Hello there everyone! This is going to be my first foray into the "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words" contests. Decided to go for a bit of a cosmic horror spin on this one. I've always enjoyed stories concerning the horror of our smallness in the universe.
I haven't had as much time to work on this as I had hoped, but going into next week I'm looking forward to continuing with these contests! It was a fun project to work on and a great way to get the writing gears going again. I hope you enjoy!
Prompt by @freewritehouse
Observer
What I See: A man standing at the top of a peak above the clouds, watching the sky. The sun appears to be drawing vast clouds of light into itself like a black hole; the clouds pulled and twisted into the light of the sun itself.
What I Feel: A sense of concern. This man is alone while this strange celestial event is occurring. Is he the only one able to witness it, or the only one left to witness it?
One of the last things I remember before the world had become empty was something my mother said when I was a child. She caught me trying to see how long I could look at the sun. I was so convinced that if I just looked long enough, I could see what it was trying so hard to hide from me, no matter how much it hurt to keep looking. She would yell, lifting me up and shielding my teary eyes, telling me that no good would come from staring up at the sun. She said that it didn’t have any secrets worth knowing that was worth giving up seeing the world that it shined its light on.
Even when I was young, I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. Even when school taught me that all there was to that burning ball was just hydrogen and helium, that reality just wasn’t enough for my young mind to believe it. Can you imagine my disappointment at being told our universe's fate as it was believed to be? That one day, it would all just end. Not life, not light, but existence itself would simply cease to be and become a great empty vacuum filled with fading radiation and atoms too distant and sparse to coalesce into anything that could experience what was left.
I could never come to terms with that. The idea of death alone was hard enough to grasp, but the idea that everything just stops like the end of a cassette tape wasn’t something I could accept. I denied it even when the math checked out and the science seemed sound. Even though I would graduate and my studies would take me on to a career in neuroscience, that thought was something that no amount of distraction or therapy could dissipate. It was as if something inside me would not allow it, demanding that I explore alternatives and find new theories of what waited for us at the end of time.
My work was something that had been tried and failed by countless others. I knew that one lifetime would not be enough to find the answer I sought. Over the years I explored ways to avoid the degeneration and decay that came with old age, quickly finding myself at the very forefront of what human knowledge had to offer its physical body. Fraying neurons would be replaced with specially engineered connections, allowing me not only to maintain the clarity of my thoughts, but for longer than anyone else could hope to remember. These rudimentary implants proved problematic, however, and for a time I took to engineering the very blueprints of the body I had been gifted with to seek my answer so that it could continue to search.
Colleagues came and went, and the short-lived ones would appear and disappear, their loves and losses and hardships becoming simple squabbles and spats in the span of my life. Nothing else mattered, not their wars, not their dying world, not their maddening noise and distractions, just that answer, I thought. I had to know that our existence was not doomed to pointlessness from the outset, even if the very thought couldn’t cross the minds of those whose lives were too short to know its importance.
The machines in my body, guaranteed to break and lose function even if it were centuries after my original body, would again be stripped away for a new body of flesh; this one tailored to my specifications. It would not age, it would not get sick, and despite the efforts of hundreds who would try in the centuries that followed the success of my procedure, it would not die.
In its shortsighted ignorance, humanity wiped itself and most life from the Earth with their weapons and after a few short decades only I remained. I was alone to stand and watch and wait.
My body had no need for food, water, even air. It would not age or decay as everything else did. I traveled to the tallest peak that hadn’t been leveled by the wars of the past, and I sat and watched the sun, with eyes that would not be blinded and with no distraction left alive to make me deviate from my work. There were times where it hid from my gaze, though the reflection of its light from the moon was proof enough that it would return in due time. There was a long time where clouds from a volcanic eruption had robbed me of my prize, though age brought patience, and soon enough I saw it again on a planet that was truly silent, the perfect vantage point to sit and observe.
From then on, little changed on the Earth. One of the last sounds I ever heard was its fading winds.
Days passed like seconds, my body only moving to remove layers of dust from my eyes or prevent my form from becoming buried. Still, that stubborn orb of light refused to drop whatever act it had put on for so long and reveal its secrets to me. I could have spent the next few thousands of years assembling the tools necessary to observe it from a closer vantage point, but to look away for too long, to become too engrossed in another work, what if I missed a critical moment? A single change in timing or position or coloration, and the last living thing on Earth that could experience it was looking away when it happened? What if it were only for a single, precious moment, and never to return? I could not allow this time and work to be wasted.
The rotation of the Earth began to slow, granting me longer observation periods. The sun had entered its next expected stages as a medium-sized star, beginning to grow in size. Soon enough Mercury would be encompassed by its mass, just as it began to take on a red hue that briefly brought to mind the changing color of autumn leaves, even if I hadn’t seen their shape in millenia. The heat baked the surface, causing even my engineered body to begin to sweat. I was reminded of what burning felt like when Venus sunk into the plasma of my sun. Though the risk of missing a moment of critical importance was great, the risk of losing my body drove me from the peak and into the caverns. Over time I found my way deeper and deeper into the Earth, hoping only that it would spare this planet so that I may see what becomes after.
This wait was the most painful. No sound, no color, not a single particle of light to connect me to the thing I had studied for a number of years I had forgotten the word for. After this time, my body, even my mind had begun to fail me.
When the cave I had waited in finally began to cool, I thought I heard my mother’s voice, calling out for me to see what the sun had to show me.
With limbs that hadn’t moved in eons, I carried myself back out onto the surface. It was cooled, though the atmosphere was now gone, leaving an unobstructed vision of what was occupying the space above.
The sun had returned to its familiar yellow hue, though surrounding it and filling the sky were clouds of bright yellow particles, which coalesced in a circle around the outer edges of the sun, tendrils of light being fed into the dimly glowing sphere. There were no other stars in the sky that night.
This was no phenomenon that had been spoken of in my memory. This was what I had waited for all this time. To know the truth. Not only were there secrets this being had yet to reveal, but it was in fact a being. It consumed the planets and stole the light of any other star I had ever seen. The planets, the moon, all vanished. In the time that passed since my emergence, the only asteroids and comets I’ve seen seem to flow toward the sun, something pulling them off their original course and sending it careening into the swirling light. No day or night has passed since, the Earth seems to have come to a standstill, caught in this being’s invisible grasp. For what reason it has left me here to sit and watch I do not and cannot know.
It does not speak, it only watches and waits as I do, both observers of the last of a kind they cannot hope to fully understand.