Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ On Earth as it is in Hell ❯ Things to Come ( Prologue )

Simple a statement to make it would seem, but the embodiment of the scene that lies before us.

You stand on a pile of broken mortar, raindrops splashing and dribbling down the cracked and worn lines of what might have been a great structure. Before you rises the silhouette of a hulking shape, blotting out the sky for several hundred feet, what surely must have been a mighty monument, but still fragile as anything created by man. Broken girders frame a collapsed roof, sticking out at jagged angles towards the gray sky, looking for all the world like a mouth screaming in final agony. And all around you are other littered pieces of destruction, offering no hint as to what they may have been.

As you walk towards the monolith, you begin to see twisted walls and sloped floors covered in bricks, walling, shingles, glass, and blood. Pushing past these obstructions, you reach the center: a hollow, burnt-out gutted space seared by unimaginable fires. On the ground before you lies an object, a large sign, with inscriptions on it, words smeared by soot or broken by ways unknown. You can decipher one or two: Library, Cafeteria, Quad...

What happened here? What forces broke this place, turning it into the debris-ridden skeleton of what it once was? To find out, we must go back seven years...