Teito Monogatari:
The Tale of the Imperial Capital
Part 2: Supernatural Babylon
Author: Hiroshi Aramata
Part 5: Destruction in the Year of the Boar
Chapter 29: Destruction
The dragon awakened.
That night, roused by lightning, the dragon raised its head. Invisible to human eyes, the dragon drove its long claws into the rocks underground. Its eyes of red lava blazed as it inched its way slowly toward the Pacific Ocean. Its tail, stretched out somewhere near Dalian, swung violently as it felt explosions reach it from the earth above.
The dragon was awake.
The next day, the dragon plunged its enormous head deep into the Pacific Ocean and swallowed an astonishing amount of water. This happened at dawn on September 1.
The dragon lifted its head and gazed at the imperial capital floating far above it. In the darkness that stretched between the dragon writhing in the underworld and the imperial capital on the surface, many white, shining, threadlike roots hung down, shining beautifully as they beckoned to the dragon. These roots were the vengeful spirits protecting the imperial capital.
The dragon playfully bit at those white threads and shook its head, its golden mane streaming behind its head.
Near noon that day, a violent tremor struck Tōkyō. Countless fissures divided every road. The pride of the imperial capital—its countless tall buildings—crashed down, crushing everything and swallowing it into the earth.
The earthquake threw all the citizens of Tōkyō into turmoil. They could do nothing to stop this disaster. They did not even understand the cause.
After the subterranean roar and tremors announcing the end of the world ceased, fires broke out throughout the Imperial Capital. By dusk, they had become a great conflagration that mercilessly devoured Ginza, Nihonbashi, and Asakusa. The setting sun took on the color of blood and wavered unsteadily behind the heat haze produced by the great fire.
All who witnessed that sunset trembled in horror. Such a vast setting sun had never been seen in the history of the imperial capital.
In Ginza, the windowpanes of tall buildings shattered, and a rain of glass poured down. Fire raced along the banks of the Sumida River. Hibiya Park, an island of green in an ocean of fire, was filled with citizens driven from their burned homes. The central institutions of the imperial capital, including the Ministry of Finance, were enveloped in flames.
The Tatsumiya residence burned in crimson fire.
A woman holding a little girl's hand fled outside, clutching at her scorched clothing. The woman drew the child--apparently her daughter--close to her breast and looked back up at the blazing house. The citizens descending the slope did not stop to look. With vacant eyes, they fled in the direction of the Imperial Palace.
The woman and her daughter joined the stream of citizens. So many people were fleeing via the moat that the surface of the water was scarcely visible. The sky darkened as the terrible red sun dipped below the horizon. Corpses floated in the moat. Living people struggled among them, trying not to drown.
Yukari was thoroughly familiar with all these hellish scenes. She had seen them in her nightmares often enough. More than a dozen years earlier, when she had been an innocent girl unaware of the world, she had already known every detail of the tragedy of this day.
Taking her daughter Yukiko by the hand, Yukari followed the flow of people with the expressionless face of a mechanical doll. To her, this experience was like walking in a dream.
The evening of September 1 in the year of the boar showed Yukari her nightmares as reality. Then it was sealed away into the darkness of the irrevocable past.
An eternal night had fallen on the world. There would never be another dawn.
END OF SUPERNATURAL BABYLON
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