It had been a surprisingly good and pleasant day for the end of the world.

That is what Bram Stockerson found flitting through his mind once again as he shifted how he had wedged himself into a crevice of rock.

Did the idea of a day even matter now?

The sun had looped back and forth across the sky for his entire life and long records before. Casting into shade and darkness his home and country when it passed the tall cliffs of the valley walls.

He had even painted the east and west sunsets as a child.

Trying to capture the beauty of the moments with inexpert hands.

How the shifting light revealed the glitter and shine of stars and the green shimmer of the weft and wake of Gaia.

Now it hung in the middle of the sky still and static.

And all across the sky the great shadows loomed.

Tripods.

Horrors uncountable.

They stood astride the world, limbs seeming thin and almost frail with tiny bodies where they joined.

They seemed frail and absurd until you saw one leg plunging down into the middle of a valley more than forty leagues across and block off all passage and crussh the landscape and towns beneath it as if they were mere nothing.

The footprint of a titan flattening entire communities.

They loomed everywhere. Black and branching their legs joining distant bodies BEHIND the blue shine of daylit azure.

For a while Bram had listened to the voice caster and the reports from cities all across the plate. But then broadcasters had begun to be snuffed out.

In the last few hours after that he had managed to catch a few panicked warnings that the horrible hands were coming for them, that they were drawn to the broadcasters.

That had been enough for bram.

He had flung the metal box full of wires off a cliff and fled to another hiding place then.

Wedged and squeezed himself back into the cracks of a cliff wall far away from any habitation.

Far from water or concentrations of food, far away from people.

The monsters in the sky were like a forest canopy stripped of leaves. Dead swaying trunks with sinewy threads oozing and pouring from where they touched the swells and curves of earth and the foothills of gaia.

The end of that last day had been the worse, for a startling panicked moment the familiar weight of gravity had fled.

Buildings less moored into their foundations had crumbled upward under the release of their burdens and people had stumbled and fell into the sky.

Whole clouds of people and cities worth of vehicles and structures had flown upwards to meet the horrors when they first arrived.

All who fell up never came back down.

And then when the pressure of weight returned the monstrous things fell upon them.

Reached into homes and villages with uncountable profusions of arms.

And they reached for people.

Leaving trees and most wildlife untouched.

Bram had watched them.

Where families or communities congregated or hid together and mourned or prayed for the souls of the departed the sinewy cables of grasping claws descended from all sides.

Those buildings that had still stood were torn apart like powder and all who took shelter within pulled screaming to the horrible limbs.

The token resistance that the great warriors of every nation could muster only gathered up more people for the slaughter.

Bram had stopped hearing the sound of shells or the boom of explosives echoing across the valleys three ‘nights’ ago.

In some ways that was getting to bram the worst of all of it.

The isolation was taxing, the constant pain of cramped muscles and near starvation and thirst from spending almost every waking and sleeping moment wedged in a crevice a dull throbing pain.

Delirium and a kind of madness slowly settling into constant companions.

But the worst part was the way that the sun and sky had stalled into stillness.

The gentle swing of their home and mother gaia as she swayed her sun plate one way and then another.

Bram had never been particularly religious, he prayed for his ancestors to nourish their spirit and talked with a few but the whole world mother thing never quite seemed important to him.

It didn't seem important to most people he knew, just a few crazies on the street warning of terrible times ahead.

But they had been saying that forever.

Literally for thousands and thousands of years people had said that the end of days was coming.

Bram spared a glance from his hiding place for the sun locked over head, where he had earlier worked out must be dead center over the middle of the world plate.

Guess the madmen and women were right.

The days had ended.

Apocalyptic monsters bigger than mountains had descended from the sky and even now the distant roar of grinding churning earth and air as their tendrils tore through the landscape for humans and scraps of civilization that they had missed in their initial frenzied arrival.

Bram had cried when he watched them rip up the foundations of the roads.

Now he could not spare the strain of wasting the water.

Pipelines that once carried the blood of gaia were torn up, mining towers to process her skin pulverized, the distillation columns of industry that split the bounty of her gifts pulled into pieces and dragged up into the waiting and unseen maws of the tripodal horrors.

It was the ruination of everything.

It was the end of the world.

Yet here squeezed into a crevice in the walls of the valley the sound of destruction was distant, hushed and rhythmic, almost soothing.

It lulled him to sleep sometimes under the constant burn of the stalled day.

The sky was clearer and clearer then he had seen it in his entire life.

The landscape where human hands had not planted tempting morsels was almost completely untouched.

And even the raw mulch of stone and dust that had once been cities, villages, towns and factories had more of a look of freshly tilled earth of a field then the desolation Bram had first imagined it was when the last day had begun.

It was despite the shocked horror of everything coming to an end a beautiful day for the end of the world.