The Flight of Azrael

by Clark Ashton Smith


Scene: an immense and darkling plain, remotely lit by the sunset of the last
day. Two demons, passing from the interstellar deep, have paused on an isolated
hill-top.


First Demon

	What world is this, all desolate and dim
	Under the lone, phantasmagoric heavens
	Great with the hanging night? Yon luminance
	Is lurid as the Furnace-glare of hell,
	Seen from the contiguity of gloom
	Of a Cimmerian region. All the air
	Flags heavily, as beneath the weight of wings
	Invisible and evil-from the plain
	No movement, save of shadows mustering
	Behind the heels of day.


Second Demon

	It is the Earth,
	A hoary planet, old in wrath and woe
	As any hell. Red pestilence and war
	Have now refunded to the usuring wind
	The breath of all its peoples; Azrael,
	Delivering now the town and necropole
	To one decay in night's abysmal vault,
	Prepares him for departure. From afar,
	Seest thou not the towering of his wings,
	Like thunder on the sunset? Widening,
	Those vans involve and stifle half the light
	With bat-like folds and ribs: on the further stars,
	Or worlds unknown of the outer infinite,
	He now intends the darkness of his course;
	On Algol's planets haply poised, he will
	Make permanent the sable sun's eclipse,
	Or round some vast Antarean satellite
	His shadowed arc will broaden to a sphere,
	Oblivion's black and perfect globe. . . . On Earth
	He comes no more: the very worms have died
	In the scarce-nibbled carrion; the thin wind
	Will write man's epitaph in shifting sand,
	And the pale unfading arabesques of frost
	Adorn and fret his ghoul-forgotten tomb.