The End

Time was growing old and what were soon to be known as the Ancient People were unknowingly drawing their final breaths. The world was growing darker and its inhabitants were quickly losing what common sense they had.
On the bank where the sea met the unsullied shore, a gentle tide swept in, bringing with it a fresh sea breeze. It mounted the shore, and broomed across the vast green plain beyond. The healthy blades of grass shivered in the wind with the chatter of what could only be described as a million whispers. Two young lovers laid in the field. The man with his arms pillowed behind his head gazed up at the perfect blue sky. His ardent companion, lay beside him, her eyes gently shut as if enthralled in a wonderful dream. She rolled over on her side and opened her soft blue eyes to his face, substantially browned by the summer sun. Her tender lips parted and she confessed her love for him for what seemed to be one final time. His face immediately bloomed in a smile and when her mouth broke once again to share another kind word, he stopped her with a kiss. Her mouth opened on his and they caressed each other on the soft prairie.
Unaware that the end was climaxing they shared their final embrace. They bore only moments to feel the warmth of one another's flesh, and the gentle beat of the other's heart on their chest, before their race's demise vehemently came to pass. The sun was slowly falling now, going from yellow to a fiery orange as it neared the horizon. When the two lovers broke away from their embracement, a great light blotted out the reddening sun with a blinding white corpulence. The lovers raised their arms over their eyes. Their hearts began to race, only this time it was not stimulated by their intimacy. The light spread across the horizon, seemingly reaping the colour from the world around it. The sky, once an unscathed baby blue faded in a livid white, like searing hot flame. Sharing whatever comfort they could manage the lovers held eachother. She placed her mouth at his ear and began to say something when a deafening blast spread across the land. It was a sound unlike anything any of them had heard before. Like thunder it roused the couple in a start, although unlike thunder it was so loud that one could have sworn that the sky had broken as if it were a magnificent plate of glass. The white light on the horizon suffused a little while longer like an enlarging sore until it drew in on itself.

In response to the latter, a great pillar of red fire shot up from the earth. It rose up and expanded near its peak, forming a mushroom shaped cloud like hellfire. The once gentle sea breeze became a breath stealing gale, traversing the prairie with awing force. The woman's golden hair whipped and twirled behind her like a frenzied flag in the wind. She felt her companion's hand squeeze hers and she shut her eyes. The mushroom cloud of yonder broadened, its pillar shaped body spreading outward in a splash of irregular greyish smoke.
A second eruption made the prairie tremble only this time both the man and woman believed they heard the shrill cries of a million perishing souls.
For two lovers their ending had come. The once beautiful seaside was now spoiled by a man made weapon with the might of God or even the Devil.
Askance from the eastern shore of the Northen continent, the far wilder parts of the world also played witness to the devilish mushroom clouds. Harbingers of destruction and beacons of death.
The foolish deeds of the Ancient People had finally ended. The end had come...

The prairie where the lovers erstwhile lay was now darkened with ash of green grass that had once been growing there. Looming above this was a insensate black sky, littered with broken grey clouds. Cinder blew across the earth like sand and the atmosphere bore a thicker, nebulous quality. The world was quiet, save for the moaning of wind that went unheard for their were no longer any living ears to hear it. Further up the plain, where it sloped into a small hill, a dark shape lay motionless like a grotesque fallen statue. If there had been some life to see it, one would have distinguished it as a human corpse. But man or woman, one could never tell. It was charred black, its skeletal maw frozen in a scream. One hand, with fingers that seemed more like claws since the flesh had been burnt off, reached for the heavens.
Time was growing old and what were now known as the Ancient People had taken their final, painful breath of air.
The end for them had come, but for a new ancestry born in the wake of the destruction, their time had only begun...