Laughter

She was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And so, she remained silent. With the death of the world around her, nothing was left to laugh at. The faintest of whisper rang hollow in the broken world. None of it had meaning. Smoke smeared the sky of her mind. Death surrounded her, closing in one by one. What hope could remain where laughter did not sound? The unused gift left fallen. Forgotten. Nothing but shapeless grey surrounded. All became a blur. There was voices, but they did not mean anything. Slowly, even the voices faded. They had left. The smoke had left. The grey had left. There was less and less, until even the madness seemed to fade from thought or memory. All that was left was the feeling of loss. Where was the laughter? Where had she gone?

Small glint, then a glimmer. She was there. She was not alone. With them the madness returned. The smoke overtook the sky. The endless walls stretched to infinity. And she marched forth, laughing, such laughter as is haunting and terrible for a lifetime. It gloried in the madness, the destruction. And as death had been visited upon all before, she, in turn, visited death upon the reemerging world, followed by a cadre of reapers. Dreams died, and madness was brought to order, the order of death. And so it was, the laughter continued until the world stood barren under the brown sky.

She then gazed out over the land. Her eyes trained across the landscape searching and searching and searching. The laughter still ringing across the plain. There, her eyes turned even to the reapers that followed her. The scythe fell four times, counting their number. Without pausing a moment, her laughter then died from her own lips. Slumping to the parched and cracked earth, it was not warm and welcoming but cold and lifeless. And there laughter passed from the world once again and the world with it.