Doomsday

The view from the top of the regional command spire was resplendent. The shining crystal towers and dark blue alloy columns of the space elevators combined to create a captivating vision of beauty and industry. The harmony was only marred by the ugly bronze shapes of the battleships hanging low in the planet’s orbit, close enough to almost touch the tops of the vacuum pillars that siphoned the raw cosmic energy of the void. Azriel leaned on the safety railing on the inside of the windows and let out a small sigh, his head tendrils flashing a pale lavender in response.

The windows, nay most of the structure, was constructed from brilliathist. A material of superb tensile and compressive strength and beauty. All the strength and finery in the universe wouldn't help him now, for the end was upon them. The dark tears of anti-reality rifts could be seen far out in the depths of the void overhead. His highly advanced cybernetic eyes were able to zoom in far enough to make out the tiny dark shapes of ships exiting from the dark stains on reality.

This war had been raging for hundreds of years by now, they had started to call it The Oblivion Conflict as the enemy took no prisoners and left naught but barren charred rock in their wake. Azriel had seen the recent footage of the war over the neuralink network, the horrifying visions of anarchy and death appalled him to his very core.

The Celestials were not a peaceful race, not by nature, but their violent past was many thousands of years behind them. They had been collectively unprepared for conflict on this scale, and when word had spread of entire worlds burned to cinders many had refused to believe the news. Azriel could remember the first reports as if they had happened only a decade ago instead of hundreds of years.

He had been but a hatchling at the time, only a bare thirty or so years in age by the reckoning of their homeworld’s star. The news had suddenly changed, the caster becoming agitated as they began to read reports of death on a scale that could scarcely be imagined. It had originally been reported as some catastrophic natural disaster, nobody even imagined it could have been intentionally perpetrated. For who could imagine the evil that could murder trillions with such little remorse or pity. Men, women and hatchlings, all reduced to atoms and scattered to the solar winds. Not even the planet itself had survived, the force of its death so great that the very mantle had cracked open and spilled its guts into space.

And then the true horror, it happened again only days later. A single time was a catastrophe, but two times? Two times was a deliberate attack. Something out in the great dark was hunting them, wiping them out with the skill of a trained murderer. They had never even seen it coming.

Azriel had been fifty when he answered the call. Almost too young to fight, he had nevertheless left his parents' palace of shining crystal and burnished chrome to fight an enemy they barely understood. For who could understand the mind of a destroyer, and how naive they had been about the great enemy's true nature.

Shaking himself from the echoes of the past he looked up to the heavens once more. The heavens that burned with the fires of war, his head tendrils flushed a deep scarlet in anger at the sight. Azriel could see bright flashes of light as the two opposing forces met head-to-head, their clash so fierce it periodically lit the city below in hellish red strobes. He watched as the first bright streaks of falling debris began to tear bloody red gashes across the skies, the wreckage burning in the high oxygen of the planet's atmosphere.

The Celestial homeworld of Sheilnova had vastly higher oxygen levels than were normally seen on inhabited worlds. Rather than the more common twenty percent oxygen content expected, Sheilnova instead had an average oxygen level in the low forties. This super oxygenation made it dangerous to use uncontrolled fire as it would quickly consume almost anything remotely flammable in its vicinity till all was an inferno.

He watched as the superheated ruins tumbled into the city far below amid acrid plumes of smoke and debris. He was too far to hear the noise, but he could see the chaos as if he was standing right in the middle of it. He closed his eyes and tried to think of happier times, but all he could think about was his first battle.

Azriel stood in his shining Celestial Battlesteel plate armour and carried a Nullspear across his chest. A nanosaber blade on the end of a pure Stritemis Carbide haft. The orders to muster on the main deck had come across the ships neuralink only minutes before. Years of training had led him to this moment, finally he would be allowed vengeance for the uncountable trillions slaughtered by the forces of the dread Mathias.

A being of such evil and terrible power had never been seen before in all the long and bloody history of the galaxy. It was theorized that the being known only as Mathias was not in fact from their galaxy, nor even their universe. Theories about the origin of the Cosmic Cycles were well known and documented.

It was established fact that every two billion years the universe was wiped clean of all complex life. The only things that seemed able to survive were simple life and space faring civilizations that used primitive sublight technology. Anything remotely advanced would be destroyed as if it had never been. But there were clues left behind, fragments of chaos as they were generally called. Remembering his first encounter with the forces of evil, he recalled the monsters that were deployed against his fellows.

The boarding panel’s opened after the shuttles had made contact with the enemy ship, the sound of high energy weapons fire the first thing he noticed. The second was the smell. The enemy ship smelled of burning metal and death, the scents mixing like some unholy amalgam of spice and fire.

The next thing he noticed were the enemy themselves, the most wretched and twisted abominations he had ever laid eyes upon. Their twisted and malformed bodies looked as if nature had taken the blueprints of life and then spilled acid across them resulting in the misshapen horrors he saw. Their arms and legs were asymmetrical and their heads had too many eyes, four seemed natural to him, but these had dozens. Dozens of partially milky orbs that gazed in every direction at once as they fired wildly into his companions.

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He had hefted his nullspear in a shaking grip before charging the abominations with a scream of righteous fury on his lips. His head tendrils flared a muted orange as he fought his own fear that threatened to overwhelm him. He remembered the feeling of energy blasts glancing off his armoured chest, the smell of ozone that pierced his respirator and the sound of bones snapping as he plunged his nullspear into the upper body of one of the abominations. It flailed and screamed as it died, its lifeblood a horrid greenish ooze that made Azriel feel sick to look at. It wasn't like the pale clear liquid that coursed through his own veins, somehow even the very lifeblood of these monsters was corrupt.

He was jolted back to the present as the tower he was in shuddered. Looking down he could see the twisted form of wreckage spiraling away into the depths of the city. The rain of debris from the battle above was picking up, pieces of both friendly and enemy vessels now raining fire over the city. He bowed his head so as to not witness the death it caused, his head tendrils flashing a deep teal as his sorrow and fear mixed with hatred.

The Great Pact was supposed to protect them from things like this. The Great Intergalactic Pact of Nonaggressive Expansion was a treaty that had been signed millennia ago after the territory wars waged by the major factions of the galaxy had nearly torn it apart. The major factions at the time, The Greanth and The Great Ones combined with The Thousand Celestial Stars came to an agreement that they would stop encroaching on each other’s territory. For a time there was peace, but it couldn't last.

The Greanth were the first to break the pact as they moved towards the protected outer reaches of the Celestial territories. If only the reigning council had seen this move for what it had really been instead of interpreting it as an act of war. The council had been rash though, too hungry for the old glories of their blood soaked past. Instead of helping these refugees, they destroyed them. And with their destruction went any hope that there could ever be an end to the slaughter.

The Greanth were too proud to ask for help, and we too violent to offer it. Only the Great Ones could have stopped the carnage growing in our own lands, but they had their own problems as they were the first to be attacked by Mathias. He knew that they were the link that kept the Pact stable and that destroying them would make us turn on each other. It was as if Mathias knew our hearts, our deepest weaknesses. But if the theories were to be believed, that was likely true.

Azriel paused his thoughts, his head tendrils glowed a muted lime in confusion. What had disturbed him from his memories? He looked up and shrank in terror as he saw it.

The thing that met his gaze was a vision from his darkest hell, a ship so vast that it seemed to stretch into the very depths of the void itself. Its armored hull was blacker than night and bristling with weapons of every conceivable type and size. It was The Ruinstorm, the personal vessel of Mathias themself.

That meant it was truly over, for nothing in their arsenal could even hope to stand before such a mighty edifice of pure destruction. The ship was said to be older than time itself, a fragment of reality from a destroyed universe populated by tormented ghosts. The Cosmic Destroyers, the perpetrators of ultimate carnage.

He watched in terror as the last of the planets brave defenders were wiped out of existence as one might brush mere motes of dust from the air. The terrible weapons of the Ruinstorm were so powerful that they caused reality itself to tremble in fear. Some of the ships vaporized, others detonated as great explosive warheads pierced them. But far more terrible were the ships that simply ceased to be, destroyed by anti-reality weapons so powerful that they tore the very fabric of space and time to tatters.

With the last defenders gone the enemy fleet backed away, their job of entertaining their dark master now complete. The vast shape of the dark worldship moved ever closer to the planet and he said prayer under his breath and pushed away from the railing. There were no godly powers that could save him, nothing in the universe that could offer him salvation. But he would be damned if he died like a simpering coward.

Standing straight and trying to appear as stoic as possible, he watched the terrible black ship slow to a stop. It hung in the air, obviously far closer than it should have been able, no reaction thrusters or gravitational lifts evident on its titanic underside. It was as if it simply ignored the gravity of the planet below.

He shut all four eyes as a searing beam descended from the ship and to the planet’s surface far in the distance. Even though the beam had impacted hundreds of segments away, he knew it was already over. The ship stayed for a moment longer and then began to draw away, apparently satisfied with its handiwork. As it moved out and into the dark depths of space, Azriel watched the dark blots of anti-reality drives as they wormed through the fabric of the universe and carried his killers away.

He leaned almost bonelessly against the railing as they left. It was over, they left not to spare him or his people, but because they knew they were already dead. Azriel looked to the horizon, a horizon that was brightening like a sunrise on a clear day. It wasn't the sun that brought life to a new day however, but a wave of death that would consume them all in its fiery inferno.

Azriel stood and turned. He was exhausted, this war had taken its toll on him and he was an old man now. Still, he never would have guessed all those centuries ago that it would end like this. No, as a youth he had been so overconfident, so arrogant. Nothing could hurt him because he was a righteous defender of the weak and a Celestial soldier. But he knew better now.

He had buried numerous friends, brothers and sisters he had fought with uncountable times, and he was the only one left. It seemed fitting he thought as he poured himself a drink from a crystal decanter. Walking back to the large window he took a drink, with no ability to change the outcome he made peace with it. No sense dying enraged when it would do no good, so he sipped his drink peacefully as armageddon approached.

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The wave of fire spread from the point of impact on the planet’s surface, consuming everything in its path. A wall of seething destruction as high as the sky itself washed across mountains and cities alike, burning them to embers and then rendering the embers to scorched atoms that were cast to the void in its wake.

A large tower of shining crystal stood atop the pinnacle of a city of silver spires. It trembled as the wave reached it before crumbling like the corpse of a tree scorched by lightning. The aftermath of the destruction left naught but charred barren rock, the very atmosphere of the planet seared away. The planet swung through the darkness around its orphaned star, a smoldering corpse bearing testament to the ultimate evil of a being known only as Mathias.

End of Story