So I was digging through some of my older files when I came across a text document that hadn't been opened for a while. I can barely remember the story or what I had on my mind when I wrote it but I thought it was good enough to share. ----- Once again the sun cast its faintly reddish glow over the scorched plains of a land that had known no name for over a thousand centuries. Once long ago flowers would have taken this dimming as a signal to start curling up for the night, protecting themselves from the cold lightless black. Now nothing except a few clouds of fine dust moved as the shadows slowly lengthened, marking the passage of time on a plain which had seen no such flowers for as long as its name had not been spoken. The evidence of water was faintly visible in the sterile dirt, a long winding groove cut into the earth, made shallow by the long years of blistering wind it had endured. Once its banks had been coated in lush vegetation, and it had even once heard the laughter of children having fun in the reeds, but the only sound those desolate banks heard now was the eerie fizz of the scorching air. As the sun continued its slow but inexorable descent its final rays once more glinted off a sheet of golden metal, attached firmly to a rock suspended over a ravine. On this plaque lay the lines and curves of half formed letters from the mind of the last individual of a race which had doomed itself to extinction. The last act of the purest insanity and desperation that humankind ever has, and ever will, experience. As unintelligible as the pseudo-text was it still managed to convey a sense of that unfathomable loss and solitude that last living creature on Earth must have felt while carving it with the shattered remains of their radiation suit. However the effort that was placed into its creation was all but wasted, as no living creature had set eyes on these last words since they were first created, and now they were doomed to slowly be reabsorbed by the earth. The sun had fully set, but the landscape was still lit by the eerie glow of its own radiation, the raw radioactive power of humankind's ultimate savage fury still bathing the land in enough energy to boil water. Not even an entire planet simply brushes off the effects of a million megaton nova bomb, not even after so many years. It was impossible to pin the destruction of all life on earth to one person, but it was certainly easy enough to pin it to an event, more specifically the explosion that turned what used to be the northern hemisphere into a seething mist of vaporized rock. As the night wore on the inevitable moment finally occurred, and after years of standing vigilant against the deadly onslaught the rock suddenly slipped into the crevice which had formed beneath it, and the last evidence that there had ever been life on this inhospitable dead planet slipped beneath the surface, never to be seen again.
Thanks! Just looking at it now, there are a few things I'd like to go back and change, but it feels too much like some ancient relic for me to muck with it lol.
Thanks! Since this one was received well I may post a few of my others. I just discovered I have an old folder full of the things. Haha.
huh... Probably shouldn't call the ground "The Earth" if you want to keep the planet a mystery but other then that I thought it was pretty neat.