The End of Life

The searing glare of the sun beats down on the scorched baron landscape punishing even the grains of sand that dare rest beneath it's gaze.

A skeletal figure stands motionless in front of an unmarked gravestone cracked and weathered with the passing years. A tattered faded cloak barely covers his desiccated body with dry leathery skin pulled taut against his bones.

How long has he stood there? Weeks, months or maybe years. The concept of time alludes him since he managed to escape death.

But she did not escape it.

Clutched tight in the bony embrace of his right hand is a tarnished locket. A memento from a time long past. A heart shaped symbol of love given to him by the only person he can remember from so long ago that like everything else, the engraving had faded away into nothing.

She was taken too soon.

He had sought to follow her, to do everything he could to bring her back from the land of the dead, or to remain there with her for eternity.

Plunging deep into the dark guarded mysteries of the occult he researched every known ritual, studied each twisted prophecy and analysed as many ancient practices as possible until he finally came across his answer.

A gateway, an unnatural crossing into the realms of death itself.

My hope was naïve.

Summoning the portal took all of his strength. A faint purple light surrounded him, refracting off the beads of sweat that glistened on his forehead. A small portal no bigger than him flickered to life in front and he stepped through without hesitation. Confusion was soon followed by despair.

The howl of souls flooding into a vast void like beacons of light swarming all around only to be grasped at, torn and devoured by creatures so hideous that even a child's vivid imagination could not have conjured them up. Shock had stripped him off all motion, his mind blank with fear as it struggled to process the mortifying scene.

His body jerked as a black ghostly claw wraps around his ankle sending an intense pain through his leg as if shards of ice were piercing deep into him. His chest tightened as the muscles in his body begin to shrink and his skin starts to encase his bones.

A wave of panic had begun to set in. Realising his very life was being drained away he lashed out breaking free of the deathly grasp and lunged back through the portal which quickly closes behind him.

I never stood a chance of saving her.

Seeing his now gaunt and sunken figure and feeling a sense of loss unlike one he had ever known, he retreated into hiding were he waited for the inevitable end. The one that never arrived.

For hundreds of years he watched from the distance as humanity rose to heights he never dreamed could have existed. Thriving civilisations formed out of nothing only to be crushed by another seeking to take it's place. In the midst of the chaos and destruction, the world around suffered.

Now only pockets of humanity exist. Small barbaric factions squabbling like children over the very little natural resources that are left. The beauty of this wondrous world all but diminished.

The beauty she loved. She would have hated to see the world this way, baron and lifeless. If only they knew.

The last remnants of the human species will soon have destroyed all she had held in awe and this planet will become nothing but a dust covered rock floating pointlessly in space.

I know what must be done.

A choice he had been deliberating since he stood in front of that gravestone many moons ago.

Stretching out his hand, his bones cracked and protested with use. Sand shook from his corpse like body as he slowly kneels down placing the locket onto the grave. Fingers reach out into the ground, his eyes remain closed as he takes a deep breath and a glow of purple starts to envelop around him.

Focusing harder than ever before, the purple light begins to solidify into a dark mass growing larger and larger and with every last ounce of strength he tears open a portal as wide as possible like a canyon of darkness in the bright sky.

Slumping down next to the locket he looks up and watches as the creatures of the void begin to swarm through.