“You were the burning mountains. You were the dried seas. You were everything I never wanted to witness in my life. You are destruction,” Kilth pointed at her and spit the poisonous words.
His stare could melt steel, yet she was made of wind.
“I am nothing. I didn’t burn the mountains. I didn’t dry the sea. It was not the destruction you witnessed. It was the birth of mayhem,” Viol spoke to Kilth in a calm and pleading voice, trying to make him understand her balance.
“The mountains did not burn, they were saved. A wall of fire to distract from impurity. The seas did not dry, they were emptied so they could fill again without dilution. Our world could not continue as it was, so I will start it over.”
“You will end everything! There will be nothing to start over. It will all be gone. Me, you, everyone!”
“We had our chance and we failed. If life is going to continue, we cannot be a part of it, they cannot be a part of it. I’m sorry, I tried. I couldn’t anymore.”
Viol’s body heated and the layers around her disintegrated until she became a white flame. She hovered in the air and her form flicked sparks to the ground below. Kilth could only watch and yell, begging for her to stop. If his pleas reached her, she did not heed them.
She pulled her arms and legs in until she was a ball. The intensity of her flame increased and the space around her began to glow in a deep blue. The last words in the world that were spoken were from Kilth, in a whisper to Viol, “I’m sorry too.”
*****
When the world stops being everything created stops as well, the physical and immaterial. Nothing matters anymore as there isn’t anything to impact upon it. Time, essentially, stops if there is nobody there to track it.
Viol’s collapse stopped time. Silence became the only sound after her shriek. When she flung her arms and legs to let loose her cataclysm everything else ended with her. The mountains and the sea. The sky and the grass. It was blinked away in a flash of white light. She didn’t know her power. She didn’t realize that not only would her flame destroy all life on her planet, but it would destroy all possibility of life.
Or maybe she did know that. She sacrificed herself and every other person on her planet, it included, to start over. Not just the Gaia but everything, and from everything Viol decided it would begin again with her at the center. Her flame burst into space and became the beginnings of a new star which would create a new solar system around her. She would destroy everything to reset the clock with her essence flowing through each particle that makes each new world.
A Hopeless Romantic, Stirred 