By: Jeremy R. Rutherford
There was no time for explanation, for there was no warning. This trouble all began with a rumble, low, deep and hard from the center of the earth. No one knew when or where the vibrations actually started from. The stories about it, slow at first, began increasing at a horrifying rate. One day, wherever you were at, the noise would start, a terrible, slow grinding noise beneath everything else, increasing slowly, steadily until it could no longer be ignored.
The best it could be described is as if the world was tearing itself asunder, which is what seemed to be happening. The larger cities fell first, buildings, tall and proudly built, tumbling into the ground and devoured by it, never to be seen again. Countless people, gone in an instant, silenced and swallowed. Those were the larger ones, ruined, but visible.
The ground just simply opened up and ate the smaller towns, pulling them under without a trace.
But, it wasn't an earthquake and it wasn't the world tearing itself into pieces. It was the birthing of something that had laid dormant, undetected since before man first crawled among the dust of the field. The waters drained from the ground into the abyss, steam rising from some unknown heat, baking and cooking the surrounding land from which it emptied, even the oceans disappeared as the world broke, cracking open like a massive shell.
Black, viscous and ancient stinking fluid rose from the cracks, things undescribable boiled out, running from the boiling liquid, great insects and serpents, blind and maggot white died in the open air. The fluid ate things like a corrosive acid, nothing survived it's wake. Then, suddenly, the world was in pieces, floating away from itself, great shards of the planet splitting away. There in the midst, as we watched in horror, those of us who were left, something massive and winged, serpentine and glistening, uncoiled itself and roared silently among the stars.
The Wyrm floated silently, inexplicacably massive, to the first shard of land and ate it. It seemed to stop after it's meal and to grow larger. As it moved again, it's jaws bit into the next shard. We were wrong and right. The planet was always alive. For, underneath all the soil and rock, lay not mantle and magma, but, flesh, bone and tendon. The Wyrm continued to take its meal.
Whoever or whatever was left on the other shards is long gone. There were millions of corpses floating in the vastness, debris, all was devoured. This is the last piece of the blasted shell named Earth. The Wyrm, bloated and expanding, moves toward us. We are resigned as we await it out among a thousand screaming stars.
- FIN -
