“This place reeks,” Ty spits. We had looked around, but all the corridors of the four-story building and all the doors look the same. I open one. It has a look of familiarity. But what meets us on the other side is something quite different than what I had expected. A swirling vortex made of grey mist and electricity fades in and out of focus, as though not fully in phase with this dimension. It twists like a heart of time out of which all reality is emanating from. Tearing like fabric, the air about it seems to stretch and contract with each pulse of the thing.
“Merde,” Ty mumbles. “Right, I think we shouldn’t go in there.”
“Calyx?” I say as I see her moving towards it.
“Father?” she whispers, looking intently into the swirling maw.
“Cal?” says Ty.
“Calyx!” I yell, seeing her walk closer.
You might consider someone a rational, intelligent person, yet when that note of emotion is struck within such an individual, rational thinking is a thing forgotten. What remains is a babbling and incoherent idiot who once again reminds you people are stupid. We believe what we want to believe and the greatest lies we tell are those we tell to ourselves. In times like these, I know that, truly, the greatest enemy of mankind is man himself. She extends a hand towards whatever she sees and whatever image of her father the vortex has conjured up in her mind. I can see the need in her eyes.
“I’m here, father. How did you get here?” I jump to her, but her hand is already within. It swirls and twists, thin as hair. She too begins to bend and extend. I grab her and extend with her. Ty grabs me and extends with us both. There is no pain as we are sucked inside, only a sense of the universe coming to an end. I scream a silent scream and realize pain would be a thing more welcome.
We find the man standing there, middle-aged. He tells us what we see, his words creating landscapes. He waits looking at a horizon in flames.
“I was young,” he began. “That day, I was young for the last time. The sky was dark, but not the type of dark of the night, this was the kind of dark you could smell. The kind of dark that bites your lungs and fills your nostrils shut. Snow had fallen that day. It had fallen and kept falling for a thousand years. I knew that day we had killed it. Killed the one thing we should never have killed. We killed humanity. We killed the world. I walked alone that evening. The ash-covered streets were empty. My footprints faded behind me just like I knew the memories of a better world will fade along with me. But I was determined, you see. I had predicted this, saw it happen, felt it happen. But the stasis chamber I had built needed to be improved upon, and I had little time left. When the evening faded and night fell, the distant booming of destruction at my heels, I realized this was the end. I didn’t want to accept it. I fought it until I could fight no ore. I built my own coffin and buried myself from the world.”
“How did you do this?” I ask as we begin to walk ahead. Visibility is high and I can see far into the distance. Almost as if someone fashioned my view so I could see it all. There’s an explosion out there, building a twisting red and yellow spire into the sky.
“Nomad?” Ty says, his voice uncertain, afraid. Ash falls from a layer above us the color of night. The clouds are thick, thundering. A heat reaches us and I can smell it, like a thousand dead bodies. We stand in the light of it and all I see of the others is their black silhouettes. I look at Calyx, I gaze at Ty. They are silent, caught in a state like me, between marvel and utter terror. Our skin begins to burn. The pain is total, all-encamping. But it soon fades. What remains is light. And in that light, I am them, they are me, we are one. I see their black skeletons in the light but those too are wiped away like shapes in sand.
We come back to it beside the black box as the body – a shriveled corpse – spills out from its confines. The fluids still drip from the floating coffin, over the body and down on the floor. The corpse doesn’t move, its eyes are dead. The smell makes my head spin.