Suddenly, everything goes blank.

​

First, chaos.

Then flame.

Then smoke.

​

And through the ringing in your skull, a voice:

Cyan’s voice.

 

“You’re okay.”

 

Her words pull you back into your body.

You stumble to your feet, and together you run. 

 

The control room falls away behind you,

a fading silhouette in a storm of fire and vapor.

 

You don’t stop until you’ve crossed the perimeter fence

and burst into the open wheat fields,

their golden stalks swaying like a sea under a scorched sky.

You collapse in the grass, lungs burning. Cyan falls beside you, gasping.

 

MEGA shatters overhead in a chain of silent explosions,

a cosmic tapestry unraveling itself.

Millions of fragments streak across the heavens at once,

painting the sky in a torrent of impossible colors,

blues like glacial glass, pinks that bleed into molten violet.

 

Hypercolor rainfalls of light cascade through the upper atmosphere,

each burning piece a star born only to die in seconds.

 

You can do nothing but watch. The sheer scale of it renders you weightless, a speck beneath an apocalypse turned to art.

 

“He did it,” you whisper, voice breaking, laughter and tears together.

“The crazy bastard… he really did it.”

 

A dawn chorus rises from the fields, stirred by the alien sunrise. 

 

“Thank you,” you look to the sky, not sure if you’re speaking to Xeno, to the world, or to something even larger.

 

You look at Cyan, her hair haloed by the strange dawn,

her expression caught between wonder and disbelief. 

 

Glittering shards of frozen meteor drift lazily around her, landing in her hair, on your clothes, melting into nothing.

​

The melody from the meteorite hums faintly in your memory, as if the fragments are still singing from the heavens.

 

Gentle, distant, but impossibly clear.

 

Cyan says nothing, only stares skyward

with wide eyes and a trembling smile.

​

You lie back in the grass, staring up at the radiant pink sky

as if it might blink out any second,

afraid to move and break the spell.

 

The melody lingers. The wheat sways.

​

“Am I dreaming,” you whisper, “or did that really just happen?”