Mount Contenous

Clouds of smoke arose from the earth. Ash spiraled up and away from the epicenter. The awesome sight of geologic power was at full blast in the titanic event that was the eruption of Mount Contenous. The stillness now long gone was replaced with the somehow constant booming of the earth. Fumes rushed upwards from the sight, up into the sky, and into the air. Specks of unfathomably hot lava were spewed up, and in a single moment, the heat from within it vanished, taken forever, and small pebbles fell to the ground. Large plumes of lava were belched forth, and broke apart. The viscous liquid cooled on the spot, leaving an alien-like shape that was rock solid, yet somehow liquid in appearance. Rivers of lava flowed down, destroying everything in its wake. The epicenter, a large pool of seething magma in the center of the volcano’s peak, periodically burst over, creating new lava flows, which fused and split from neighboring flows. The boom subsided and the lava sank, sank back into it’s hell, slowly and steadily. The source was fading, and the final glob of lava made its way down to the base of the volcano. The destruction was magnificent. All the land around the volcano was devastated, and patches up to a mile away were still burning passionately. Over many years, the volcano became a mountain, fooling everyone who saw, waiting to pounce on the world again, surprising everything within a massive radius and destroying everything within a smaller radius. And so it waited.

It waited for many years. Until one day, Earth gave it the single, and rerouted a large quantity of magma it’s way. It squirmed throughout the plates of the Earth, and the pressure built up from inside Mount Contenous. Fissures built up around the peak, abruptly, releasing massive yet still far insufficient amounts of pressure out. Magma had already been flowing when the peak burst into dozens of chunks, flying through the air and landing somewhere far away. But it was too much. The lava kept flowing and the volcano couldn’t handle the pressure exerted from the core. The lava was trying to escape, escape from wherever, escape from- The mountain split in two, and a huge chasm was snapped into existence. A sheet of lava burst out. Some of it hit the floor as brittle rock, but another part of it burned everything it touched as it hit the surface. The mountain was decomposing, the lava taking it down, as it once did to the land. Fissures of lava emerged from around it, and the previous green landscape became a sea of red, orange and yellow. The heat warped the air, and the clouds quickly left the scene. Neighboring mountains began to crack. They had never been volcanoes before. Each second the trees, the plants, animals, dirt, all of it, was being replaced by a sheet of liquid rock. An epic boom struck the air. The ground shook violently, and almost perfectly along a defined line. The dirt gave way to seething lava. Hell was brought upon Earth.

It began ever so slightly, you could barely feel it, not that it would trump the trembling of the Earth, but slowly, one could very definitely feel the Earth splitting. Along the border of lava, the Earth rose in either direction, giving way to and revealing the layers of rock, previously unexposed and hidden from the surface. The land lifted, and a once horizontal surface became a diagonal surface. The land itself looked crooked, askew to the rest of the sky and neighboring surface. The lava dripped from the rock, like acid on a brick, simultaneously eroding and flowing down it. The trees were gone; You could barely see the brush in the distance, not that you would see much of anything, as the sheer quantities of smoke and poisonous gas would kill you in a single breath.

Mother Earth labored many days, and many nights, but finally, the chaos passed, and was replaced with a depressing stillness. The lava had cooled, leaving behind a grotesque blend of elements, all somewhat grey, to cover the whole Earth. Nothing survived. Not even our favorite volcano. The land was more or less flat, the complex topography of the area decimated, only leaving behind a faint glimpse into what it used to be. But most depressingly of all, in all the land around and beyond the sight, life continued, without a second thought. No one would miss the configuration of atoms and that had been those 550 miles of land, because all around it were similar configurations, for hundreds of miles. The gravest efforts of the Earth had been a blip in this grand timeline. The chaos and hell on Earth had, to an observer, say 1,000 miles away, it could have been a passing thought, an interesting occurrence maybe. And nothing there would remember the event, or any event, as remarkable as it may have been. If one truly wanted, they could reconstruct the event, but to what end? The event lived, and died in the span of its occurrence. Let us, the reader, remember the existence of Mount Contenous, the greatest volcanic eruption the Earth had ever witnessed.