The war came silently on a thief’s feet in the night as wars seldom do.
It crept over the black roofs of the town sealing out the moonlight and before dawn, it crept away, to its dark, wet grendelcave, hiding from the sun behind rotting shutters on yellowed plaster, under gutters in dim alleyways, and between the cracks in mens’ hearts.
Even so, its effects were brobdingnagian.
Slate gray clouds thundered quietly through the air like a downbound train consumed by fever while jazz musicians waited in bread lines shuffling their feet against the cold, instruments like albatrosses hanging heavily from their necks while the poets became backwards-talking prophets, preaching nonsense from streetlamp pulpits, frothing madly at anyone foolish enough to listen.
Moths in their wool coats tumbled through the dark corridors and crooked streets the fog thick with pale blue melancholy, almost tangible in the wet air.
A thin breeze snaked over tin roofs and around dripping corners playing an elegy of emptiness, a lonely dirge echoing over every broken sidewalk and dusty window.
The clockwork king at the center of town chimed on the hour his hollow, false sound rolling over the city like a shroud on a dead man’s face, providing a steady, sorrowful harmony with the wind’s stark chorus.
The faces of the town were painted, painted in quiet, agonized desperation, their masks trying to conceal frantic eyes, madly searching for deliverance from the cold sorrow that stung their cheeks.
Color drained from the world, the sky lost its hue, paintings lost their vibrant timbre poems’ meanings became lost in swirling tidepools and imagination walked on creaking crutches, begging in the dead-ended alleys.
The war was won, started and finished before anyone was aware, and without a single shot fired.
The casualties were innumerable.