until they are stricken by an epiphany. They must have risen from their dreamless sleep for a reason. Their feet move with immense strength, speed. Purpose. They see the Earth’s veins behind their eyes. They see crowds worshipping evil, innocents trekking through ice fields. They see a child, floundering against the current of a river of iron. On the road out of Buckhannon, West Virginia, they travel through a town bathed in red. These stains, smell heavy with metal and rust and sickly-sweet with decay, reach far above the Devotee’s head. Each building, each step, each dying tree and pile of debris, is stained. They cannot stop to consider what this must mean, or how a river or a flooding rain of blood is possible at all, because they are stopped in their tracks by a sound. The first voice they’ve heard in longer than they know– and a child’s voice, at that. Pushed by a force beyond themself, the Devotee rescues an angel. A little girl-child, from the river. Her white dress is stained red, and her gaze is intense with knowledge beyond her years. Led like a herding dog behind a grazing lamb, the Devotee follows the angel out into the new world.