Facing Fury

A single flash lit the crimson sky and with it the lightning had passed.  The night was quiet but the hues on the horizon warned the desperation of what was to come.  The birds, first to know, had long since flown away, and the beasts were fleeing.  Just miles away exited an inferno, lit by the lightning, and fed by the forest, marching onward its host of flames.1

With relative speed the fire consumed all in its path, reaching the trees once home to the flown birds.  Flown because they could not face fury.  And the trees burned, flames spreading from trunk to top, from tree to tree.2

Blazing flames illuminated the surrounding hollow with red malice and orange deceit.  Smoke rose through the treetops followed by fire, and molten, crackling heat.  Needles burst into uncontrollable tendrils of flame and branches were diminished to ash.  As the fire cleansed the forest it also brought the continuity  to life through death, be it the death of birds, beasts, plants, or trees.  Life was to begin anew, to rise from the ashes once again.  Always and forever again to become incarnate.3

Over the course of a few days the fire had passed leaving the once green forest an image of a black wasteland.  Smoke still rose and coals still smoldered, but the open flames had moved on.4

Soft rain came and smoke was replace by steam until only the last havens of the coals remained, and even they soon disappeared.  The area, however, to the eye, remained the same: black and barren.5

It was not the moment, not the instant, but the slpw passing of time that began to heal the land; plants took root in the fertile soil and grew once more, starting a new forest upon the ashes of the old, as do we all.6