Stars Burn Out
Watching All the Stars Burn Out…
The air is still. Not as if in a vacuum. Still as in lifeless. As if Death could exhale. Jagged spears of a rock, all in symmetrical rows, claw at every horizon. Their clay red is stark against the black sky. The southern sky is ringed in crimson, giving the planet’s curvature a blood frown.
Near half the sky is starless, with a few sparkles of pink, blue, and white peppering the cosmos. The brightest of the blues winks out, a black bag of night overtaking its light.
“That was one of your beloved, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was..” The voice was uncaring, but for the zeptosecond drop in inflection.
“Do you need me to leave–to compose yourself?”
“No, we are fine,” a featureless silver hand rises to wipe an errant sliver of a tear from beneath a featureless golden eye. “This is what we do, we watch them burn out.”
“But you made them all! Shouldn’t you do something?”
The silver man sighed, propping their elbows on their bare knees. The wide splays of their hands cupping a statuesque jawline. Their eyes trace the wide crimson ahead. Their brow furrows in discontent. Another light in the sky flickers out, then another.
“The sky will be nothing soon.”
“We’ll let it become as such. It doesn’t matter.”
“All that life…”
“They are but ashes cast in a wind. Bright, burning, but still the lesser of a greater light.” The silver man studied their upturned hands, their palms and fingertips all featureless. “All lights die out, no matter how bright–” another star fizzles into nothingness. “Or how beautiful they once were.”
“You once painted a galaxy from only a dream. You pulled that curtain from your mind, threw it against the sky and it was so. That galaxy is an abyss now. Zillions of life forms…gone. Now you sit, make chess boards of sharp rocks the size of continents,” the smaller voice seemed to spew out the notion. “It is you that are lesser.”
“I am letting that which bore me to be born once more,” the silver man let the southern cold run its nails across their face. “Maybe this is how it should be. The darkness bore me, perhaps it’s best I let it bore into the cosmos unimpeded.”
They raised a hand, flicking the wrist upwards as they did, then let the hand hang limp in the air. A stray ribbon of sunshine caught on the metallic surface of their skin. The purple of it flooded their sheen like blood in water, then flushed away in an instant.
“You see? There is still beauty to be had.”
“Beauty is natural, it exists as easily as I. But you…” Their voice trailed off, the silver man contemplating the quarrelsome whisper. “You are an ember of the hope I once had. An afterglow of the joy of creation. A phantom celebrating its hiding in a fleeting shadow.”
“I am the joy that you once felt. The bravery against death. The single lantern against the crush of night,” the voice paused to seemingly exhale. “I am you before despair.”
The index finger of the upheld hand flicked, a shockwave roared forward, obliterating the rows of jagged rock like a hammer to teeth. “Destruction, the unmaking, is part of creation, and the stars that burn out are fuel for further stars.”
They flick the remaining three fingers in the same directions as previous. The horizon roars in protest before peeling off the world as if it were an orange peel. The crimsons and purples of the sky dissipate into a darker darkness. Oceans boil against the vacuum of space before rising in falls of ice hundreds of miles high. The silver man brings both arms out, palms up, before bringing them to their chest, hands crossed, in a gentle self embrace. Before them, the world reverses its death: the sky pours itself back into color, the oceans churn with putrefaction, cities teem with sentients from across the galaxy. Time freezes in place over this world, a ghost in amber across a breathless universe.
“Look at all you can still do. Look at all the light in this one world now?”
The silver man peered across the nearest ocean to study the nearest city. These sentients, or so they claimed to be called, clawed and crawled across their structures, across the cosmos. Spreading, infecting. They looked past their doors and windows, saw the blood, cold, boiling, or bitter, that painted their moralities. Somewhere, deep in the infinitum of memory, they remembered why they had let these things die, and stay dead.
“No.” They said, balling their right hand into a fist, while flattening the left palm-up.
“No!” The voice shrieked as the fist came down on the palm, the planet pancaking beneath them in fiery, violent birthing of asteroids. “You can’t let this happen, this is the antithesis of our purpose.”
“As I said,” the silver man begins to walk across endless nights of space, lightyears with each step. “Destruction is creation, the necessary anchor to keep it buoyed.”
“You once loved these worlds…”
“And you are tiresome as ever.” The silver man bemoaned, their tone cratering with slight aggravation. “I am letting this all die, so that I may once more find the joy you so covet. But that day, that joy, will not be shared with you.”
As if unzipping a dress, the silver man ran his right index and middle fingers down his sternum, their tips having morphed into blades. The flaps of silver skin hung in the still air of space, while their ribs burst out like a rapidly growing tree of marrow and phosphate. Their body contorted into an elegant mess of conflicting shapes. The bones, moving as if they were tentacles, each bore a tiny light at their tips. One light flickered more than the rest, but still the brightest among them. The stalk on which it clung bent down to offer the small bulb to the silver man’s left hand, which plucked it from the writhing branch. With that the mass of bone, tentacle, and lights withdrew back into the compact frame of the silver man, who sat up to examine the dimming bulb.
“There is no more joy to be found by us, errant aspect.” He intoned, flicking the light into the firmament, among other celestial bodies bracing against the encroach of death. The distant silver of his conscience rapidly signaled a plea as a tendril of night caressed it. It blinked with a hurried panic, its light fading faster, before finally burning out with a final twinkle, like a tear.
Throughout the halls of time and space, he thought he felt the glow of its screams emanate for a billion years, though eventually he paid it no mind as he sat atop a spinning nebula, watching the sky snuff itself out.