Beyond all the elements that composed harmony, there was one that seemed the basest, the oldest, and the purest of all. We know this as laughter. Laughter will be there with us from our first giggle, to the final death rattle of a elder. We all will know laughter at least once In our lives. It is a beautiful thing…
The laughter that escaped his lips on that rooftop would have been considered nearly blasphemous in every sense of the word.
It echoed on the howling wind, blending with it. Twisting it. Till it seemed that the very air was laughing with him in his sick mockery of joy. The laughter itself was high pitched, and mad. Mad with rage, and insanity. The laugh of a man whose lost everything and is willing to loose more.
But what made it even worse was that he wasn’t a man. He was a boy, barely beyond childhood. Not even to the age of seventeen, yet a boy ready to die. His body was perched on the edge of the building, legs together and arms spread; a precarious position that even the gentlest of breezes would cause him to loose his balance and bring his end. That was the whole point however, ready to die he was but it wouldn’t be by his own hand. It would be the world that did it, the world that had already taken everything from him. It would take his last thing worth taking, and then give him the sweet mercy he craved.
And even when it came he continued to laugh. He laughed at himself for his foolishness, laughed at the cruelty of the world for taking his life, and laughed at the hard concrete that greeted him with a lovers kiss.
Then he laughed no more.
And as the people around gathered in a mutual horror, the universe itself decided to have a laugh, one true laugh at his expense. It laughed at the wastefulness of his death, it laughed at the irony of his situation, and it laughed at its plans for the child. With a shift incomprehensible to all but the oldest of the Eldritch Beings the universe broke the laws that defined corporeal place, and with nary a whisper the deed was done. To all of creation it looked as if nothing had changed, the wind still blew, the water flowed, the stars burned…but one thing was missing, one life forgotten. One life that never was, but on a different world, in a different time, one life begins anew.
