Endings: All

For every beginning, there is an ending.  Every birth a death.

Myth is the reverse of life.  Life is a gasp of meaning drowning in a sea of meaninglessness.  Myth is meaningful.  More energy is vested in meaning than in the oblivion at the end.  Myth is defiance of life.

The wasps believe that when the world ends, it will be with the last breath of the last spider, when the will of the Allmother-to-Wasp done, and all shall return to tranquil eternity, free of impurity and need.

The spiders believe that when the world ends, it will be when Hunger is slain at last, and all his works undone.  Those trapped in hell by wasps will be freed, and all the world will exult its saviors, the spiders, at long last, and so will begin a perpetual kingdom of bliss.

The cockroaches believe that the end would come when the day of the sacred court ends, and all the gods would return home to sleep, and the play of reality will end at last, its mantle taken up by a new world when the court wakes the next morning.

The mosquitoes believe that the beauty of Earth is ever-increasing, and one day grow so beautiful the planet itself will become one of the Great Many Gods and join its brothers and sisters to play eternally amid the stars.

The scorpions believe that when all the remnants of demonhood are slain, the godfire will rejoin at the center of infinity and create a greater existence, flawed only in ways that make life enjoyable, so that an Anti-Creation will never rise again.

The humans believe that when the Thousand-Year Kingdom reaches its thousandth year, Aesh will return to the world and elevate her faithful children to the position of godhood, as their great ancestors before, and all who disbelieved shall be et behind in the infinite darkness that existed before Aesh.

The razorborn believe many things.  One is that the universe will crunch back in on itself, compressing again into a single point and starting a new universe.  Another is that all the stars and planets will spin out into oblivion, leaving nothing behind, a momentary curiosity extinguished.

All are wrong.

The end is that terrible day, when the noon-day sun glared on the face of the desert, and that titanic hand breaches the sands again--no longer a thing of flesh, but a thing also of steel, and iron, and brass, and fire and steam and smoke and the great soul-searing fire of the stars, the weakness cut out of it, its frailty replaced with strength, its thrice-poisoned blood turned against the insignificant beings that dared try strike it down before.

The end is the day the beast howls its rage to the sky with the sound of a world dying.

The final note of the symphony.

All life ends in Death.