The sky had turned black. Voices of fallen gods echoed through the hills.
Gray, barren skies, sprawling, lifeless forests, and quiet, azure waters have long become a normality. The soldier's pace quickened as he pushed aside low-hanging branches and wiped sweat from his temples. The hillside swayed with every step he took—like a vessel being the plaything of oceanic wrath. The trees grew haphazardly from the ground, branches protruding from their skin like numb appendages. The grass on the forest floor slanted at an angle, as if eons of gales had adjusted them into their titled stances.
And yet, the hills were perfectly still, and only a soft draft snaked between the trees.
"Gravity fluctuations," he murmured in a gravelly voice. "Lovely."
After a hundred steps, the Artifact's ambiance came within hearing distance—a cold, monotone static underlaid with a faint whirring noise. The closer he got to the Artifact, the more chaotic his surroundings became. The sky shifted colors in a maddening iridescence, the trees grew haphazardly into the ground, and holes into nothingness became more prevalent. Colossal rings of gravel, rock, and leaves revolved around the Artifact's proximity at steady speeds. From the heart of the system, it appeared like a cage, its bars like heavenly bounds ensnaring something of godlike properties.
And at last, he reached the clearing.
It was nothing more than a massive, empty circle, where a shrine stood at its dead center, like a single rose breaching the hardened ground of dirt. He crossed the space, cloak flowing behind him. His boots crushed the pebbles beneath, and his hands tightened as he approached the small site. It was built from stone, with a language lost to time inscribed on the exterior walls. The man traced his finger along the words before taking a step inside.
The Artifact sat still, hovering above the pedestal by some inches.
A spiral of rings slowly spun around the cube, various sounds of clicking machinery emanating from its steel rims. The object's fragmented surface glowed with the colors of the cosmos, like a window to the stars themselves. Through this aperture, the man saw some stars flicker and die away, whilst others flourished from feeding off of massive clouds of stellar dust. Galaxies spiraled, and others were elliptical shapes of white radiance. Beneath all the stars was the cosmic background—a veil colored with deep azures and enchanting amethysts.
The man warily eyed the Artifact before extending both palms out towards it. A blue light was cast onto his fluffy, maroon gloves as his shaking hands were drawn toward the cube. As his fingers slid under it, the rings retracted into the cube's cracks, and the Artifact descended into his hands. When the material made contact with his gloves, a shock went through his body. He fell backward, and the Artifact nearly dropped from his hands.
Echoes of war. Countless foreign memories of war cascaded through his mind—entire legions being reduced to shimming dust, gods of forms that exceed the human mind, weapons transcending the greatest devices of history, cities surpassing the stars and extending through numerous galaxies, and many more. To the human eye, it would appear as if the stars warred on each other, casting mountainous meteors like bullets across the intergalactic battlefield.
His vision blurred between reality and memory, between the silent shrine he stood in and the blinding wars that invaded his memory.
But at last, they disintegrated away, receding into the crevices of his brain.
His grip tightened on the cube, and he exited the shrine. Strangely, all was normal; the clearing was replaced with a meadow, the rings of dirt and stone had vanished into thin air, and the trees grew vertically from the ground. He pressed a button on the radio on his shoulder, and it crackled to life.
"Got the Mistress's cube. Nothing eventful, really," he muttered into the device. "You there, 3?"
A cacophony of voices returned through the speaker, coalescing into one entity.
"Right here. Before you depart," he began, "try out the Artifact. See what it can do."
And the radio returned to static-filled silence.
A sinister smile crossed the man's face as his grip tightened on the cube.
"Now how did that scripture say it worked, again?" he mused. Focusing on the object, he thought a single command in his mind.
Destroy.
The ground shook with the fury of a god, and the wind rose to intense gales. The man turned against the sharpening breeze and gazed in the distance.
His eyes widened in shock.
Yearned had I for the eternally distant stars
Yielded had I to the still ocean of time
Yelled had I to the benumbed gods of gods
Fallen quiet and dormant in their soundless sleep
Youth I had lost in my ageless search to find immortality
Yesterday it seemed, when the gods of gods warred
Years, countless had gone by, each sowing the death of a star
Its stellar compounds scattered across the void
From the chaos, stars formed.
And back to the chaos, the stars returned.
Within seconds, he was propelled into the sky, the air around him rapidly heating up, and in the vast distance, the anomaly passed perfectly into his view. The man watched in awe as the anomaly rapidly tore apart the forest—the circle of void bringing the end of a silent ocean of trees. The plane distorted, stretched, and warped around the black hole, emanating the dissonating screams of space-time being toyed with like a limping puppet of fate. And yet, there was a silence lingering in the air, threatening to muffle everything in the living present and forevermore.
"So this is what it's like to play god," the soldier said.
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a Lubik's Cube. Completing the white face, he smiled.
"We could get used to this."
And with that, all ceased to exist.