The End
The day the world ended Gavin slept in. Like everyone else on the planet Mordak, he believed in a lie. He believed he was safe.
The morning sun was well on the way towards its zenith by the time Gavin stretched out his gangly limbs and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Running a hand through his black, curly hair, Gavin scented the morning air with his flat nose. The aroma of breakfast led him to the kitchen, where the dark-skinned youth ate a filling breakfast with his parents while they watched the news attentively. Gavin sat back in his chair, unable to give the rambling fool some called a news presenter the same interest his family did. Once the man had finished his standard, biased to the abyss and back, speech about politics, Gavin’s attention was finally captured by a far more interesting subject: space. Although the countries of Mordak did not have the technology to endeavour on lengthy space voyages, the planet was located far too centrally in the universe to avoid interaction with passing fleets and wanderers. A spaceport, build with the assistance and supervision of a passing dreadnaught captain sick of the centrally placed planet’s lack of infrastructure, had been finished just over two years ago, much to everyone’s (especially Gavin’s) delight. Since then, the capital of the new ‘United Mordak Republic’, Erandor, had exploded with business from passing ships. “Two months ago,”, the news reporter revealed, “a Nalblaka rogue spent time working our scientists at Space Fed. to boost our progress towards fully-functioning Star Voyagers by over a decade!” As excited as Gavin was by the news, he shuddered at the thought of what the blade-wielding psychopath had requested in exchange for the secrets of space travel. The news moved on to more financial garbage, so Gavin got up and placed his cutlery in the sink. Packing a bag for another day at his apprenticeship at the “Propulsion Research and Development” site in his hometown, Gavin began his daily morning trek. It was technically a weekend, but Gavin loved his job far too much to be deterred by such frivolous things, even if they allowed him to partake in his family’s long tradition of sleeping in whenever they could.
“Off to work again, honey?” His mum called from the dining room.
“Where else?” Gavin called back with a smile.
After checking that his lunch was packed and he had all the supplies he needed for the day, Gavin echoed one last farewell to his parents before stepping through the door and breathing in the beautiful late morning Mordak air. Despite the arduous walk ahead of him, Gavin was bouncing on his heels at the thought of another ordinary day of blowing things up and risking his life mixing rocket fuel. Unfortunately, Gavin’s days would never be ordinary again.
As Gavin strolled along the wavering path, he gazed out across one of the many mountainous expanses that protrude out from Mordak’s surface. The gold-leafed trees rolled over the lower valleys, their dirt brown trunks concealing the blue stone beneath. Red clouds lazily crawled across the bright orange sky. Truly a beautiful day. Gavin didn’t see the clouds of black that churned angrily beyond those beautiful ranges. As he neared the town, Gavin grew weary of a sense of wrongness that protruded from the small urban jungle that lay at the end of the ridge. Unable to put his finger on it, Gavin wiped the sweat from his forehead and continued. The thought of sweat stopped him in his track, as he realised what exactly was off. No breeze rippled over the rocky pass. No calls echoed from animals in the forest. Gavin took off in a run, dropping his bag of carefully packed supplies as he raced towards the town, anxious to find out what was happening. However, as he reached the streets of the town that encircled his beloved research site, he heard the screams of terror echoing through the lifeless roads.
The world lost colour as any intelligent life fled or cowered in trembling terror at the wave of malicious hatred that poured out from across the town. An unnatural shriek of horror sent Gavin stumbling in the entirely wrong direction as his innocent heart shattered at the thought of anything being driven through that much. Gavin’s new black and white world concealed little of devastation that had ravaged the first victims of the primordial wave of burning malice and insanity. Broken bodies lay inside the walls through which they’d been thrown; cast aside like child’s toys. Blood dried around the bodies of those who ended themselves before they could be caught in the clutches of the entity that now destroyed and corrupted Mordak from both the sky and the core. Darkness fell as a wall of simmering blackness circled the planet’s atmosphere, turning off the sun. Darkness fell over a man’s tortured face, a cast of terror and disbelief permanently set in his features; the hastily made noose around his neck not working fast enough to spare his eyes from the fate of the street’s inhabitants. Gavin continued to stumble through the lifeless hell the town had become, with each passing atrocity outmatching the last. Children strung up from the rafters on their own intestines, featureless bodies more resembling a hunk of flesh than the intelligent life forms they used to be.
A gargled cry shattered Gavin’s mortified trance. A woman sprinted for Gavin as fast as she could, her wounds leaving splattered blood in her wake. She screamed until her voice broke off the darkness chasing her, yet Gavin saw no sign of her pursuer in the ruined street behind her. She begged Gavin to save her, to run, to move, but Gavin could only stare, dumbfounded, at the woman who had survived what had broken so many others, only to be shattered on the inside. His body would not move as a tendril of darkness snaked out of a sewer grate. Would not move as this tentacle of pain, misery, and hate snaked its way around the woman’s leg, hoisted her into the air, and carried her towards the centre of the pain and chaos. His paralysis turned his muscles to stone as the woman, in a feat of sheer desperation, reached up and broke her own neck to save herself from whatever lay at the centre of this labyrinth of darkness. Realising its prey had escaped through the doors of death, the tentacle dropped the woman’s lifeless body, already reaching for its next target.
Himself, Gavin realised with a heart-stopping shock. His heart hammering the paralysis out of his system, Gavin turned to flee, only to meet a face full of concrete as he tripped over the managed husk of a body that lay at his feet. The entity, sensing his sudden desire to escape, darted forwards, wrapping Gavin in its twisted embrace. Gavin reached out and grabbed something sharp from the ground in front of him, intending to fight back, or take his own life like those before him. Before he could act, the solidified darkness the coiled around him, consuming his body, touched the pointed rib bone Gavin had ripped from a shattered corpse and seemed to throb in satisfaction as the makeshift weapon crumbled to dust. Gavin twisted and struggled as he was hoisted into the air like a sack of potatoes. His arms pinned, Gavin was helpless as the corrupted limb smothered his body and dragged him through the air towards a cave mouth from which several tendrils like the one that held him now had immerged. Gavin had no choice but to look upon the black epicentre of the crawling shadows slithered through the town and across the surrounding countryside. An avalanche of terror swept through Gavin’s system as he realised the thing gripping him intended to drag his as-good-as-dead corpse into the damning hell hole. The appendage gripped him tighter, a haughty taunt at the helplessness of his situation. It echoed a single word; a name, of what had committed such atrocities upon his world, and of what he was to become. Tenebrismor, it whispered. A silver lining dangled in front of Gavin in the fact that his green heart was hammering away so hard in his feeble body it might give out before he reached the gaping pit of death. Any glint of silver was abruptly snatched away, as the cave mouth approached, and passed Gavin. A darkness that made his chocolate brown skin look almost albino enveloped Gavin as the soul-crushing, thought destroying pain came crashing down; the boy who could not remember his name sunk further into the ink blackness.
Mordak fell in two hours. One hour after the boy was taken, nothing remained of Mordak save the crushing feeling that yet another once joyous planet had fallen prey to the dark stalkers of the universe. As death washed over Mordak, everything perished, save the one dark-skinned boy who was unlucky enough to survive
