One minute, a city crumbling in its decline: the last city on Earth. Every song, discord. Every thought, ugly. All its doors shut, all its children hungry. Glutted with envy, the city slouched in on itself like some rough beast waiting for its end.
And then the sky ablaze cracked and sizzled and turned the city electric. The clear gold of God’s own trumpet filled the air, an impossible note of storm and brass. It filled the streets with light and song, where choirs of neighbours sang their marvel and wonder together. Their children ran and laughed and played and discovered the thrum of their pulse in their ears. Like a preening swan, the city shook itself upright.
The last vessel. They remembered her from childhood or grandparents’ tales, the creed each generation held in half-belief. The last vessel. The blinding disc shone, a beacon of humanity’s ascent, a city from the heavens. “They remember us,” someone said. “From the stars,” said another. “At last!”
The last vessel. All day and all bright night the people stayed out, their hands shielding their eyes. The last vessel lingered, ringing still with the harmonics of her lightning arrival. She covered the sky and lit the city and all the earth around with the goldsilver of stars.
As the city sang itself awake, the last vessel performed her mysteries. Soft rains rose to her like sparks from a fire. Around her gilded edges puffed sporadic clouds of vapour or steam. From time to time small silver spheres like sparrows darted out and down to the horizon on errands unknown, to return again later. The city’s people cheered and sounded the anthem of their forebears: “At last, at last! Has it finally come for us?”
While the last vessel lingered, the city bloomed with symphonies. People made great works of every kind while the last vessel filled their sky. Dauntless towers stretched to reach her, magnificent colossi of marble and bronze rose to praise her, sweet sorrowing songs yearned to woo her! The labours of ages finished in days, and they who toiled forged mighty chains of friendship to lock the gates against the void. The brightest spirits of their souls cast bright haloes of all they could be, all they might do.
When the up-rains stopped, when her steams and vapours stopped, when her silver spheres stopped, the city cried out. When the last vessel, like every time before, vanished without prelude, the sky loomed silent, and the dust began to fall. The sound of her clarion thunder faded to mere memory then rumbled back into myth like a passed storm.
The dust would fall for days. Upon it, a hollow wind would trace its unreadable names, and doors would shut, and the children would scratch and pick at the scant dirt and wonder, when will she come again? When will we live again?