Delivered.

The first thing I heard when my eyes opened was a timeless roar. It was a sound that seemed to have begun many aeons before I woke, reverberating in the nothingness. It was not the roar of a beast in the night or of a person in distress, but of a creature that embodied the terrifying notion of infinitude. It was a monster that went beyond petty physicality, a being that had walked paths unknown to mankind and had walked them well. In a moment I beheld the cruel knowledge that all that I owned, all that I loved, was now dust.

It was a sudden and instant realisation that shook my wretched form. I was overcome by a calm but pressing desire to escape. My fingers explored a few inches, their half-broken forms stroking the dust and the dirt. All was darkness and I dared not make a sound for the guttural howl of that immortal creature still reverberated in and out of existence. I stifled a painful cough and began to crawl. It was if my previous identity, a person that had seemed so concrete and well-known to me, had vanished out of existence with the arrival of this new threat. What had I been doing five minutes ago? Whatever it had been it no longer seemed important.

There was a gap in the ruined ceiling releasing a singular pillar of iron-coloured light. The bleakness that pressed in around my body began to repulse me so I pushed towards the light with flimsy muscles. My eyes were still refocusing; somehow the roar had blinded me as well as deafened me, however I could make out the multitude of scratches and lacerations that covered my arms. The pain was there but it throbbed like my desire to escape, present yet numbed somehow, as if all my sensations were being felt through a pane of glass.

I knew that I would have to climb a section of fallen masonry. I felt that all my strength had been carried away with that voice, ripped from my body and stolen into a plane of existence that I couldn't even fathom. How I knew these things I couldn't say, for the effect of the roar was so instantaneous and shocking to the human form that I had passed into unconsciousness for several minutes. When I finally came to I was a new man; empty and devoid of sophistication, blind, deaf and dumb before my magnificent adversary. I knew not what the creature looked like, but I was certain it was there, hovering just out of my reach. Finally the pain in my chest was too much for me to bear and I collapsed against a slap of granite, coughing blood profusely.

For some time I stayed there, shaking and despairing in my grim prison. There was a terrible sensation of finality. Whatever had caused the destruction had marked the beginning of something great and evil, and I struggled to comprehend my own thoughts whilst my body recovered. Eventually I regained a portion of myself, the part that filtered madness from reason perhaps, and with a groan of acceptance I continued my climb.

My hands clambered across the collapsed blocks of grey granite. I used a series of jutting support beams to move across the outline of the dark pit, using that single point of light as navigation. I remembered fleeting images of the building just before the creature had roared. It had been a school of some sort and I had been a student. Not only that, I remembered noise and movement, the cacophony of sensations that accompany a crowd. My school had been a busy and vibrant place, filled with people that I knew and loved. This building had been my home, this I knew, so please understand my despair when I thought of it. My memories were just out of reach and every time I reached for them they pulled back with a mocking laugh. Despite my confusion there was still the certain knowledge that the roar had gifted me; those people that I remembered were now dead, buried under hundreds of tons of detritus.

Passing a set of crackling wires, I finally was in reach of salvation. There was a collapsed slope where the ceiling panels had fallen to the top floor and with hands slippery from my own blood I climbed the final stretch. What awaited me on the other side of that portal left me with a profound feeling of emptiness. I knew that I was completely and infallibly alone, aside from the monster that waited for me to emerge.

My city was ablaze. A foul wind crested my body as I observed the rampant destruction. My academy - yes, I recalled that it was a military academy - was one of the tallest buildings in that district, and so I had an incredible view of a large portion of the city. In the distance the business sector was lit up like a burning forest. The fires were climbing the lengths of the skyscrapers, gutting the insides and leaving charred ruins in its wake. A swathe of the city had outright collapsed, especially the structures that were unfortunate enough to be underneath the monsters body when it had emerged from its vile realm. Whilst some blocks of flats remained upright and seemingly intact, I knew that the force of the creature’s arrival had rent the insides of the buildings just the same as the outside. In that moment, faced with the absolute ruin of mankind, I was certain that I was the only survivor in the entire city. This could have been superstition but I suspected that this grim realisation is another gift of the roar. Listening carefully the noise could still be heard in the empty air.

It was not the downfall of my fellow man that had my attention though, it was the being itself. Even now I find it difficult to talk about it. Description of the creature just falters, like a bullet jamming in a weapon. I will try my best to conceptualise it, but forgive me if it takes me several attempts for even the slightest memory of its gnarled form fills me with revulsion.

For the purpose of my account I shall call it the Deliverer in honour of the chaos and calamity that it delivered to this world. At my first glance all I could see was a colossal bulk of flesh. It was so huge that it blocked much of the suns bounty, and its bleak shadow covered much of the desolate city. The Deliverer floated in the same way that a helicopter would, only without any supports or devices to keep it in position. It had a power over the fabric of this world that we as flesh and blood beings couldn't hope to master. The force of gravity, the seven basic necessities of life, the basic laws of physics, it denied all of these absolute laws just by its existence. Even as I watched parts of its body was vanishing in and out of the ether. The creature was present, but somehow not, like a hand trapped inside a glove. I couldn't help think that part of its form was filling some other chaotic space. I wondered whether my eyesight was lying to me as I watched another chunk of its body vanish and reappear again. I look back on that moment and I find myself laughing a little; to think such mundane thoughts whilst confronted with the sure end of our species! For how could we fight it? How could we even explain it? The Deliverer had arrived in our world and there was nothing we could do to confront it.

I think I sat down, my legs dangling over the drop. Just one slip and I would be free of my horror. The fleshy, mutilated creature and the destruction it had bought would be able to bother me no longer. There was something appealing about the thought; the sight of me crushed against the pavement down below, the final corpse in a city of bodies. But, no, I had no real desire to die. The roar had spared me for a reason. If one man out of the entire city had been spared, then that one man had a purpose. I thought of military history. I thought of how conquerors would ransack and slaughter their enemies city, keeping the slaves and the beautiful women alive as bounty. They would also spare one healthy man and a horse, allowing him to flee to their kin, letting him spread the message of the invaders victory. I couldn't help but see the correlation. However, the Deliverer has no need to eat and drink, no desire to sup on the delights on humanity, no need for riches or wealth. The ancient, behemoth intelligence of the creature had no desire to interact with us or gloat. It was just there, existing. It had erased my city entirely by accident, or by coincidence, of this I was sure. When it had slipped through the gate between his reality and ours there was such an explosion, a force of noise and incredible power, that it erased the bodies of the other citizens.

But it had spared me. I wept openly in that dead city, my crumbling body leaning over the parapet. The Deliverer, was it now my God? Surely this creature was so above me and my species that I would have no choice but worship it and its endless majesty? The despair that gripped me in those moments was intolerable; it was like I felt the last screams and cries of all my fellow citizens. For a while their fading grief touched the outskirts of my mind and I was racked with loneliness. Faces filled my thoughts yet I didn't know their origin, whether they were people in the street, my own family, my lovers or my friends. To forget oneself so completely is an experience that I have never recovered from. You can see why I struggle recalling my ordeal accurately. So overcome was I with the events of the past half-hour that my mind was twisted into queer shapes. Strange impressions and feelings filtered through me, like the emotional equivalent of white noise on a television set. This was another symptom of the roar. The Doctors have never been able to heal me of this malady.

I left the Academy and climbed down the ruin of a multi-storey car park. Think of me, a lone human being, having full freedom to do whatever I wanted in my own grim wasteland. I had an odd desire to touch things. I stroked the shells of peoples cars, aware that doing such a thing under normal pretences would have been met with strange accusations and funny looks. Only in destruction are we allowed complete freedom. Peace by its very nature implies restrictions. The Deliverer had torn me from the structures that society places upon us. I remember relieving myself freely in the street whilst the titanic creature continued to float above my head.

It was dark in the space underneath the beasts belly, almost as bleak as night. There were fires here and there, filling the remnants of shops and inner-city flats. What evidence of bodies I did see was gruesome and indistinct. The shapes of other humans were burnt onto the walls and pavements, and I noticed sporadic clumps of skin and muscle clinging to the gutters. By the fifth intersection I was beyond the point of shock. I saw the majority of a corpse lying flat in a fountain. The person couldn't have been much older than a child. The scarred head was bald; no evidence of hair remained, and its clothes had been scorched off by the Deliverers explosion. I couldn't help but create a story for this young body. She, at least I suspected the body was female, had been throwing coins into the starry waters of the fountain, when in its reflection she saw a distortion in the air above her. Her timid face looked up, filled with a morose fascination as a rippling blue portal expanded over the length of the city. She pointed the weirdness out to her parents - who had been milling around the bazaar aimlessly, playing with over-priced trinkets and toys, - just as the force swept out from its depths. Her last sensation would be of a roar, a noise that went beyond the constraints of our dimension. I couldn't look any more and so continued on my way.

As I drew closer to the edge of the central district I could see closer the burning towers. I hoped dearly that the occupants of the buildings had been slain instantly and that my premonitions of being alone were correct. Better that I bore the burden alone rather that some poor soul was trapped still in the slowly-decaying form of his tower block. I could also see new parts of the Deliverer which I hadn't been able to consider before. I wanted to find some magnification equipment, a camera or binoculars, so that I could better observe the hellish being, but all the equipment that I found had been fried in the same manner as the citizenry.

The underside of the Deliverer had a dark pink colour to the flesh, bordering on intoxicating purple in some places. Streaks of moss green traced channels along this section and I related them to veins, though I couldn't fathom what the creature could possibly have instead of blood. I could see sections of writhing tentacles that waved helplessly in the half-light, their repulsive forms reminding me of bacon fat. Inward facing pores dribbled a strange translucent slime down onto the city. I watched as a stream of that strange, spittle-like liquid covered the top of a high-rise. Thin traces of smoke rose from everywhere the glaucous liquid fell and I vowed not to approach it, despite a growing curiosity. Indeed, as I paced the ruined city my crippling fear was giving way to a calmer mood. I accepted my complete and utter insignificance compared the monster. If it wished to be my God, I would praise it. If it wished me to die right here in this shell of a city then it was welcome to my life; I had no use for it any longer. Until it made such a request however, I was intent to head out of the city. I would walk along the scarred motorways until I found civilisation.

I stopped in my tracks; I hadn't even considered the global ramifications of this event. Had the shout covered the entire globe? Was my species lying dead in their homes thousands of miles away? What if the Deliverer wasn't alone and this was some part of a parasitical attack on our universe. Like a bacterium the Deliverer would spread its voice through the cosmos until there was little more than silence and barren rock in its wake. I wouldn't be recounting my tale if this was the case, of course, however you can see how I reached this conclusion at the time. For if my muses were correct and I was the last man in the world then I was envious of the dead. How dare they leave me in such a state? They should have taken me with them to the coldness of the grave rather than leave me here to confront the horror of the Deliverer. I remember screaming at the beast in my loudest voice, begging it to reveal its intent to me, to give me even the slightest glimmer of what it was, where it had come from. I waited in passionate silence for several seconds, and then it came, growing like a funnel of force from a flame-thrower. The voice! The roar! It burst from whatever gruesome chambers the being possessed and eclipsed all other sensations. I grabbed my head and threw myself to the ground, unable to bear the horrific vibrations that assaulted me. I pounded my fists on the cracked pavements, screaming like primal man in his opening moments, confused and vulnerable in a hostile world. Then, as soon as the noise came, it went. The echoes of the roar blew through the shattered windows of the city, filling the empty rooms and giving the place life again before finally dissipating. It was only then that I related the Deliverer in some way to a living creature. I compared it to the whale, lost in a void of cold blue, feeding on the tiny lifeforms it can find for sustenance. It was possible that the Deliverer was not some invading, malicious force but was instead a lonely and lost animal, just like myself. If that was the case, could I forgive it for the monstrous destruction it had caused? I didn't know.

I walked on through block after block of grey city. Hours passed. The day began to slip down towards the horizon and soon night would be upon me. I wanted fire and food, something to remind me of my humanity. I reached a residential hill on the western edge of the city, one that was extremely close to the motorway. I knew how to drive but I couldn't find a single vehicle that wasn't burnt out. I found a local shop which had somehow retained its windows and wandered inside. The place was empty, and I did not dare to climb the stairs and check to see if there were more bodies. Instead, I found food, packaged sandwiches and pastries. I almost wept when I saw them, still intact in their packaging. I greedily ripped the plastic and ate the lukewarm bread. The overwhelming starkness of the old prawn-mayonnaise compared to the dead dust that had slipped into my gullet all day nearly made me vomit, but I kept my food in and enjoyed it. I found a carrier bag and packaged as much food and water as my tired arms could carry. There was the possibility that radiation or some other contamination had altered them, however I was not prepared to die over such a caution. I picked myself up and continued on.

It was twilight when I reached the commercial intersection that joined the city highways to the rest of the world. Despite being reinvigorated by the food I was intolerably weary and filled with an impending dread. Ahead of me was the way forward, an escape. I could finally leave my old self behind. It had died a foul death and now only body and an internal willpower remained.
I looked once more at the Deliverer. From here I could see the amber light of the setting sun reflecting against its face. The creatures front was mangled, as if there once was a beast there but it's features had been driven inwards by the driving of a mallet or some other device. There were two eyes; one puffy and half closed, bordered by huge crusty lids. The other eye had no lids, but was bigger than several buildings. It was bright yellow with a singular black slit that stared through me. A writhing mass of tentacles and slime fell from its mouth. Ravines were rent into its skin, huge pits like the craters of the moon, only that they oozed with the same slime from before.

It was looking right at me. It could see me from so many miles away, across acres of city. I felt some familiarity there, like it somehow knew me, or needed me. My mouth opened and closed like a fool. There was nothing more to say to my new God, the creature that would then bring so much death and destruction to our world.

I turned about and walked away, and it let me go. It let me escape. For I needed to spread the word; The Deliverer was coming, and it bought the end of humanity in its wake.