On a ruined throne in a long forgotten world, something stirred. Invisible energies, undetectable and unknowable even to the mightiest forces praised in the current legends, began to coalesce into a single form. Slowly, ever so terribly slowly, those energies manifested something.
Or more likely, revealed it.
Who can say how many centuries, how many millennia, the concealments placed around that ruined castle had stood? Yet even as they fell the once mighty structure showed no change. A thousand spires still lay crumbled and broken, covered in the dust of ages and corroded by the erosion of eons. Time, most relentless of all forces, had undone this once overwhelming glory, leaving only ashes behind. The mighty walls that denied all challengers, the terrifying heights that dominated the hearts of any mortal king, and even the supreme army that stood watch on those fearful heights, an army that had never faced defeat; all had long since been lost to that unrelenting foe. Now, eons after the glory of this great fortress reigned at the peak of every known world, nothing remained but dust and ruins. Not even the oldest of legends reached back to when this fortress still stood.
Within the heart of the fortress, behind the mighty walls and thousand spires, there was an ancient temple, at whom’s center rested an even more ancient throne. The temple had been built around this throne and the terrible energies it contained, to worship whatsoever had made that throne, long forgotten even then. The remnant of its power they managed to control had been enough to make the inhabitants of this temple supreme throughout existence, enough to justify this great fortress and its impenetrable defenses. Yet now the full might of those energies was moving, in all their immeasurable glory. Twisting and turning as if alive, they undid concealments lain not within stone or earth, but within space and time and reality itself. Thus, flickering, unsteady, something began to appear on that ancient throne.
Blue. That was the first impression that would be given, but it was not a blue of the natural world. It was not the deep greenish blue of the oceans, nor the dark indigo blue of the deepest lakes or the pale blue of the shallowest. The skies’ brilliant blue, a varied spectrum seen over many worlds, would be considered dull before this blue. It was a color between blue and green, unnatural and abnormal. Cyan, this color could be called by those who had developed it, but even that may not be sufficient. It was like the color of a tropical sea, a deadly poison, or a pure flame. Yet it was also beyond any of them.
That color was so striking, it almost concealed the pale skin beneath it. One could see in that paleness the skin of a person, a living being sleeping soundly on that throne. A girl, beautiful to some, less so to others, yet with features perfectly symmetric and even. The phrase ‘face of a doll’ would fit her perfectly. For in every aspect, from her small nose to her lightly closed eyes, her parted lips and her delicate chin, the girl’s face gave an impression of something crafted, not something born. Her slender limbs and undeveloped body furthered this impression, for the child that appeared atop the ancient throne took the form of a prepubescent child, without the seductive curves or the firm muscles that would be developed in an adult.
For a while, the girl slept even as the last of the concealments were undone. As they were, the power that had resided around that throne for so long began to dissipate, released to vanish into the surroundings and disappear. Its leaving tore away the last vestige of divinity the throne had held, allowing it too to crack and weaken, the weight of countless eons pressing down on it at last. The collapse of the throne on which she slept finally seemed to stir the girl to waken.
Her head slipped from atop her hand and fell to hang on her chest. Her curled legs twitched, one by one straightening to stretch out a long period of immobility. Pulling up her torso, the girl stretched her arms above her head and yawned widely, then pushed herself up and took a step to stand in front of the throne.
She looked around, her eyes still closed, smelling and hearing her surroundings for the first time since she went to sleep so many, many ages ago. She turned around and touched the throne, running her hand along its armrests and seeming to comfort it somehow. Kneeling, she rested her head on it one last time.
“You can rest now, old friend.” She whispered to no one.
But at those words something answered. The powers that had gone rushed back and then vanished again in an instant. With their vanishing, so too did the ancient throne collapse, falling apart and crumbling to dust in an instant. The girl remained kneeling, looking up at the sky while still keeping her eyes closed and seeing nothing. Silently, she prayed for something unknown, perhaps lamenting the disappearance of the last trace of where and when she had gone to sleep.
Far below her, the prayer triggered something. Ancient spells, unknown even to that empire that had reigned from the temple of that throne, unknown even to the countless dominions before and after it, activated at last. Their purpose, nobody knew. Except for a single child, slowly rising to her feet and walking with the firmness of those who could see, and the sealed eyes of the blind.
“How long has it been, I wonder?” She asked the air around her, walking across the crumbling throne room. Beneath, the spells began to compress the iron core of the planet, gravity spiking and then disappearing in unnaturally rhythmic patterns. Like the beating of a heart, the core expanded and contracted under the influence of these forces.
“When I chose to sleep, this was a good world. I had taken it as far as I could; anything more, and I would have become a curse, not a savior, to those who lived here.” The girl spoke of times longer ago than legend or myth, time before time itself began. The heart-like beating of the core continued, pulses creating currents in the magma layer above. Far away from the planet, another signal reached the golden sun that ruled the heavens. Its core, like that of the world far away, began to contract as similar spells of gravity and anti-gravity pulsed their activations. Burning lifeforms, unintelligent, yet still with the instincts of life, felt the changes and from them something akin to fear. Of what, they did not know.
“So I chose to sleep, to sleep until such time as they managed to wake me, or such time as there were none of them left. I had hoped that I would be met on my waking, that by some miracle I would be proven wrong, and they would be waiting for me.” The girl sighed, laying her hand on one of the mighty pillars of the temple, still standing with effort after all these eons. To most, that would be considered miraculous. Yet the girl lamented their inadequacy. “Alas, it was not to be.”
The magma currents activated another set of ancient magics, myriad and arcane in function. Pressures fluctuated rapidly, as the continents on the world above were accelerated in their motion and, with great, shuddering tremors, started to move. The other planets in the system were even now receiving the signal let out from the girl when she woke, great spells of terrible might activating for the first time since this universe began. These other planets simply collapsed, antigravity and their own motion tearing their rounded forms asunder and strewing dust in great streams across the cosmos. Gas giants expanded, the hydrogen and oxygen within them igniting as pressure dropped and temperature rose, while deeper nuclear fusion reactions sparked something like unto a newborn star. That light surged through them, tearing the worlds apart faster and faster. One by one, they died, arcs of dust and fire filling the space around the brilliant sun.
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“How far you have fallen, my children. I know ostentation when I see it; a million gods know I have used it often enough. But to take pride in this? Even at its height you should have seen how crude, how weak this fortress you created was. Where has your glory gone? Where has the power and majesty you brought to me time and time again? Where is the confidence to challenge me head on, the cunning to plead a favor, the courage to demand my aid? Where has it all gone?” The girl continued her soliloquy as the magma pressures created far below her found the surface. The earth shook terribly, the very ground unsteady and unstable. All around her the fortress trembled, not collapsing yet, but not resisting much either. And far away, the ruined corpses of worlds began to stir and move, gathered by terrible forces to a single point.
“Millennia… That is all it takes any more. Once I gave you life eternal; once I gave you the power to last meganuum. How did you spoil it, my children? Have the years gone by in their millions? I don’t doubt that. Even so… I expected better.” The girl lamented, standing in front of the temple gates and looking down on the ruins of the mightiest fortress of the universe. “I expected much better.” She shook her head, her eyes still closed yet somehow perceiving the world in front of her.
Behind her the shaking of the earth completed its work, causing the mighty temple to come crashing down, shaking apart to tiny fragments in its fall. The heaving world shattered every remnant of the dead city, pulverizing the collapsed spires and even the deep-seated foundations of the once imposing wall. All around the world volcanoes spewed magma, the liquid stone from the core of the world driven out by the pulsing pressures generated far below. As its heart beat, the world bled.
Behind the girl, fire flowed from the dormant volcano on which the temple was set. It covered the collapsed remnants, destroyed them in the fire of the world’s creation, melted them in a heat that the inhabitants of this world feared even at the height of their power. Yet the girl was unmoved, even as the liquid flame flowed over her bare feet. Unaffected by that ancient fire, she waded through the growing lake of magma towards a destination as of yet unknown.
“I cannot bear to see what you have done to yourselves, my children.” The girl said, her hands brushing against the sinking pillars being consumed by fire. “I gave you everything… Even so, you failed.” The girl stopped as the magma rose to her knees. “Yet you will say that I failed you.” Her tone suddenly became reproachful.
Around the world, forests burned and deserts melted to glass. Mountains collapsed, their snowy peaks exploding in steam as the world entire is scorched by terrible heat. Even the great oceans were visibly shrinking, the mighty fire driven from the heart of the world by the relentless beating of its core heart overwhelming even their mighty girth. Tsunamis devastated the beaches, as the countless explosions at the depths of the ocean drove it to hammer the shorelines. Yet except for the already vanished temple and fortress, no sign of civilization was consumed by these disasters.
Above, the stars were hidden by a cloak of ash and steam, mighty hurricanes feeding off the blazing surface to ravage it with winds beyond measure, scouring clean every trace of mountain or forest, devouring islands who then rebuilt themselves with the flowing fire from below. The world was dying; the armageddon of myths nothing compared to the calamity being visited on it now. Yet through it all a single girl walked, wading through a sea of fire and breathing a smoke of ash and heat, unconcerned with the perils of a dying world.
Beyond the choked sky, the streams of matter from the destroyed planets were coalescing, forming the skeleton of a great trumpet. A music of energy and gravity played around it, a great symphony of destruction targeted not a mere world, but the might of a star. Resonating with the beating core at the heart of that blazing sun, the music grew as matter gathered to fill the trumpet, a great instrument larger than a thousand worlds.
“You never believed this possible, did you?” The girl asked. “Even if you still lived, my children, you would refuse to accept what I am doing now. Impossible, you would say. Not even the primordial age you claim I ruled could have done this, much less the age of gods you claimed supremacy over. But I was born long, long before either of those names were used. This was commonplace once, you know? Geocide a trivial exercise many, many times, but starcide? Now that, my children. That was an art only once. A terrible, wonderous, art.” The girl raised her hands like the director of an orchestra, lifting to signal the start of a great piece of music.
Far away, at that mysterious signal, the spells that were controlling the flowing matter from the ruined worlds were torn apart and replaced with stronger ones. Space shuddered as it was forced aside, the speed of light damned as the matter seemed to teleport into place and complete the terrifying trumpet. The beating hearts of the star and the world went out of time, thumping faster and faster as if scared, inanimate heavenly bodies mimicking the fear that is the province of the living about to die. And then the girl struck the first beat, swinging her hands down to open the concert.
On the world, negative gravity thrust the fires of the magma layer and the core away at impossible speeds. Pillars of fire rose into the air, streaming away from the planet like beams of energy. The crust shattered, pieces fleeing in every direction and crumbling smaller and smaller as fiery magma formed a sea around them, cooling rapidly in the extreme cold of space. The girl stood atop one such remnant, surrounded by streaming fire and vanishing air, and she watched with an unobstructed view as the song of the trumpet began to play. A song of gravity, electricity, and magic, resonating with the sole purpose of bringing death to the star above.
“I will not allow these remnants to distort your legacy, my children. You will be remembered at your peak, when you served and challenged me in equal measure. And so, I will show your empty tomb, what the summit I wanted you to reach looks like.” The girl proclaimed, shaking her head in sadness. “My spells have decayed over the meganuum since I slept. That is not surprising; time wears on all things. You know that all too well, I think. So I hope I will be forgiven for my impatience. They would have taken days in this state to annihilate every trace of your legacy. I will merely reduce that time to hours.”
The trumpet’s blast of starsong struck the star, shaking it to its very core. The blazing corona flared and collapsed in intervals, waves racing across its surface in time with those tearing apart the fusion reactions far below. The life born of its fire died as those waves struck it, even their durable forms unable to withstand the pressurized blasts of the star-killing weapon. Then the trumpet sang a second note.
The girl merely watched the star above, seeing the mighty streams of fire blasting off into space, incinerating the floating garbage where this world had once reached for the stars. Gateways, floating unchanged for millions of years, untouched by time, melted in the fury of stellar fire. Satellites disintegrated, their myriad machines becoming atomic dust, then merest particles even less than that. Mining outposts already crushed and turned to rubble by the destruction of the asteroid belt were treated to the same fire, returned to the subatomic dust from which the universe was born. Defying space and time, striking faster than light under the influence of ancient magics, more streams of fire reached across the heavens, scouring clean distant planets on which colonies had been set. Some bursts even reached across dimensions, blazing clean planes of existence on which that long dead race had studied demons and gods. Even those places were long abandoned, the gods and devils not long surviving the extinction of their patron race, but the starfire was merciless. It wiped out the temple homes, the ancient vaults, the records that still remembered what history and myth did not. Not even the mystical Akashic record, the history of the universe recorded in the still traveling patterns of light, was spared. As the star sputtered and died, there was no trace of the long dead race remaining to be found, save for the pieces of their first, and last, world. No magic, no technology, nor any other force capable of existing, would ever be able to find a single shred of evidence that they had ever been real.
“Goodbye, my children.” The girl whispered, her eyes still tightly closed as the pulsating inner core of the dying star, unhindered by any atmosphere or even the outer core, collapsed one more time before exploding outward in a magic-induced supernova. The trumpet, hit by the blast, disintegrated rapidly into the subatomic matter it had been shortly before. As the light washed over her even through her tightly closed eyes, the girl spread her arms and welcomed the oncoming torrent of destruction, which returned everything to dust before eternal darkness dominated the void where once a mighty civilization had ruled over space and time.