The wind was whispering through Lil's hair as she looked back toward the setting sun. The fields rolled out behind her dipping and rising with hills and valleys. Tall grasses waved green and purple and blue in the wind. The sinking sun sent shadows racing with the breeze out across the fields. A single darker shadow marked where the sun's rays hit against a solitary standing stone, far away and across the hills. A single gravestone to mark the death of a hundred species, an entire world.
The wind was salty with the breath of the sea but not a single gull called. There were no lark’s wings to obscure the sunset now and no hum of insects to give a voice to the rippling carpet of grass. The world was silent. It stretched out behind her, green and perfect, a landscape marred only by that single standing stone, a warning finger raised above the grasses.
But the warning had come too late and now there was no one left to head it, no one except Lil, who had given a voice to its warning, Lil, whose words always went unheeded. The world was perfect now, maybe, but it would not stay that way for long. Without the insects, the decomposers, the fallen plants would lie where they fell burying and choking the new growth. Without the decomposers to return its nutrients the soil would lose its richness. Soon all that tall grass would yellow and die. It would pile up, and up, and up until it buried that warning finger and there would be nothing left.
So Lil looked back, watching as the sun set for a final time. She took it all in, the grass and the breeze and the standing stone. She wanted to remember this world, now, as it was, perfect, not as it soon would be. The sun had already long since passed its zenith, and it would soon be down for good, then night would role in and it would begin. Yes, it would begin soon, the second death of this world that had already died, and it was time for her to be gone.
Lil turned away from the sinking sun and the hills and the valleys and the world that she could not save and stepped forward out into the darkness. After three steps Lil’s feet had carried her far enough into nothingness that the sun setting behind her was nothing more than a bright spot in her periphery. She fought the urge to turn back, to take just one more look, but she had already taken that look and she had already seen all that there was to see. Now it was time to move forward. She was back in the darkness, back in the void and the silence and the waiting nothingness, back where it all began, and now, now it was time to begin again.
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