Darwin

by Between Lines

Process

It was all over so fast. There wasn't even a sound. No warning, no blaze through the evening sky. Just a light, so impossibly bright, breaking over the horizon. The ground had gone first, buckling and tearing apart like such a thin sheet of ice, hot magma gushing from a million wounds. Then had come the blast.

It wasn't some wall of flame and light, some brilliant oblivion rushing across the land. It was just dirt. A tide of black dirt, reaching up to the sky. There had been a second of shadow before it fell, before the horror and the roar had descended. Celestia remembered Sharp Quill had been on the balcony, the pegasus just staring up agog. Maybe she should have moved to save her, tried to shield her, but somehow there had been no panic in those last moments. There were neither screams nor flight, not even the sound of hooves. In that instant, the tide rushing on, they had all realized there was no escape. There was just the coming end.

All of Canterlot joined the wave, the mountain beneath it torn up and tossed into the maelstrom. Dust stripped everything the shrapnel didn't shred. Boulders finished anything unlucky enough to survive. How she herself lived was something of a mystery. There are times even a god should die.

That was the last thing she ever heard, that roaring cascade. When she came to, she was adrift in a sea of madness. Gone was the blue of the sky, even the ground beneath her feet. Her flesh burned as globs of lava drifted past, their light dimming in the silence of vacuum. Below her, as much as it applied anymore, what was once the world now lay spread out across the expanse of stars, a billion points of shattered light.

She didn't scream. There was no point. In a moment, she'd lost more than she'd ever thought possible. In silence, she watched as those molten sparks began to die, lit in a strange half light of their own glow. As she spun through the void, something passed through her vision, a great smear of orange and yellow, stretched like spilled paint. It was the sun.

She stared, watching its symmetrical form twisted inside out. It looked like apples she'd seen shot with arrows, the core torn clean away, the trailing edges of the wound spilled out across the sky. It seemed to hang there, frozen in the moment of it's own destruction, perhaps pleading for her help, but it was gone. There was no sun anymore, just a corpse.

Even the moon lay spread among the stars. Broken and tumbling, it glowed a dull red, torn in two and tearing apart. Again she thought of the arrow and the apple, of fruit ripped asunder for sport. Suddenly, the game seemed so macabre, so innocently horrifying, she wanted to laugh. Maybe she did, but only silence greeted her ears.

---

She waited among the ruins of her home. She'd sat, once upon a time, until she realized it was just clutching a cold stone to herself. She'd let go, and now her seat was somewhere out among the fragments. She could find another if she wanted, there was no shortage.

She'd been so sad at first. Then so angry. Now there was just dead rubble inside. What was there left to fight for? What was there left to avenge? A memory of a world crushed like a cookie underhoof, crumbs forgotten across the void?

In the end, she decided she was just waiting. Some part of her hoped there was a reason, a cause for all this. Had her world at least died for something? Another part of her hoped there wasn't, that nothing could be so malicious but blind chance. Was it better to have died a meaningless death, without objective or gain?

There was a new star in the sky.

---

Vultures. Even among the stars there were vultures. They'd come on wings of flame, sweeping by like the pelicans had so long ago. She'd watched as they'd passed through dead gasses and stones, great shining nets scooping up what had once been her home. Perhaps they'd been the ones to destroy it, come to plunder the corpse. Perhaps they were just oppertunists.

Eventually the nets came for her. She didn't resist, letting herself be drawn up into a waiting maw. For the first time in eternity, she felt some flicker of life in her bones, watching as the rocks piled together, crushing to dust against their own number. Soon, she joined them, pulled into chaos so like the day her world died.

She tumbled through them, smacked once or twice, but otherwise unharmed. Within, steel walls shone beneath lifeless lights, the stones within shepherded into rivers by some unseen force. She felt herself gripped, moved off to the side. She watched as she was filed away, the rest of her world poured into churning grinders. It would have been so much easier to plunge into those whirling blades.

Instead, she sat for the first time in ages, and waited.

---

In a way, there was less time within the steel halls than without. At least the rocks had tumbled, danced through the cosmos on their haphazard journey. Here, there was no change, just the endless glow of those lights. Maybe she could have explored, or quested for some answer, but after waiting so long it felt wrong to act. Whatever came would come, as it had before.

Eventually, there was a thing. She could only describe it as such. Like some iron spider, it crawled into the hold, and stared at her with eyes of metal and glass. It waited, and she did as well. She barely noticed when she could hear again, the hiss of air and the rumble of the grinders. She didn't even bother to breathe, didn't even remember to.

They sat there, watching each other. She remembered the spiders of her home, their webs and the bugs they ate. At last, she realized there were no questions. Things simply were the way they had always been. There was neither point, nor morality to anything. There was just death, carrion, and those who ate it before dying in turn.

She turned back to the endless river of stones, and watched the cycle carry on.

Comments

[cooopercrisp]

This was quite poetic. Well-written and sad.

[The Grey Pegasus]

My process of reading this story:

1. Check latest stories.
2. See first story and... a black rectangle. The cover is actually a black rectangle, and the description is a short sentence. Congrats, you captured my curiosity.
3. Read story.
4. Whoa.

[The Fluffy Ninja]

Really good stuff. A bit confusing at times, but overall just simple and amazing.

[nodamnbrakes]

Yes

[Brony Tom]

I am having a hard time with this one. It's done well enough, but I have a strong dislike of fics that go for the nihilistic, "nothing matters anymore" feel.

[Sunken EldritchSpires]

oblivion is terrible and beautiful.

[Between Lines]

3807725

Honestly, I wrote this when I was having a really hard time of it. My stories were refusing to come together, and I wound up deleting most of them.

There aren't a ton of options when you're writing from a complete absence of hope. So I wound up going with something that had been bouncing around my mind for the longest time: the Berzerker concept. I.E., that the dominant form of space exploration would simply be dispatching bombs programmed to destroy any life they came across, ensuring no competing stellar societies would arise to interfere with the harvesters and their work. Of course, after scooping up thousands of star systems, you'd have so many resources that even a competing society couldn't oppose you.

I briefly considered setting the story with one bomb exterminating every pony but celestia, then her wielding the sun as a weapon against the coming harvesters, swatting them down even as they dispatched more and more bombs, finally overwhelming her in a hail of mass-driver oblivion. However, I was too nihilistic at the time for that.

[Jordan179]

Well, now, that's why the Ponies need an interstellar empire.

[Shpoople96]

So, the planet was hit by a RKV, and then some sort of stellar scoops came to collect the dust?

[Between Lines]

3810526

Yes, not only do you neutralize resistance, but it also removes the problems inherent in descending into a gravity well to mine. This way, Mineral deposits are readily exposed, speeding appraisal, and collected without dedicated high-G mining equipment.

[Shpoople96]

3810537
I had actually had the same idea about this method of planetary mining for a while... Cool to see someone had the same idea!

[Blobskin]

I guess Luna died in the initial attack huh. Such a shame

[Between Lines]

3828981 The sacrifices we make for narrative, eh?

[Jack-Pony]

Have you ever had a moment where nothing mattered, but everything mattered somehow? Yeah, this story actually gave me pause. I was actually forced to stop and consider what I had just read.

_Π_
-_Ƣ ~ Stay classy.

[Shpoople96]

4502632
It's more of the 'Shocked by the suddenness of the end of your world' thing than anything.

[PostPony]

Uh?

[an1979]

Well, drat...

Some typos:

It seemed to hang there, frozen in the moment of it's own destruction,

its own

Perhaps they were just oppertunists.

opportunists

[Waiting for Godot]

Existential Angst.
I have some nightmares like this!
You have a favorite and a follow.

[Stellar Light Sparkle]

Yes, not only do you neutralize resistance, but it also removes the problems inherent in descending into a gravity well to mine. This way, Mineral deposits are readily exposed, speeding appraisal, and collected without dedicated high-G mining equipment.

If you read some of the later Star Wars novels, the Death Star was originally designed to be a gigantic mining station, the superlaser designed to rip open dead planets for mineral processing. This is no different to that concept.