Even the bats had flown to the fallout shelters. The sky was charred black, except for the ovum of deepening red in the western sky. Gray smoke curled from blasted bombs and newly made ruins, which had stood indomitably for three thousand years just minutes before.

“Innovations,” said the wizened old man in the bell tower that overlooked the ancient city, “Modern man and his modern weaponry.” The old man wrapped his gnarled, bronze hands ever more tautly around the thick rope that had been cutting and burning them for three days. He pulled with all his might, howling from the exertion. The bell tolled its loudest just then as lead and steel fell from planes and fires ran rampant down every street.

Little children’s heads, hands and legs were sticking out from under old rocks that had tumbled well before their time. From the bell tower, the old man surveyed several such scenes. And they had warned him. People had warned the old man that if he valued his life, he would withdraw to some place subterranean, a cellar, a hole, an underpass. “No,” he told them, “I am not long for this world, but I will die ringing the bells of peace to ensure that the children are.” Now the old man could not bear to look down to the streets. He raised his head to heaven, but his eyes stopped at the palace.

The palace stood taller than the bell tower and, just like the bell tower, remained standing. “That’s where all the trouble is coming from,” said the bombers about the palace. But the city had never seen trouble like the bombs that pummeled it that day. It was not the palace that sent New World troops into arcane alleyways to commit atrocities, unsurpassed even in the very soldiers’ worst nightmares.

The red oozed out of the western sky. Towering flames were all that was left to keep the city lit. The palace villain was nowhere to be found. Guards had secreted him away. New World soldiers turned over every stone in their path, the very stones that had crushed legions of unarmed bodies. Still the villain had his recourses. The rest of the land did not. Wailing emerged from cellars and caverns.

The old man scanned the smoke-filled horizon. Through little pockets in the drifting gray wall of sky, he could see the world. He knew the same fire below him would spread. It would cross seas and continents. Its fuel would be the oil that the New World soldiers came to claim from the city, never considering that fire burns all flesh - brown, black, yellow, white, yours, mine, theirs. The old man’s gaze was fixed on heaven as millennia of spirits hovered above the wreckage. They knew as well as the man in the bell tower that the wreckage would only replicate to the ends of the earth. Together, they wept. Seraphically, they lamented, “This did not have to be.”