Ephemeral Blooming [ONC2026]

The world has been blooming for a long time, now. A Blooming is the slowest death a planet can be subjected to, after all - as proven by the husks of once thriving worlds still turning around the Last Sun. Each planet had slowly peeled its layers off, bending outward in a mockery of a flower. Corpses, forever frozen in their most beautiful yet broken form. Their faces, the innermost cores, were turned towards one of the dead suns. Broken little cracked balls, the light having seeped out of them like liquid gold, lost forever. Now, the Last Sun was dying, and the last planet in this system was about to start the final stage of its Blooming. Its last hurrah.

And the stars were dying with it.

Darkness has been swallowing the universe, the monsters within it eating the stars. Now, the only question that remained wasn't whether it would survive - it was how it would go down. Will Burgeon, last living planet of the Solquin system, slip into endless night first, or will it be able to finish its last dance?

And so, with a murder that heralds the beginning of the end, everything gets set in motion. Burgeon holds its breath. Soon, the Final Blooming will reach its last act.