The first thing I can remember is that I was sitting at the table.
I couldn't sleep that night. It was very late.
Then I heard the sound - that deafening boom.
As if the skies themselves had been ripped apart.
I mean, I guess that's what actually happened,
more or less.
They stopped throwing their annual ***** nearly a decade before.
No one really knows why. A whole crowd was ready to climb those ladders that year, but they never came down.
Then a sound like thunder,
but louder than any thunder I'd ever heard before.
It shook the whole house. Then the earth started to shake.
It was from the rubble, of course.
Those massive stones falling to the ground.
Rumors began to spread.
Tales of romance, jealousy, scandal, adultery,
******.
All hearsay, of course,
if not entirely fabricated.
Truth is, nobody had any means of communication with the castle.
They stopped sending the pigeons when they stopped lowering the ladders.
The whole town was simply left to wonder what happened.
A death in the family was the common consensus.
I remember being knocked off my chair from the impact of the first one.
It landed right out back; right there in the garden.
Then more came. Just a few at first,
but then the the sound quickly became constant.
A never ending barrage of thuds and quakes,
and in-between those,
the awful cracking sound of a building being smashed to pieces.
Screams could be heard after that.
The cause of the explosion remains a mystery,
just like everything else about cloud castle.
All investigations yielded nothing but wild theories,
and of course, there were no survivors.
I ran out of the house and into pure madness.
I've seen many a battle before, but none of them compared to what I saw that night.
Death and destruction all over.
A house would get hit and burst into a thousand pieces;
splinters of wood and brick tearing into anyone unfortunate enough to be too close to it.
And the people -
they were running in all directions;
screaming, delirious.
I saw families huddled together trying to figure out where to go.
I saw many of my fellow townsfolk get crushed right before my eyes.
The whole gruesome scene lit up by the ghastly glow of that cloud on fire.
Powder charges, atmospheric pressure anomalies, black magic -
even dragons. All have been proposed;
none can be proven.
I ran.
I could barely stay on my feet for the quakes,
but I ran nonetheless.
Through crashing stones and crowd -
through shrapnel blasts and the wails of death -
I ran.
When it was all over,
very little remained of the city
and countless were dead.
Those who lived through that night never came back to it.
Nothing was rebuilt.
That flying fortress had made that town,
and when it went down,
it took everything along with it.
It's nothing now but a graveyard of rubble;
haunted by the souls of corpses never buried.
I looked back only once.
I looked back at where the castle used to be.
I saw nothing but flames.
The smoke from it blacked out the whole sky above.
No moon or stars to be seen.
That's when I saw her;
a shimmer of white falling from the sky -
like a wingless angel.
It was a nightgown of sorts,
long and white. It flowed around her as she fell -
a cloud trying in vain to fly.
I thought I could catch her.
I wanted to catch her.
I turned back and ran toward where I thought she was going to land;
in a field behind a farmhouse that had already been smashed by a stone,
but I was too slow.
She hit the ground with a faint thud.
I was only several yards away.
When I got to her, hoping against all hope,
I saw that I was too late.
She was already gone,
but she had this look upon her face:
Serene.