In one last, miraculous burst of sanity, Firenze slapped the emergency release.
The floor dropped away. The airship vanished.
The wind howled through an open door. The goliath was gone, sucked into the void.
The door closed. The lights came up.
Hill was on his knees, bloody, sobbing, and pounding at the floor.
Firenze stared through the moon-roof and watched the airship plunge away. It was aflame on all sides, its whipped-creme spires kissed by a funeral pyre. As he watched, one of the magnificent towers snapped clean like a dead twig. It ground across the city-scape like a rolling-pin, shedding bodies and debris as it smashed the lesser towers flat. When it reached the aft, it broke away and fell in parallel, two blazing sky-dancers on their final descent. More and more burst free, as the falling star became a falling cloud, filled with whirling chaff and crackling lightning.
Lifeboats popped free, seeds from a blazing pinecone.
One of the outriggers burst, like an angel, shorn its wing.
Firenze couldn't look away. He tracked the descent until the wreckage-cloud slammed into the ocean and boiled the sea. There, the tide churned red and drowned the lightning in her depths.
By the time the rescue-medics cracked the lifeboat doors, he was near-catatonic, unaware of the meaning of the lights and sirens around him. Time and place transposed as he floated from beach to gurney to bed to cell.
When he found himself again, he was dressed in a paper robe and chained to a jailhouse cot. That was when he understood the joke: they'd charged him with treason, after all.
His journey had ended where it started, in a concrete cell, a failure unmourned by the world, damned by his own hands.
He fell back to laughter, then, and did not stop.
