The Way it Ends
from "Beautiful Letdown" (Switchfoot)
Stars streamed past the viewing window. I fumbled against the straps holding me in my seat. I had to see the end for myself or I wouldn’t believe it. The clasps came free and I fell forward. Pain tore up my side. “Dammit!” I ran my good hand over the bandage. It still held firmly to my skin. I grit my teeth against the ache and crawled to the window. After so long in near-weightlessness the false gravity of the escape pod pinned me to the floor. I wouldn’t have been able to stand even if the cursed Salzen hadn’t burned my left arm and leg to uselessness. Damn the traitors to Ursa’s Hole!
At the window, I managed to pull myself up enough to grasp a handhold to one side of it. Behind my pod’s trail of exhaust, I could see it: the Galanthos Space Sation, pride of the living Planets, masterpiece from the combined skills of the nine races. It took three hundred years and millions of engineers and artists to build it. Its destruction took less than three seconds.
The first explosions happened on the far side from me, just scattered flashes of light and a hazy halo of debris developing in eerie silence. Then a burst of light blinded me. By the time I blinked away the tears and afterimage, nothing but a dark smear across the stars marked where Galanthos had been. Words rose unbidden to my mind, last lines from an ancient poem. I whispered them out loud to the silence:
“This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.*”
*TS Eliot's "Hollow Men"
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