At the Terminus

Alone on the southern ice shelf, a snowscrounger looks out upon a strange sight. The night sky tonight glows a brilliant orange, and a haze lays low along the horizon. It has no way of knowing yet just how close the impact of events so far away will soon be.

The first surface fire ate up the land for weeks. Ash from the blaze, fueled by hundreds of millions of years worth of stored carbon, flooded the atmosphere. Filling the air, it refracted sunlight and stained the sky across the world red day and night - an apocalyptic sign of changes to come. The fire was large enough and burned so hot that it made its own weather, as cold air from above the ocean was pulled inland as the heat of the fire rose, and so huge thunderstorms formed and exploded above the land, with extreme currents of hot and cold air giving rise to fire tornados and continuous lightning. Eventually the effect of heavy rain from these storms would douse the worst of the surface flames, revealing a landscape left blackened and charred. Yet throughout the worst of it, life clung to damp refuges - marshes and rivers and along the seashore where the initial inferno couldn’t spread. Some species, already in low numbers, didn’t make it. The coastal steppe that had been cultivated by the wooly wumpos was among the hardest hit regions, for it was situated almost above the epicenter of the underground fire. Here the smoldering carbon not only whipped up flames that scorched the surface, but also released toxic sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide gasses, poisoning many animals caught nearby even if they found shelter from the fire itself.

Though above ground the fires would come and go, beneath the surface the flames burned slowly but unquenchable. Sheltered from wind and weather, it would continue to spread ever further underground through the vast stores of coal and peat for a very long time, occasionally to escape and flare up upon the land destructively, then to lie dormant and hidden again in unpredictable cycles. Surviving the first fire would not guarantee survival of the second, or any more yet to come.

The sea, too, was threatened, if only on a less immediate timescale. During the initial inferno, the sea stewards were sheltered by their waters. Yet as they saw the skies change and the land glow, and the land creatures that sought refuge from the destruction of their world now crowding the shores, they knew that this was not an event that would leave them unscathed for long. A global apocalypse was upon them. The destruction of the sea would come slowly, painful and prolonged. On the scale of generations, fire would continue to spark and flood the sky with gasses that would come to shift the global climate. Sea ice would melt, but rather than save their world, it would now raise sea levels and bury their productive ecosystems in water too deep for plant life to grow. Acid rain, suffused with sulfur and carbon dioxide from the coal, would eventually fill the seas until they ran with poison, toxic to life.

Though the coal seam fire would end the ice age, and so prolong the lifespan of Serina’s biosphere on a long time scale, it would come at the expense of the sea stewards’ world. The ocean age could not exist forever in any timeline. Whether the ice remained or whether it disappeared, their specialized world would disappear either way, and with it, two of the three species, trapped in a dying ocean, would be doomed. But the third, an extreme generalist much more adaptable than its current lifestyle led on, would likely survive in this outcome. Small and omnivorous, amphibious and innovative, the thalassic gravedigger could adapt to almost anything that a changing world could throw at it. Yet its survival through such a shift would surely come with the loss of its culture, and the seeds of it that were planted by an extinct race that came before them that did lose out in the game of life. This species alone had demonstrated the ability, if not yet the motivation, to go down a very different route of progress by mining fossil fuels, one that this time was limited to a single goal, but which could eventually lead to a destructive, industrial race that forgot its past. A species that climbed higher upon the technological ladder in this direction could ultimately destroy its own world, scouring it of all resources and stifling evolutionary progress indefinitely, or even causing a global nuclear annihilation if it were, like the bluetails, to eventually craft tools it couldn’t control but on a far worse scale. This outcome could end the experiment too soon just the same as the ice age, and render a certain outside viewer’s interference to avoid a different premature end all but pointless.

If the sea stewards' world closed out in ice, as it would have otherwise, and so ended the reign of all three together, the observer would be justified to merely look on as it had for so long and with so many lives and so many past tragedies.

But this direction was now indirectly the result of its doing, another outcome brought on by its interference, and as like dominos one small nudge now resulted in a huge chain of subsequent consequences, the observer was left to grapple with other complicated choices. As it watched its experiment go up in flames so that it could be reborn anew, and as it contemplated the last living moments of one brave little bird, it made a decision it had never before made.

They didn’t have to die for its choices too.

~~~

Thousands of helpless eyes set upon the northern horizon to watch in horrified fascination the end of the world that night. Panicked animals of all sorts leapt from the shores and swam out to sea among them, not knowing where they’d end up, only that anything was better than what they fled. The more nimble scrambled onto boats and rafts miles from the shore, taking hold of any bit of land they could, and there they hauled out exhausted, disregarding the people around them. Even some of those which could not swim, animals too heavy and awkward to float, dove into the sea to choose a death by water to one by fire. Near the shore, the air became toxic and black, forcing sea-going viewers to retreat. Spires of flame rose and churned high into the air above the land, tongues of hot fire lashing out as they spun, beneath a sky itself red, angry, and sparking. The air exploded with the booms of thunder and from unseen explosions beneath the ground.

Some panicked at the coming end. They cried out and tried to get away. Others simply couldn’t stand to look. The prospect of death instilled instinctive fear in many, but not all. Some watched it calmly.

“Are you scared?”, Whirl asked Seeker. “You know…. to die?”

“Sure.”, he responded softly. “But if this is really it, there’s nothing any of us can do to avoid it, so why worry?”

“It’s almost pretty.”, said Patch after a long silence. “I’ve never seen so much color before.”

“I don’t think we will have to worry about ice jams anymore.”, Whirl added.

“I wonder what it’s like on the other side.”, mused Pebble, sitting beside her sister.

“I hear it’s beautiful.”, a white gravedigger nearby replied. “Just beautiful. Like nothing we’ve ever known in this plane.

“We’re going home.”, added an old, weary daydreamer nearby her, almost with joy in her voice. “Finally, the fragments have come together, and this journey will soon be over. We’re going home.”

Seeker wanted to reply, to say something in retort. Maybe this wasn’t the end of everything. It could just be a coincidental disaster, something logical. Perhaps it would end, and things would soon go back to how they had always been. But he found himself struggling to speak. His vision was narrowing to darkness. And not only his.

“I can’t see!” cried out Pebble, fear in her cracking voice. Seeker had never heard her afraid before.

“Is this it?”, someone else said, but Seeker could no longer discern who, for the world outside grew silent.

He found himself in alone in a void.

With it.

He saw the creator. Its shape at first was hard to understand, shifting and changing like ripples on water, disappearing along its edges, neither close nor far. Yet it seemed to realize, and then settled into a shape that he could easily discern - four overlaid outlines with glowing auras, one each of a daydreamer, a greenskeeper, a gravedigger and a small bird. The bird, the prophet. The wings. The figures all shared one eye, which shone like the brightest star in the night, and which he understood to mean they were parts of one being. Seeker had never seen imagery like this, but it was how the daydreamers often described their inner sight.

Though Seeker could not see or hear anyone but his own thoughts and those of the creator, he knew that what was being shown to him was seen by everyone, as if the information was being transmitted instantly from the creator to himself without spoken word. All of those around him were dreaming this same waking dream, even those, like Seeker, who were not supposed to be able to see visions at all.

The creator was not frightening, though it should have been. Yet neither was it comforting. The feeling Seeker got from it was that it was uncomfortable and inexperienced. As if it didn’t quite know how to proceed.

So Seeker spoke first.

“Are you us, then? All of us, together like the stories said?”

The creator turned, facing him, all of its auras fitting neatly inside the other. It didn’t respond immediately, and when it did it didn’t speak, at least not in a way that Seeker heard. Instead he felt a second monologue beside his own in his head; a thought that hadn’t come from him.

“No.”

“Then what are you?”, Seeker asked.

"I have always been here, and I will always be. You are here because of me, but not directly. Your world is ending because of me, but not directly. I should not be known, and do not wish to be known, but I have made choices, and so I am now giving you a choice. Directly.”

Seeker did not have time to respond before vivid images flashed before his eyes. Not dream-like outlines, but a scene as rich as life. He was awake, but now saw a nightmare world before him, crumbling and in ruin. He saw the greenskeepers and daydreamers left dead and dying. He swam through hot, sour water, smelled the rotting flesh and felt the decomposing ooze against his skin to the shore. The air was painful and choking. There skulked evil creatures all around… his friends, but gone savage and mindless. They gnashed their jaws and ripped skin off the carcasses, growling and fighting like beasts. Because they were beasts. Their world destroyed, only one would remain. Yet it would lose all that defined it in the process.

”This is the future of your world if you choose to stay, because of me.”, spoke the inner voice again.

Then it felt like a stretching band was reaching the extent of its length, and then suddenly Seeker was being pulled backward at high speed, out of the horrible place, and springing back into the silence of the void. Back to the dream.

“You do not have to see this end, because I am offering you another route. You do not have to take it. It is a courtesy.”

“What do you mean?”, he asked.

“If you go, there will have been no fire. No prophecy completed. The world you return to is how it was, except that the ice will not close in, but will slowly recede, so that your descendants will one far and distant day swim a wider sea. You continue, and I am unknown to you as it should always have been.”

Seeker thought, and then responded.

“Are the others going?”

”They have already left.”

“Then yes, I will too. But can I ask one-”

“No.”

~~~

Seeker woke up with a jolt. He must have dozed off. He looked around. It was night, and his friends were nearby in the water, Whirl floating to his left, Pebble and Patch as well as their families on the boat to his right. A white gravedigger passed by slowly on her own raft, whistling as she cast a line as a large black bird with a blue tail preened itself perched on the bow.

“Sweet baby you are.”, she said to her pet in loving singsong tones, caressing its neck. It fluffed out its feathers, enjoying the interaction.

“I love you, Bird.”, it told her back, mimicking the tone and voice of its owner, not knowing the meaning of the words, but understanding the context in which to use them. An elderly daydreamer listened nearby and stopped to speak to her.

“Sometimes they talk so well, you’d be sure they understand what they’re saying.”

“That would really be the day, huh? We’d have to honor them as another one of us.”, she responded, laughing.

They were all in the same positions they had been, facing the shore. But the shore was dark. The sky above was clear, a billion stars shining above. The breeze was cool and pleasant. Birds called quietly along the beach, where a foxtrotter was running silently along the sand, scenting for carrion washed ashore. It was a nice enough place, past the tide line, but no-one wouldn’t want to go there for long. There probably wasn’t anything worth going there for anyway.

As they talked and joked before Pebble returned to her hunting party down south tomorrow, and they would again have to part ways, four life-long friends couldn't remember it having ever been any other way.

~~~

But elsewhere, now far away, most life would not be so lucky. With the observer having solved its conundrum, splitting off the sea stewards and cloning their familiar world to colonize a new project as a compromise for its interference which will now lead to the end of the Mid-Ultimocene ice age in this one, it retreats to where it came. No more will hear its words, as Serina is left, again, to see through another mass extinction on its own. With its major keystone species effectively gone in an instant, the consequences will be severe as Serina at last closes the door on one chapter, and enters its final age.