Maelstrom by Jason J. Buchholz

The coming cataclysm loomed closer and closer as the skies darkened from the lack of light left over from the initial cosmic event, as well as his planet's only natural satellite blotting out whatever was left, star light notwithstanding. This was to be the end of the promising civilization and all other life on his planet, and there was nothing Kendar could do but watch it all unfold.

          Where others were fearful and frightened to their core, Kendar didn't want to run, hide, or prolong what was going to happen to him and his kind, as it was now absolute. The planet's top scientists warned the populace of an impending disaster which would strike their sun, but the warnings went unheeded, and the space program was put on the back burner due to a lack of funding.

          Some of their kind could have been saved - not enough to do a lot of good elsewhere - but enough to carry the memory of the Eintarans and their culture. Kendar looked down at his greyish-blue forearms and flexed his four fingers, wondering if there was more to life than being wiped out by a celestial body.

          'Or even the next life, if there is one...'

          He himself had been in the training section of the Eintara space program, hoping to make it into space and explore beyond the confines of the homeworld, but he knew now that it wasn't meant to be. Tapping his brow and rough skin of his forehead in thought, he began to focus his circular, black eyes on the impending doom - a massive silhouette of the Eindaran moon as it neared its destiny. The ground was already trembling, but it was the sky that bore the brunt of the visual devastation.

          Purplish-white clouds swirled as storms became worse and worse with crackling red lightning that started to strike the ground. Eindarans everywhere started to scream and holler before the storm became too deafening. A ground tremor forced him onto his rear as he huddled up against a small rockface, watching the moon grow larger and larger as it was soon to meet its own disastrous fate. Not far behind and now visible without visual aids was a line of blue-white light or energy that stretched out on either side of the moon and continued on as far as his eyes could see.

          'Impending doom, part two.'

          It wasn't enough that the moon would wipe out all life on his small world, but that the celestial energy wave from the supernova would finish it off and leave nothing behind, the punctuation for the sentence, so to speak. Kendar somehow knew that his death would be most painful, like the deaths of all the others, but didn't know that it would be far worse than anything he could have ever conceived.

          Eintara's atmosphere did little (if anything) to slow down its moon from the imminent impact, and when it did happen, a cataclysm of epic proportions began. The rocky crust of the homeworld started to ripple and tear itself into pieces, the moon now ripping into its parent with extreme prejudice. No one on the surface could stand now, with bodies being thrown into the air as chunks of moon and planet, some molten, some not, rained down from above. This would be a horrible event if it naturally occurred, but the help from the energy wave slamming into the moon made it that much worse.

          Deep chasms formed in the ground, violently splitting apart and swallowing towns and destroying larger cities, among them the domed city that Kendar called home. The collision was tearing everything to shreds as if they were made from paper or timber, with structures disappearing in seconds. The section of rock that he had been braced by was quickly ripped from the ground and thrown into the sky, along with himself. Other rocks and massive chunks of debris smashed into it, reducing Kendar to nothing more than paste and killing him quickly, a split second of unimaginable pain coursing through his body before his life was extinguished.

          Other suffered the same fate, or worse. Some were incinerated by the now incomprehensible red lighting bolts that grew in size and intensity, while others were disintegrated by molten streams of magma and rock that they could not escape. The homeworld was absorbing a lot of the energy put out by the collision, but when the blue-white energy wave from the supernova followed the moon, it finished the job.

          The powerful blast from the supernova slammed into Eindara and quickly shredded what was left of the moon that was still colliding with the homeworld, and as the energy contacted the open gashes and inner mantle of the planet, it pulsated and pushed the planet apart from the inside, triggering a reaction in the planet's core that exploded upwards and finished off the small world of millions, taking the moon with it. What began as an event that doomed the people who watched it, turned into the mass extinction of the Eindaran people and the world they called home.

          Nothing was left behind but rubble and chunks of planetary bodies that now resembled a floating wasteland of rock that would eventually turn into a new asteroid field in a star system now devoid of life.

          The maelstrom was complete.