The skies are dangerous, deep and dark. The sun crawls, vile and squirming, endless and convulsive, but here, so very far from the ever-mountain, it is a dull and angry thing, its light full of shadows and the flickering of flame. Above, the stars look down at the world, occasionally shifting, moving in patterns that speak of constellation and prophecy.

Sometimes, they blink, slow and wet.

Xala runs, feet beating a rhythm against sharpened stone and crawling vines, dancing between ground shaped like shattered glass and through drooping trees. They creak and groan in the wind, the crackling of their ever-breaking branches speaking in a language that no one in his village dares to know, and he does his best to listen past them, to try and hear for signs of pursuit.

The fact that he hears nothing assures him of little.

More than once he stops, out of breath, ducking close to the ground so the drooping branches cannot touch him in his stillness. The air in the valley is thick, dense with the heat and wetness of a sauna, swimming with a nutty, sweet and spicy scent. Xala knows that when this happens he is to hold his breath, and could perhaps do so for many hours still.

He cannot afford to. He has seen what the heavy air can do to people, saw what happened to his sister when she inhaled too much and began to rot from the lungs outward- but if he holds his breath now, he will be slowed. He riles his spiritual reserves, moving his inner essence into a greater formation so it swirls more violently about his lungs, and prays it will be enough.

The sound of a twig snapping somewhere behind him cuts past the whispering of the breaking trees, and without daring to look back he is running again.

He puts everything he has into moving. He has to warn them. He has to tell them that the end of the world is coming.

One of the trees manages a swipe and he has to pause, use some of his essence to rile up the shards in his arm. The tattoo, gifted on his fifth birthday, crackles like shattering ceramic, thin and razor-sharp limbs of stone spawning and tearing apart the tree where it touches him. Without even pausing to check, he tears a star-shaped chunk out of his shoulder, the new scar joining dozens more as the splinter that lodged in him spawns like an ever-breaking fractal and tears the meat to slurry.

The air reeks of death, flavored like freshly-cracked nuts and burning sugar, and Xala drinks it greedily, forcing himself to move. The end of the world is coming, and if he doesn’t make it in time there will be nowhere to go.

They have had to move more than once already. Every year the end draws closer, many-limbed and crawling, cutting apart all that it can see and crushing it flat. The end comes dressed in fire and light, screaming with many mouths, always screaming. Xala believes, like his mother told him before her end, that the end is a child of the sun, hateful and writhing forever like its parent. Xala has heard it spoken that the end breeds more of itself from out of steel and meat, that it has crawled its fingers into the final lands beneath the earth, that the stars blink so rarely now because they hope to see it devour all the peoples of the world.

Xala remembers when they tried to fight the end. The way his mother stood, swords resplendent and glowing with blessed thorn and moonlight, and walked off to face it. He had been old enough to fight, but his parents had spoken with the wisdom of those who have survived the forests for longer, and told him to remain. Watch over your sister, they had said. If we do not return, you will have none but each other, and blood is precious. Do not let it be spilt alone in the woods.

They did not return. The end took them apart, in fury and song, in a constant noise and light that turns the world to hells come early. And now his sister is gone too, too weak to hold her breath for the hours needed to travel from their home to safety.

But Xala still runs. There are other families, other friends and loved ones, and as much as his heart aches and his lungs begin to burn in sweet, heavy air, he runs. And distantly, ever onward from the ever-mountain and the lands of the ever-screaming sun, the end follows towards him.

He does not see where he is going. He is traveling so, so fast, his essence burning his muscles with its potency as he spills it out of his well and floods his body with it. In a normal night, he would remember the words of his family and chide himself for panicking. The forests are deep and dark, but in that dark is safety, in that depth is strength, so long as one is not a slave to their fear. But he can’t help it. His lungs are starting to hurt and he is going so fast, faster than he has ever gone, all his normal care left behind.

The end is coming.

Xala runs, violent and alone, from the light of a horrifying dawn.

The end is almost here.

A hand shoots out, grabbing Xala by the bicep and holding him firm even as he tries to rush past. Trained instinct screams at him to react, to twist and spiral his body so the grip cannot hold, but before he has a chance to he feels a calming wave of essence blanket the area they are in. It embraces him and the space around them, shapes it to be one with the soul which has touched it, and Xala breathes a heavy sigh of relief.

He stares up into the face of one of the village elders. Elder Xorus looks down at him, her face stern but concerned, painted in constellations of scars from a childhood encounter with a spasming shadow.

“Are they here?” she asks. “Have they found us?”

Xala nods. He tries to speak, but all that comes up is the taste of iron and a wracking cough.

Elder Xorus places her hand on his back, the scarification on it flowing into his flesh and letting her essence move through him easily. He feels his breathing lighten as her power massages his lungs, slowly altering the damage in his lungs to become part of him, shifting so that it strengthens rather than harm.

For damage like this, it will take some time, but even beginning the process is enough to allow him to speak once again.

“We have to go,” he rasps. “They are coming. The brightest star has returned, and he is cutting the forests apart.”

Elder Xorus nods. “Be brave. You have done well to speed back so quickly.”

Before Elder Xorus can move, Xala grabs onto her arm. “Please. We have to get back. We have to prepare to fight. There is nowhere left.”

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Elder Xorus looks down at him, a single eyebrow arched. “Your fear has no place here, Xala. We will not run, it is true.”

He collapses a bit at that, falling to his knees among sharp stones and vines. He breathes again, the act no longer painful but still shallow, and gives a single, quiet cry.

A moment later, he stands back on his feet, forcefully stretching his shoulders and rolling his neck.

“So be it. I will delay them but a moment, Elder. Please, return to the others and prepare.”

Elder Xorus quirks a very slight smile on her face before the stone strength she bears closes it again. She shakes her head.

“Your courage becomes you, Xala. But we will not be fighting, either. I have come only to know where we must be, and where I must aim what we carry with us.”

It is only now, freed from exhaustion and panic, that Xala looks behind the elder. There are three others there, all tribe members, all of them blooded and well-scarred. He nods to them in customary greeting, and they nod back, one of them signing respect and tapping knuckle to forehead. On the ground between them lies a single, large stone, shaped into a box, wrapped in metal chains.

He looks in surprise at the use of metal, so rarely refined and so wastefully made into such thick, heavy links, but shakes his head.

“Elder, I have seen them. The end is here in force. Their shells are aglow and their blades unsheathed, their dogs crawling and gorging before them. I do not see how any weapon can stop them now. We must run, or we must stand and die with strength. I can see no other choice. Perhaps we can still buy a few moments for the sick and the young, but they will overcome us.”

For a moment, he glimpses another emotion on the elder’s face. It is not sadness, not quite. Closer to shame, perhaps, but still not entirely correct. Melancholy, perhaps, tinged with guilt.

“No weapon we can make could fight back the end, this is true,” she says. “We are a people of shadow and song, of scar and starlight. We are not as the end is, ever-consuming and ever-destroying. But we are also not alone, in the dark or beneath the sun, and the end is not an ending for all.”

She turns, a single ‘click’ of the tongue ushering forward the three others and the stone they carry between them. Their scarification and tattoos speak of great power already, and Xala has known each of them to be able to roam for days out in the wilds without fear, but they struggle to lift the object carried between them.

“We are not a people of war. We are survivors. But this ‘end’ is not the only thing of war in the world, Xala, and if there is one thing that war does is breed more of itself. Come. You will return to the others. I will stay to unleash the weapon. When you see it rise, add your strength to the Shophet, aid him in our defense. I will be there soon to aid you and add my essence to the all-Well.”

Xala goes to say something, to protest… but one more look at Elder Xorus silences that thought. This is the most he has ever heard her speak, and it seems perhaps that it has strained something in her, for she holds herself tense now. He looks behind himself and sees the first flickers of light and sound, the snicker-snack of the end’s brightest star and his everblade cutting through the world on the way to them.

“Go. All of you, now. I have not the patience to coddle children.”

This time, Xala only nods, touching a fingertip to his forehead and bowing slightly. It is the highest sign of respect that they have time for, out here in the wilds, and he does not look back a second time as he runs.

He does not know if he believes the elder that this weapon will stop the end. He is far more afraid that it will simply unleash a sibling of it, birthed also from war and fire. He fears that he will not have even time to scream before the end takes him and cuts him to nothing, unfit to even rest beneath the earth.

Almost thirty minutes pass before Xala and the others reach home. Thirty minutes in the comfortable dark, breathing only sparingly as the sweetness of the air tickles their lungs, and they arrive.

It is a paltry thing.

The home that Xala remembers, that he grew up in, was a place of beauty. All around it a sea of ever-breaking trees, roiling and washing away the dirt and the wilds, woven into a labyrinth, and in that labyrinth, light. Not the hateful, harsh light of the sun, forever screaming and coiling about itself, but the soft lights of shadow, where one improves the other, the dark and the gentle glow of fungal bloom both making art from every angle as one approaches, like a mirage. The homes there had been grown, each vine lovingly tended and washed until it was full to bursting and then emptied, and finally wrapped with just enough room for living spaces around conquered bones. He still remembers the time he spent there, learning to hold his breath and dance amongst raindrops that tickled with the glow of the stars.

Now, their home is desperate. Hungry, just as the people within it. The vines that are here are improperly dried, many of them smelling faintly of mold and only enough to block out the sharp stone underfoot. Some of the trees are cracked open around the site, but their ever-breaking wails are nothing like the whispering song of the splinter-moat they once had.

Xala lands among his friends and family, ducking through the hidden, maze-like patterns left in the trees. They look at him, and do not ask of him anything.

They already know the end is coming.

He sees the town center, where the Shophet stands. His skin is more scar than flesh, every impossible pattern imprinted into it overlaid until he glows off-white under the gaze of the stars. He looks like he is made of bone, his angles made sharper by the engraved tattoos and black stone that grow from him like a thousand spiraling antlers from his shoulders and waist.

The Shophet sees him, and nods, once, but then there is no more time.

The end meets Elder Xorus and the stone coffin she carried, and the world turns to silence.

For a moment, Xala sees the end. Highlighted against distant trees and distinct from the always-murmuring woods, it stands on all its many legs. It is armored in white and gold, every facet unnaturally sharp-edged, their edges tinted with jade and ivory. On long, glowing leashes are things which he called dogs but surely cannot have a name, surely cannot be of this world, for they are madness, their very forms crawling impossibilities of limbs and teeth and oozing muck. Where they walk, where they ooze forth, the splinters of the ever-breaking trees are consumed, and made still, and they carry that death with them forward.

And before even they stands a man. He is not a man, not really, not with skin so unscarred, not with robes so pristine and canvas-grey, and no man could do as he does. Where this thing in the shape of a man turns its gaze, the world is divided. Things come to pieces, unmade by holy and divine Division, until all that is left is ash. In the things hand, there is a blade that shines brighter than any star in the sky, and blinks shut only when it is sheathed.

Arrayed against them stands nothing.

He sees the chain, falling away to the ground. He sees bits of stone coming apart into dust and atoms in the air. He even sees Elder Xorus, briefly, before she holds her arms wide and is consumed by nothing.

He cannot name what it is. You cannot name something that does not exist. It is not there. Nothing stands there, emerging like an endless mountain up, up into the air. Nothing is vast, like a living spiral, curling in on itself and expanding all at once. Nothing is so heavy that the air bends and the world shivers and the ground whimpers and the trees cease their whispering and turn to silence.

It might have a color, if it were not nothing, a shade which is almost real but which hurts to look at until he feels his eyes squirm like they are made of eels. But there are no eels, and it does not hurt, because there is nothing there.

Nothing moves forward, its every motion like a fractal and a whirlpool in one. Nothing turns along an axis that cannot be real to sweep over the oozing dogs of the end and turn them into nothing too. Nothing shifts its weight into something like an orbit or a halo and looks upon the end and turns it to spirals and nothingness too.

The man that is not really a man and who cuts with his eyes turns to look at the nothing, and for a moment, it is like the world aches at their touch.

The man that is not really a man, for no man can look at nothing like that, smiles, and sheathes his blade. Its light blinks, like an eye closed in meditation.

And then all the world is light and nothing and could not ever be anything else, and everyone Xala has ever loved is screaming and afraid, and all he can do is offer up every drop he has to make sure that they survive the coming of nothing and the end of the world.