Copper, Iron, Aluminum
On the surface of the sun
are all gas.

The churchbells are ringing and manage to miss the point entirely.
“God save us all” or “I told you so!”
It is a tradition to ring the churchbells wildly when a storm approaches, to warn the inhabitants of the city to tie down what they can and forget what they can’t.

All the clouds in the sky have flown and the sun burns, svelteringly hot, down on the rooftops, the streets and the people. It is a beautifull day by some standards, even though no one seems to want to comment on the weather for once. The voices and the faces told us it was coming, forming outside our walls, on our fields, and that no one knew why, or how. The world was looking on in faszination and dread.

We smelled it coming first. Somehow like petrichor, but dry and cloying, a layer of dust in the air too fine to see, but there enough to choke us.

We heard it coming next, and felt it in the ground. A vibration to deep to hear, but loud enough to burst eardrums and tear through hollow organs with its force.

We felt it too, the immense heat radiating from an impossible will, outshining the sun, boiling asphalt, stone and skin.

We thought it should be bright to be so hot, but is wasn’t. A giant pillar of grey clouds, miles high and miles wide, beautiful in the way all the faces of death are beautiful, attractive the way man and beast are always drawn to the superior force.

We could see it approaching and that it was, in fact, spinning with wind speeds never heard of before, but that was hard to make out against its size. Those who could look far saw that it was burning and ripping out the trees and the houses on the land, flipping them up and about like matches, ash in seconds. And it was coming. Those who still had eyes closed them, those who still had throats prayed, or screamed.

It hit our walls like the hand of god. The strength of the wind and its temperature vied for the most destruction as our foundations went up in flames as they were torn from the ground and from each other, shattered into bricks, into splinters, into dust and ash. Everything was born up and to the west at first, desintegrating as it went, and we went with it, higher and higher. From above we could see that the storm formed a perfect circle and that the center was indeed calm, and incandescent as the air in it turned to plasma. From even higher we thought our city looked tiny, smaller than the diameter of the storm, and the landmarks we built and knew where barely seen in the seconds they lived. Behind the storm we saw a black trail and knew that it had eaten its way into the bedrock.

The storm had stopped moving forward, directly on top of our city, but started spinning faster, and faster, and we spun with it. The forces of the wind where igniting even the dust and the ash and now it became bright, the brightest light ever seen on our planet, before the wind dropped. What the storm had carried it flung outward and down as it sunk in on itself with a smile, slowing to a standstill, shrinking and disappearing at last, leaving only heat on the ground and ash in the sky.