How the World Ended

Just as worlds before it have ended, Earth too lay in ruin, scorched and cracked into an unrecognizable rock. The ground was barren of life, the sky was clogged with ash, and the water was murky with filth; a planet uninhabitable to all those who used to thrive there.

But Earth had not always been this way. Once lush and full of life, with people walking amongst other species like brothers, living off of what the good Mother Nature had provided for them. However, as it goes in most stories, humans became greedy, and began to kill their brothers and sisters by the thousands in order to profit from their deaths, to build, to evolve, to destroy.

Society grew and factories began to spit filth from their bellies, polluting the sky and the water that housed millions of animals seeking refuge from the humans. Corpses riddled the ground, ecosystems began to wilt underneath the rot of the humans, and still the people kept on building, willingly unaware of the hurt they were causing.

Mother Nature watched all of this happen with a sad smile, but did nothing. She could not, for humans were just as much of her children as every other animal was. So forlornly she watched, tears creating floods and sobs creating earthquakes.

But, as they usually do, humans persevered and continued to build, creating structures that scraped the sky and houses that dotted the once pure landscape like ugly zits upon nature’s face. The sky grew darker, the forests grew thinner, and then species of mouse in Australia became the first ever to go extinct.

Like a chain reaction, this triggered a culling, and one by one different species of animals began to drop off the face of the earth. Mother nature was joined by animal after animal in the heavens where she lived, and with every bit of company she gained, the angrier she grew. He tears were no longer wept out of sadness but out of rage, erupting volcanoes and releasing disease from the depths of the earth. Yet humans continued to destroy, and mother nature began to plan.

It was only a short, few years later when the last species of animal, a breed of frog, was wiped from the planet. No one noticed, no one cared, but when Mother Nature noticed her child, that precious little amphibian, seating on the arm rest of her throne, a change was enacted in her, twisting her core right down to the bone.

Her mind became warped, her inside ugly, and with a scream of unadulterated fury she unleashed her hurt and her anger upon the Earth. Flash fires riddled the countryside, horrible diseases ran rampant, and deadly storms swept the face of the planet, doing the job that Mother Nature had given them. Now it was the humans turn to be culled, now it was their turn to suffer, and now they could watch as the empire they built atop a pile of innocent corpses was destroyed by the very land they had shaped it on.

No more was Mother Nature a kind god, a giving god, but she would always be a just god. She delivered justice in the form of destruction, and no longer were people marveling at her kindness but instead screaming fearfully at her wrath.

No longer was she idle, no longer would she sit by. Once, she was the god that everyone worshipped, but now, she was the god they deserved.