The End of Time

It is the end of the world.

Yes, I sound insane. But I am not. How do I know? Because I caused the End.

You heard me correctly. I caused the End. To be specific, I caused the beginning of the end of the world, and now I will be the sole orchestrator of the End of all Ends.

When you look at me, you wouldn’t think I would be the cause of the end of all things. I am a seventeen year old girl, slightly built, with clear white skin and wavy red hair. People would have said I reminded them of Irish fae of old, if the Red hadn’t already burned every remaining piece of paper in the world. I have elfish features and bright green eyes. No one thought of me as a threat until I was twelve.

It was my birthday and I wanted it to last forever. I had gotten every gift I wanted, and my crush had even smiled at me. It was almost sunset when I finally got to blow out the candles on my cake. It was the happiest moment of my life. I never even got to make my wish. It started to get cold, and frost formed on the table and grass. It came from me. My parents took me to the hospital, where the first thing the doctors did was take my blood. It hurt.

They came back hours later and took me from my parents, explaining nothing except that I had an extra nucleotide base in my DNA, which made me very dangerous. They told me later that I had two conflicting bases in the sequence, which allowed me to stop time. They made the mistake of telling the public. There was mass hysteria, and the Red was formed to weed out any alleged to be like me. They forced everyone to submit to DNA testing, then killed everyone with the extra base. They found that it affected everyone differently. I was the only time stopper. I was the only one they couldn’t kill.

None of the soldiers could get close to me. It seemed that the closer they got, the slower time got, until eventually they dropped dead. The Red compensated by putting me into a cage. I sat in that box for four and a half years. By then, the world had changed. The Red had burned so many houses that the sky had turned gray. They had killed three quarters of the population and taken over the governments of more than half the world. There was a constant war going on between the EXists, as they called the people with the extra base, and the Red, and the world was dying in the crossfire.

I walked the Earth looking for people sympathetic with my cause. I found none. The Red hated me because I was EXist. The EXists hated me because they believed I had brought the war down on them. My parents and friends were dead. I got to see my old crush once before he died. He was Black, the Red that had defected to the EXists. He said that he did it for me. I smiled at him. Then he was hung for treason by the Red.

Now I stand it the center of a battlefield, and I know it is my fault. It is the last battle. I will make it so. I will not allow the destruction to continue. I will let the Earth recover and give birth to a new population, a more tolerant one, one where Red and EXists can live together without tearing the world apart.

I stand still and lift my head to the sky. I will see the sun before I destroy everything. As on my twelfth birthday, my wish comes true and the ash spreads. A ray of light hits my face and I let go. Time rips through me and I close my eyes as it spreads. First frost comes, and then time stops. Molecules freeze and nothing moves. I wait. It gets colder, finally hitting absolute zero. I watch as the world falls to pieces. I feel the spinning Earth grind to a halt. Motion stops. I cannot move.

I watch as the atoms holding the form of humans lose their shape. But they cannot move, so I must observe the soldiers melt into their own forms. If they were alive, they would have screamed in agony. But they have been dead for a while. Time has ceased. Nothing exists anymore. I have ended the world. I hope it can be reborn elsewhere.

I am free now. My terrible burden has been used and it is using me up. I stand in the middle of time and I know it is my fault. I have killed everything and now it is my turn. I feel my molecules stop moving and I know it is the End. There is nothing left. The Earth will stay frozen like this forever. I take one last look at the havoc I have wreaked, and then I die.

It is the End of Time itself.