Our Failures

Prologue: Black snow

The ubiquitous ash drowned out the sun, covering the world in darkness. The mountain from where it came was but a candle lighting a castle. It was only visible when you looked for it, and only if you knew it was there in the first place. The cold was slowly creeping in my bones, even as the molten rock tried to warm the world. The glow from the heat would soon be put out by a winter that would last too long and finish off anything that had survived the Earth-shattering discharge.

The man responsible had burned away, his skin ripped from his body as the magma washed over him. His plan for peace had succeeded, though perhaps not in the way he had planned. This is his reward, and his punishment was that he would never see it, never see the god he had released fulfil its purpose because it had taken him as the first. It was mere days after the start of the eruptions that Asteria was destroyed, covered in a sea of molten rock and ash. The oceans went next as soot began to cover the top and slowly sunk deeper, suffocating the fish that dwelled there.

Now nearly a month later, after the discharge stopped I returned, hunger being my last companion as I prolonged how long my body could survive with only a small amount of water. I couldn't save the world anymore but maybe just maybe I could fix the mistakes of my generation. It would give new life a chance while the rest died out, killed by stupid ideas of selfish need and peace.

I sighed before pulling as much magic out of the air as I could, it ripped through my mortal coil expanding it beyond what it had ever been before. It was dangerously close to rupturing before I pushed it out in a large stream, commanding it to collect the ash into a single ball before teleporting it far away, it's mass landing on the lunar body.

My body ached, the blood in my veins boiling as my mind slowed. I had one last sight of a bright blue sky, with not a single cloud in the sky before my eyes closed, my body warming once more. Then the darkness washed over me.