A bed of bush daisies bloomed while basking in the sun before the forever darkness struck. Children—girls played in the meadows while young boys took to the fields with sticks and toy guns. Hyverant grimaced at the echoes of the past replaying in his mind. He and his partner Sy’Trystian had returned to find the entirety of their unified galaxy in utter disarray. They’d grown up surrounded by the fables of the Whirm, like all others, but so too have they trembled at the sight of the evidence pertaining to Their existence. The panic had been abundant, and with the acclimation of Their mystique had the populous clamoring for salvation. Ports were barricaded—few had been allowed off the planet and even fewer from the Galactic Collective sent their acknowledgement or sorrows.
Hyverant sat at his workstation, taken by grief. His bald head had sprouted thickly matted threads past his shoulders. Their exhausted resources left their planet and the rest of their portion of the galaxy more exposed than ever in a failed effort to spend what they could not afford on an odyssey to damnation. The people of YU’danga possibly had centuries to prepare for Their arrival, yet the inescapable feeling of hopeless dread followed them out their doors.
Even their top astronomers had their gazes fixated on their graves. The first decade had been the roughest with every day ending the same—the recurring question springing through the inhabitants of the galaxy; Will it be today?
A generation had gone by without incident from Them. Messages traded between Galactic colonies spread the word of losing sight of them entirely. This further disturbed Hyvervant, on a sickbed with a young man by his side. His firstborn had been the spitting image of him, but his sickness had stripped the boy’s name from memory. It was a strenuous effort, but he’d eventually recover, outliving his traveling partner by decades, as Sy’Trystian had taken his own life the year prior. He never married, nor did he sire offspring. The growing speculation had racked the Galactic Collective to its core with another question; Where have They gone?
It’d nearly taken a decade in a hydro-cryogen pod before Hyverant would recover with his world trapped in a state of incredible despondency. Expired dullards had seized positions of which they had no true understanding. Many of them had allowed the growing threat to slip their minds and had instead focused their efforts on renewing their world’s energy, thus diminishing the hope of survival. It was then that They appeared. The word spread like that of a cosmic virus, affecting those in a matter of moments the instant the ToYuoga system had been obliterated—‘consumed within a violent flash before vanishing from the Collective scanner’, astronomers reported. They’d move from one galaxy to the next, a cosmic hurricane on a warpath that spilled its vendetta across the universe until They’d happen upon Hyverant’s home.
The years had not been kind to YU’danga. Its climate turned on its people, blotting the sun with thick storm clouds, but saved them by protecting them from the sun’s spiteful radiation. The dramatic change in the atmosphere had torn their planet’s equilibrium asunder. Hyverant, an old man grasping at the straws of youth, garnered every second he had of his remaining life and placed it into preparing his kin for this operation. They would leave this galaxy, his son Tao’ga, and his garrison of warriors, and would venture to the far reaches of the next galaxy over. To a place with more time—preparedness for what’d been inevitable.
YU’danga had been on the brink of collapse for decades, and only then would the foundation begin to crack. As the wormhole closed, Hyverant had been left there, a broken old traveler in the middle of a field on a dying planet. The city over his horizon burned, and the taunting smoke stayed with him until the end. He’d lay there motionless. Until he’d finally seen that light in the sky. The light burned in the distance, clearing the clouds from the hemisphere. He turned his head and smiled at a bed of dead bush daisies gently blowing in a sudden wind, slowly regaining their color—until the darkness returned.
End
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