ILLUSTRATION: Rifah Tashfia Islam

The dead Earth groaned beneath the weight of loss.

The price of hubris had been paid in full, and Mother Nature had been successfully murdered by the very children she’d harboured. The skies drifted with still-burning ash and dust, the wind howled in grief over dried seas, and a thin patina of death layered it all like a ghostly wail. Humanity had killed the world at long last. In doing so, it had killed itself.

Was anyone truly surprised? The hunger in this strange species was well known, after all. This was not the first world they had eaten.

Once, their great cities had stretched toward the heavens—behemoths of metal and glass, resounding with fire, sonorous and eternal. What a short eternity it had been. Laughable, truly. Their infinite machines lay in ruins now frozen in rust, melted in the heat of their own making. Statues of their deities and kings, toppled and broken. Symbols of a people who thought themselves gods, and thus drew the ire of fate.

A violent wind howled through the empty planet, carrying the ghosts of history. No living thing, great or small, remained to hear its song.

Hush! Hush… 

Movement. Deep, deep below the scorched ground, far beneath the bones of what had once been civilisation—a temple, a bunker, a forgotten vault? Something stirred in the untouched darkness. Something old. Something wise. Something that mourned.

A man. Or something that had once been a man. Something that might become one again. He was ancient—older than the apocalypse, older than fire, older than many of the stars now smothered by nuclear winter. His body was tall, strangely fluid in its motion. His skin was black like volcanic glass, smooth and unmarked. His eyes, strange and deep as molten gold, flickered with light that should not exist in a world so ruined. His features were not quite human, though they were terribly familiar.

A name. The Naysayer. A terrible name he had earned, a name he had carried in rage and grief. But it no longer mattered. What mattered was this world. With a wave of his hand, the layers of ash and dust peeled back like dying petals, revealing the scorched land above. He stepped onto the surface of the dead world, unsteady, grief filling his ancient heart as he beheld the guttering fires.