The End

It blew in from the North. 

An Arctic wind.

No-one really noticed.

But this was it.

The End.

In the pristine frozen wastes it had been awoken, a calculus of doom, a formula of nothing, an unending sum of collapse.

For Millennia it has slept, locked in the ice, trapped deep in the strata, a sediment of entropy sewn into the veins between epochs, the interstitial marshall, the tyrant from the crevasse, the mad berg.

No particular thing stirred it into life. It was just time that's all. Enough clocks had stopped for a reappearance. A comeback of sorts. Like Elvis the Destroyer. This time there'd been films too. A nervous prescience. Comets, storms, earthquakes, floods, even numbers and raptures about God.

But it wasn't Hollywood. No big neon sign here. Simply an undoing, an arresting, a stoppage of all that was alive, an erasure done without cameras or crowds or opening nights. A finish.

This was the end once again. A stutter in time, a spring clean, a full wash, a big scrub. Like last time. And the time before.

For all life on Earth.

It's here.

Extinction.