Purple Rain (Wermspittle)

Well, there is a rage in the storms of late years which really transcends bounds; I do not remember if I have noted it in these sheets before: but I never could have conceived a turbulence so huge. Hour after hour I sat there that night, smoking a chibouque, reading, and listening to the batteries and lamentations of that haunted air, shrinking from it, fearing even for the Speranza by her quay in the sequestered harbour, and for the palace-pillars.

The Purple Cloud

M. P. Shiel

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Nothing lasts forever. Even those vast aerial horrors that go on to kill off entire worlds eventually succumb in turn to some mysterious process of nature. Even Purple Clouds die. Not quietly, not gently, but ferociously and violently. Purple Clouds do not go quietly into oblivion, they become intensely agitated and wracked with lightnings and hurricanes, tornadoes and storms. Thunder shatters the gloomy silence brought upon the world by their deadly vapors. Where once they stole into the world like quiet thieves, these aerial horrors depart in a spectacular tempest of sound and fury witnessed only by the unburied dead left to rot where they fell.

Rain washes the purple stain from the clouds. The skies become a raging battlefield between vast aerial horrors and unknown forces, and those few survivors left down below upon the tainted and toxic surface of the world find themselves faced with an entirely other form of holocaust...

Sometimes...Some fragment of a Purple Cloud, beset with the thunderous wrath of a vengeful atmosphere and cast down from its lofty throne over a world it had all but murdered will flow through some Weak Point or other aperture in its blind panic to escape. These sorts of reduced and diminished Purple Clouds are known as Purple Tempests or Purple Rain and while they have been stripped of much of their former glory, they remain formidable, terrible things even in their last death throes.

Exposure to the Purple Rain causes temporary fits of madness, violence, and has been known to make doves cry. Chemists and others collect the stuff to use it in various processes; the Pruztians were the first to learn how to distill a potent nerve gas from it.

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Minor Miasmas  |  Purple Wisps | Purple Haze | Deep Purple Smog |  Purple Rain 
Purple Clouds | Purple Horde
Srumachis

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Inspiration: The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel, with a little assist from this guy. Happy Thirtieth Anniversary!