Nuclear Time Waste Heroes

Forest Death

FOREST DEATH

In this place, the rain travels upwards in an act of senseless rebellion. If you tilt your head up in direction of the upwards rain you see the ocean looming and filtering light turning the visible world shades of blue and grey. Through the sea filled with astronauts you can see galaxies clear as the moon on unclouded nights.

Then through raindrops, magnified, I see death pale hands reach through to me from the depths of a fog thick as a forest.

"Lee?" My voice is carried over by swirling tendrils of smoke and I still can't see his face though I can feel his breath, cold as a corpse's, on my skin. "What is this place?"

My heavily bandaged fingertips touch his and the bitter rain travels in between the crevices in our hands clinging to the ends of Lee's fingers and then adding itself to the sea in the sky.

"How long have you been here?" The wind tosses my words around causing them to evaporate too quickly. This place is trying to obliterate me from its existence. The wind moans, tossing hair into my face, and it ebbs away the fog revealing a skeleton with the galaxy in their eyes.

The skeleton, it takes a thousand years for it to speak, and what comes out is gusts of desert wind hollering themselves a way out. "Time doesn't work the way we'd thought it did. This place turns our foundations to dust."

I feel static build up around me, extending to make Lee's hair stand on end. An electric shock forms between us and my hand shakes. Coils of blue electricity form between our fingers and arms linking us together.

"You're not making any sense."

In his eyes I see our solar system with a black hole. It eats and eats, never stopping, infinite like the path of wind.

"We can only watch the outcome of Time. We've been opening doors and watching as the Death Pulse wastes us away to dust. We live to see Time and now that I've seen Time what reason is there to live?"

The rain, only cold before, tears apart my bandages. Tears apart my flesh. It robs me of the very atoms that make me who I am. Drop by drop they take my being away to the sea in the sky until I'm mostly gone and what's touching Lee's hand is another skeleton. The unwanted pieces of myself orbit around us as if we had our own gravity field. Seconds pass and my skeleton gives way to gravity. Collapsing and turning to ash.

"Going back is impossible," Lee murmurs, his lips barely moving they give out more air than sound. "And we can't change the past. We can only run from it. There is no more purpose to life anymore and you'll see why. We run in straight lines from the womb to the grave and we don't ever stop to look outside of our fabricated universe. We ran faster than the rest though and I could predict our every movement. I should've realized this then."

"Tell me one thing before I go."

"What?"

"Where am I going?"

"You're going to see the rest of Time. You'll be the omnipresent time hero. Goodbye Vikko."