Zaphara Cirin Vendt's blog: "Story"

I lived in darkness for what seemed like an eternity. Constantly thinking to myself--feeling a sense of loneliness. I felt like a drifter, what was going on? I began having dreams of a place I had been, I couldn't remember everything, and I spent most of this time in darkness thinking, or, maybe dreaming of what I had been. I wanted so much to remember everything. It was so beautiful for so long, but its beauty would change and eventually begin to fade away. Never again to regain that beauty it once beheld.

By the end, their was so much death and destruction, it became harder to remember all the beautiful scenery, I was desperately trying to hold onto. I remember these flesh bodies, covered up. All shapes and all sizes. These flesh creatures were not all the same color. Long flowing manes on some that blew backward as the wind passed between each strand. I could hear laughter spill out from their mouths. See tears drip from their eyes. These creatures talked in all different languages. There was a sudden burst of energy and in a flash I was back there. Covered in flesh veiled by clothing. This sense of confusion and chaos that surrounded me. Suddenly, none had laughter spilling out of their mouths. They were replaced by screams and tears in panic and desperation. Trying to hold onto our breaths, a sudden jolt shocked the ground with such a force it sent many of us face down in the dirt. It was just the jolt that I needed that made me completely aware of what was happening. Giant balls of hot gas, rock and ice were falling from the sky.

Many creatures lie still while others try to cling onto dear life, gasping and gurgling for one last breath. I had one though come to me-- people, humans dying. Everyone around me were human beings. And we all clung to this planet. We lived on it. We breathed on it. We hunted and gathered and with each passing era, we became more modern. More modern with our world. Warfare, to fight our enemies. Satellites to take pictures in space. We were able to connect and communicate with other humans that inhabited our planet that were thousands of miles away. Just by the tapping our fingers on keyboards. We were of the technology age. We had come to the point where we relied so heavily on our technology that we were completely unaware of the dangers it was doing to our race, the human race. The very technology we used to keep inhabiting this planet, was, in fact the death and destruction that was now being force upon ourselves. And I couldn't help thinking-- we were getting what we deserve. We were people from many nations that took great pride in all out technology created.

We became lazy and selfish. Unhealthy beings. We created violence to stop all violence. A concept that I could never grasp onto. We had great leaders just as we had bad leaders. No one trusted the "men" in power and we became paranoid at the very thought of big brother spying on us. Corruption eventually took over the world. We were divided unto religion and politics. At some point we stopped caring about the lives of others and became selfish and only cared about ourselves. Wat color of people would survive longer than the rest. Who at the end of all violence would be left standing. We were once children who had an innocent view of the world, but, as we grew older, we had the harsh reality that the innocents were gone. For only a brief period in our lives it existed. We couldn't ever place the blame on a single person or a group of people, we had to point the blame at ourselves.

While pondering over my latest revelation, I heard the most deafening sound, followed by more screaming and men, women and children running in complete chaos trying to hide from whatever was happening. I looked up the skies upon my observing many pointing towards the sky. The moon had broken through all the layers of the atmosphere and the fist moment it had, caught it on fire and sent out the blackest of smoke. There was silence for a moment and every living thing stood still. The entire skies filled with this smoke. Still in shock, black raindrops began to fall. The thick cloud of smoke began to dissolve and the rain had stopped. And before too long, the clouds that once overpowered the skies were gone. The moon was nowhere in sight. Upon impact, the fire quickly burned one corner to the other,the moon and the black rain drops we felt and saw with our own eyes, was the remnants of the moon when it exploded in the sky.

A gigantic, monstrous wind roared to life just above our heads. Many scattered to find shelter. The utter chaos led to many disputes as people fought over shelter after shelter they made claim to. During a time such as this, where people needed to help people, turned into an every man, woman and child to themselves. Everyone was running any direction. Some, like myself, had their plan of action, to find shelter without getting all caught up in the hectic traffic of the aftermath of the moon disintegrating into thin air. For the first time amidst the chaos, I notice the whirling wind above us pick up speed. Cars and tops of buildings were being ripped off and apart and sent out into oblivion. I quickly found myself shelter. I was desperately trying to make it home to my family when I decided I had t take cover quickly, the fear of myself being sucked up and hurled out into oblivion was out of my head and if my family wanted to see me alive, I had to sacrifice an unknown amount of time until whatever was whirling overhead would die down or evaporate altogether.

Just as the wind picked up speed again, something grabbed my arm and pulled me into shelter. They grabbed me so wildly, I though my arm had been taken off. He was an elderly man, not quite 5 feet tall, dressed in winter clothing, although it was summertime. The entire time I was down in this dark, molding room, he said not a work to me. Watching him scurry around in the dark with only a candle lighting his pathway grabbing and pulling things from off almost bare shelves, he stopped dead in his tracks and for the first time since grabbing me, he made himself aware that I was in the room. I tried to speak, but he put his palm out with one and and did the universal sign for quiet, one finger to the mouth without making a single sound. I closed my moth and retracted, He grabbed a metal object, I couldn't tell what it was until I saw him jab it into his fingers and extracting his blood into a small vile. I had no idea what it was that he was doing. Yet I was still so fascinated it was hard for me to look away.

He took this blood from the vile and put it on the end of a small cross, just the tip of it. It looked very old, it was tarnished and weary and looked as if it had been sprung to life after being deeply ground into the dirt and rock of centuries of long ago. He slowly walked over to me, his eyes were dark almost black with only a tiny hint of sparkle behind his retina's. He was weeping, I could see the tracks of his tears run from the outer and inner corners of his eyes that dripped far past his nose and lips before taking resident on the tiny hairs of his chin before plummeting to the dirt floor beneath us. He took one hand and placed it over my eyes and touched the cross to each one. Flecks of green found solace underneath my eyelids. I began to weep. He touched my ears next, first the right, then the left. Until there wasn't any sound other than the beating of my own heart. I felt a rush of energy fill my body and after the rush of it was over, the green flecks of light behind my eyelids faded away, the beating of my own heart became silent and my body fell beneath me. It only lasted a second I could see the rush of colors from behind my eyes and I could hear the beating of my heart and a rush of air filled my lungs. The elderly man was gone and so was everything he had taken off the shelves, there wasn't any sign of anything that had just occurred and was in a state of confusion because I thought it was all a dream. I pulled myself up off the dirt floor and walked slowly over to the door and upon opening it, the loud screams, the whirling high winds were still very much still there. Something was different about me and I couldn't place my finger on it. I put it in the back of my mind until I could reach the front door of my home all I could think now was to get to them, to hug them to hold onto them and kiss each of their faces. I began to observe my surroundings.

I couldn't see the panic on their faces, but I could hear their cries out in desperation. The sky had turned every shade of the color spectrum. I saw something far in the sky and I would've believed it to be the Moon, had it not already been destroyed, that sent rocks the size of mansions hurling at the planet I called home for many years of my life. There were not many people still alive and I couldn't help thinking that I wished I hadn't been one of them. I was literally walking among the dead bodies, overwhelmed by the smells of rotting, burning flesh of people missing parts of their bodies, there was so much blood, the dead lay in a pool of it marinating in it till a gust of wind so powerful sucked them out of it and hurling them out to oblivion.

I looked out to the sky and saw an object in the far distance that I was unable to make out its characteristics. It was rotating at such great speed, I knew it was the cause of the death and destruction of almost everything within its path. As the object got nearer and closer in the sky, I realized that this object was a planet, one from our own solar system. I started to make out its characteristics. The bands of orange between the bands of white and the swirling clouds of red that resemble a hurricane. I watched on while it rolled in the sky above me. Parts of the planet were in a blaze where it entered the atmosphere that drew a tail of smoke and made a line across the sky.

I ran inside to find my family. They were huddling in the basement of the house we were living in. I was one of the many to cry out in desperation and although I could not see my panic-filled face, I was almost certain that it was there. My son confirmed my suspicion and although only five years old, he immediately broke into tears. I could not tell him-- no I could not bring myself to tell him of the horrible suffering that would soon consume us. All, I could do was hold him close.

Outside, we could hear the high winds but a new sound began to take over. The ripping sound of the ground as this planet, which was Jupiter was pulling it within its pull.

Dry land was becoming oceans and oceans were becoming dry land just before it was ripped apart. And just before our faces were forced into the water, I told my son I loved him and that it wouldn't be the end, it was only the beginning of our forever. Our eternity...