Work Text:
Maybe if you had let yourself leave your hiding spot, you could have escaped on the Torrens with the intruder.
Everyone had heard the explosion when the Anesidora collided with Sevastopol. At the time, your only thought was relief that it hadn’t killed you, but then came the slow realization, the slow death: Sevastopol had been sent into a freefall. You remember hearing your friend desperately praying to God as he hid, alone within the darkness as you kept to yourself, but that whisper alone was enough to descend the draconic horde upon him until there was nothing left to mourn.
Hunger dug its claws into your stomach, while existential dread gripped your heart like a vice. Survival. You did all you could have done.
Though many of the lights were failing and plunging the sector into darkness, the vast windows that spread across the outer wall of the hallway coated the graffiti-laden metal with the hazy glow of the sun. KG-348, always safely far away as it loomed over you all, now consumed far too much of the viewport, and the rare swirls of its clouds felt like morbidly-curious eyes.
You couldn’t help but feel curious, too.
As tremors began to wrack the station, faint at first though they grew, you saw as fires licked against the opposite side of the window, and the heat that had started to soak into your skin almost reminded you of Hell.
Did Hell await you, once it was over? Would the things you had to do follow your soul even beyond the veil? Or was Hell bound only to Earth?
It was always just a curiosity, passing ghost stories around with friends back on Earth – tales of souls bound to Earth by their torment. You remembered hearing of humanity’s first foray onto the moon – a quaint journey, by now – and you remembered reading deeper, learning what was planned if the first explorers had been lost to the moon. Those still on Earth would have presided over a burial that the dead would not bear witness to, consigning their souls to the deep as if it were a burial at sea. You’d briefly thought of their ghosts, forever bound to the moon, only able to gaze up back at home from a cold and lonely void.
The sea shall give up her dead;
You swore you could hear distant screams, either human or alien, tearing their way through the halls until the roar of the dying Sevastopol drowned them all out. Your skin began to crackle and boil from the heat.
and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body;
It was always easy to picture Heaven as being ‘up’ and Hell as being ‘down’. If a God had focused on the Earth alone, then why would that God need to stretch that cosmic sovereignty across the lonely expanse of space? Leave the aliens to their own devices. Consign them to their own ocean.
according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
Alone.
The room began to crunch up and buckle, slowly, as the caustic air burned out of your lungs like acid. You thought you’d grasped at your own face, gasped for breath. The universe itself seemed to quake as blinding light and searing heat flooded what remained of Sevastopol; the melting window before you burst like a boil, and what was left of you followed suit.
The titanic mass of slag hit the metal sea like a bullet, a mercury-like broil lashing up into the storms above. The maelstrom of wind and lightning buried Sevastopol further, and the dying flames lashed up towards auroras that they could never reach before finally letting themselves end.
The roar of the storms grew muffled as you sunk deeper into the churning metal. You could hear a hum that you thought could have been the song of Heaven, and you could feel a sinking cold that you thought could have been the ninth Circle.
A low thrum bled down into the ocean. The chaos above was muffled until it was nothing but a trickle, a reminder of the physical world, all growing fainter and fainter. You might have been sinking. You might have been fading.
You waited. Waited.
Panic and realization echoed throughout the sea. You felt what you thought was pressure and darkness as you sunk deeper, but then you tried to focus and realized that you had never felt anything. You listened, and you realized that you could hear the monsters as well, lost to their dying domain; a cacophonic howl that bled into a song-like scream, the endless terror of a lost humanity, forever left to the depths of space with consignation to no eternity.
You gasped for nothing, and you joined the chorus.