The Hour of Unbecoming

It began not with trumpet nor trembling of earth,

but with a stillness so profound
that thought itself seemed swallowed in in
a stillness wherein the sky paused mid turn,
and the breath of the cosmos drew back
as if reluctant to exhale again.

I stood alone upon the strand of no known shore,
a place that defied the cartographer’s ink,
whose sands did not sink nor shift beneath the foot,
but held, as though conscious of the witness they bore.
No tide lapped, no gull cried,
only the infinite hush of that final interval,
pregnant with the weight of what approached.

Then, above me, the firmament did fracture.
A seam, imperceptible at first,
opened across the celestial vault
and bled forth light of such unnatural cast
that it blinded not the eyes,
but the memory of what colour once was.
The heavens churned in spectral delirium,
vermillion, void blue, hues that bore no name,
spilling and folding into themselves
like the petals of some eldritch bloom.

And lo, the stars began to stir,
those anchors of the ancient night
shivered loose from their ordained orbits,
and wandered, pulsing with unfamiliar motion,
as if obeying a design long buried beneath the skin of time.
No longer symbols to guide the lost,
they now moved with will,
their very procession an indictment
of all the order we had ever presumed.

Then did the Sound come,
a blast not born of wind or fire,
but of unreason unloosed
a concussive convulsion of Being itself.
It tore through the firmament and the mind alike,
a cry from the throat of Reality
as it was rent apart by its successor.

The horizon, that quiet custodian of distance,
rolled inward like a scroll ignited,
its line breaking into curves
monstrous arcs of land and sky
twisting as water caught in a descending spiral.
Continents rose and shattered like brittle glass,
skies plunged like stone,
and the world we once called Earth
was folded inward toward a single point,
drawn into some vast, unseen aperture
at the center of all unraveling.

Around me, the multitude was unmoored.
Some clawed at the sand,
others fled with weeping mouths and blind eyes,
and some merely fell still,
having seen the face of that which replaceth form.
There was no salvation,
for none had ever been promised only delay.

And I, untouched amid the wailing and the dust,
beheld it all with a stillness not my own.
Not wonder, nor terror but recognition.
For this, too, I had dreamed.
Not in metaphor nor veiled prophecy,
but in perfect shape and sequence.

The end had always waited beneath the skin of the real,
like fire beneath painted glass.
And now, at last,
the veil was lifted.
And the Dream beyond the world
stepped forward to take its throne.