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The Sixth Extinction

·356 words·2 mins
flash-fiction

Let's start at the end of the world, shall we?

I believe this was the sixth time I have watched it end. They all appear different on the surface, but they are not. Each time, someone gets a taste of a little too much power and commits mass genocide on a scale never seen before.

Well, on a scale almost never seen before. The first near-extinction of the human race is still unrivaled. Even as I watched Rex Terra—commonly refereed to as God—line up the last of civilization, not even 10,000 people, I knew he had failed. He did not ravage the world where they lived. Even with canyons the width of cities and length of countries, mountains threatening to breach the stratosphere, and tides swallowing continents by morning and exposing ocean trenches by afternoon, humans always found a way to survive if even one square mile of land remained habitable.

This time would be no different.

A girl barely old enough to tie her own shoes stepped up to the cliff's edge alongside the rest of her family. The first of the last to die. Once in place, God's minions stepped aside. He strode towards the two parents and announced their crimes.

"Betrayal."

A single word. Not even an explanation of how or who they had betrayed. Truly pathetic.

God threw the little girl off the cliff and into the ocean. Even now, no one fought back. Cowards. When presented with the choice to possibly die or to certainly die, which do you pick? The rational being rallies their comrades and fights back. The irrational being allows themselves to be slaughtered. The psychopath plunges her blade into god's chest.

Risen from the ocean grave below, the little girl's eyes burned white, and wings made of blood stretched from her back to beyond the horizon. Thousands of years of planning and decades of conquest only to be foiled by a single child. Ironic.

God turned to her and asked a single question.

"Why?"

Death answered him with a smile.

"I can't have you destroying my greatest weapon, brother."

Perhaps this time shall be the last.