George was floating against his restraining belts, studying the planet in the immense distance. The shuttle's pilot was sitting beside him, waiting fitfully for the landing order from the Admiral. He seemed impatient. A few minutes ago, he had tried to strike up a conversation with George, but it didn't go well. Now, the two sat in silence.

At some point, Shen's agitation spiked, and he started yelling into his radio. George ignored the noise, and continued to observe the surface of the planet. He thought he noticed a dark smear across the uniform red-brown. Perhaps it was the colony.

Shen stopped talking and began to prepare for a deorbit burn. Before he could finish, the dashboard flashed red and an alarm wailed through the cabin. There was a shower of pings against the dropship's skin, like rain on a roof. The thin whistle of escaping air joined the growing cacophony.

There a flash of black and Shen was gone, along with half of the dropship. The air exploded out of the gaping hole, sweeping George's body against the belts and sucking his lungs empty. He groped for his helmet as his ears popped and his eyes burned. The world was silent in that moment, and George never heard the click of the latches. He lost consciousness.

George opened his eyes

It didn't quite matter, since he saw absolutely nothing when he did so. The only sensation was a pounding headache. George couldn't even feel the crash couch and restraining belts keeping him in place.

Naturally, his first task was to complete a full visual survey of his surroundings. Twisting his body to gain some rotational momentum, he began to spin slowly, scanning the darkness for any sign of light. He found none.

After several uneventful hours, George felt something. It was a warm breeze, soft and quiet, whispering through his ears. He shivered as it passed, despite the heat.

The breeze kept blowing, and George soon grew accustomed to it. Once again, the hours slipped by. It was only much later that the first of the stars began appearing among the wisps of dark. George could not be sure of their nature, and so he quickly retracted his initial label and thought of them instead as simple light sources. They numbered in the thousands, a swarm of brilliance among the oppressive black.

Each of the light sources was blindingly bright compared to the surrounding darkness, and each varied slightly in color. Most were orange and yellow, a few brilliant white or blue, and the dimmest were red. George watched them as he climbed, and weighed his options. He could investigate one of them in greater detail by letting go ladder, but he might not be able to return. There was also a fair chance that the light hid some sort of danger, and might injure him if he approached. Acting on impulse instead of reason, he leapt from the ladder toward a nearby light source, an orange one with a faint halo of blue and white.

As he floated closer, the sphere seemed to grow larger, much larger than it had appeared from the ladder. He tried to go back, but the lack of a solid surface made him helpless to his own momentum. He touched the light.

In that moment, George found himself at the edge of a galaxy. It was a barred spiral, showing the graceful curves of starry arms and the faint dark mist of nebulae. It was immensely peaceful despite the vast number of stars swirling through it. George was calmed by the sight.

The galaxy for a time before spontaneously erupting into a visual confusion. George saw every color he could imagine, along with several he thought he shouldn't, all twisting and dancing in agony. George found it very difficult to stare into the chaos. He closed his eyes.

Eventually, the swarm of color resolved back into a stable shape, a sphere not dissimilar from the one he had touched. George tentatively opened his eyes and found himself staring directly at the blazing orb of an aging star. George felt no discomfort on his part; he could stare quite readily into the light. Even more surprisingly, he could clearly see the tiny dots of planets in orbit of the bloated star.

George was allowed to bask in the soft orange glow of the sun, floating in the empty void. Then, a disembodied force pushed him toward one of the glinting planets, which quickly grew into a blue-white sphere. George could make out thick white clouds, beneath which was only the bright dusty yellow of desert. A faint trail of gases stretched behind the planet, like the tail of a comet. The sun was a monstrous orange disk in the sky. George could suddenly feel its immense heat and terrible glare.

Even at a cursory glance, he could tell the planet was dying. The clouds meant there was water, at least in the past, but it was obvious that any life that may have once grown in the oceans had long since boiled away. George guessed that the star was reaching the end of its life and drew nearer to its spectacular death throes. No doubt the planet would go with it.

The pain of light and chaos returned, and George closed his eyes in an attempt to escape it. The faint sound of static joined the color.

Once again, the swarm of stimuli subsided and order was reasserted. He saw a barren landscape, not entirely different than that on Gaea. The ground was composed of fine dust that became airborne at the slightest touch. Dense haze obscured the horizon. A heavy canopy of cloud hung above the desert, but it promised no rain. The sun burned through even the thickest cloud, heating the air to a shimmer.

Far in the distance, George could make out the faint outline of a city, lost in the dust and vapor. He knew that nothing still lived in the rusted hulks of the remaining skyscrapers.

The towers warped and shimmered into a jumble of light and sound that again blinded him. His mind was slowly losing coherency as it experienced complete sensory chaos every few minutes. George began to make shapes out of the random static of his vision, if only to provide himself with a mental anchor. He saw ants, an army of red-black insects scurrying across a background of yellow and green.

Reality returned in a very disorienting manner. George, dazed, looked up to see he was suddenly much closer to the city, standing among the towers. There was no cloud cover here, and the sun shined with its full, terrifying strength. It swallowed half the sky, its surface a boiling, churning cauldron of liquid flame. The last traces of water were fleeing from the baked ground, rising in wisps from the dust. The skyscrapers remained largely intact, belying the hell raging around them. Each building took a unique, fluid shape. Those nearby were shaped like ripples on a pond, other were crystals stacked atop each other in a random jumble that still conformed to a pattern. Once, they had been beautiful examples of architecture, poetry made of glass and steel. They were all clothed in the dust, their crystal facades faded to the same drab brown as the dead soil.

The chaos quickly consumed it, this time taking on the subtle appearance of a fire. It lapped at his vision, a bright flame seeking to burrow through his eyes and into his mind.

When it ended, George found himself lying in a dry riverbed. A skeleton bridge arced across the sky directly above him. Over the years, it had shed most of its structure into the valley it had once spanned. A pile of rusted metal lay half buried in the dust, almost black against the fierce glare.

George waited for the confusion of sensory input to return, but was pleasantly surprised when he was allowed to remain present. To better survey the environment, he climbed up the shallow slope of the riverbed, dislodging cascades of loose sand. He felt his skin burning and his throat dry out. He quickly reached the lip of the valley and saw the horizon.

A lone tree, long dead, clung to the dry soil with roots as hard as stone. The sky was heavily overcast, but the air still shimmered in the heat. A faint vertical line of white vapor rose from the ground many miles in the distance. George reasoned that it was probably an underground reservoir leaking the last of its water. A line of mountains stared into the sun stoically, awaiting their inevitable fate.

The world again erupted into anarchy. The colorful flames returned with a vengeance and consumed everything. The tree, the mountains, the entire planet was enshrouded in smoke and ash and angry fire. And then the inferno was extinguished as suddenly as it began.

When George managed to open his eyes once again, he was met with a world wholly changed. The ground had turned to swamp. Between the puddles of murky water, reed-like sprouts grew, and the air was muggy and filled with the buzzing of insects. The tree was still dead and dry, though water lapped at its base. The sun was distant and watery, glowing beautiful white in the pale sky.

George watched with interest as the flames appeared and danced atop the distant mountain range, burning away the clouds that obscured the peaks. Once the vapor was gone, the fire jumped into the sky and was lost in the blue haze. He was jerked up with it.

The rush of air was surprisingly smooth on his face as he ascended, following the flickering tail of flame. It seemed to accelerate, and he watched the planet below recede, shrinking from a whole world, to a sphere, to a dot in the darkness. The stars began to slide across the sky like gems in a cosmic chandelier. The universe whipped past in a blur of light and motion.

The flame ignored the spectacle before it and burned steadfastly forward. It set fire to the stars it touched, causing them to flare momentarily before smoldering and darkening into ash. It traveled through the arms of the great pinwheel and wreaked its havoc as it went. Finally, it settled upon one star, an uninteresting red dwarf in a sparsely-populated region. The star wore a ring of glinting stones

The fire came to a halt and contracted into a bright point of light. It floated amid the refuse of the solar system, observing silently, a spotlight trained on the many worlds in the heat of this sun. It flicked from one asteroid to the next, examining each in turn before finally settling on one of the dimmer ones. The flames it had started among the stars still burned, bathing everything in a sickly light.

The fuel was soon depleted, and the world was left in darkness. George struggled to see, but was unable to pick out anything.

He woke to the soft lap of waves on the shore. The faint hush of wind and the smell of salt filled the air. George opened his eyes and beheld the constellations of Earth, blazing with a glory unheard of. There was no moon, no satellites, nothing but infinite stars.

George was rather content laying in the sand, but he got up and retreated from the shore. The surf was exceptionally calm tonight, and the stars reflected almost perfectly off the quicksilver of the ocean. The beach was clean white, and led up to a grassy hill. A dirt trail twisted over the hill, disappearing on the horizon. George followed it.

When he crested the hill, George was disappointed to find a gleaming city, glowing amidst the darkness. The stars dimmed in capitulation to the might of human creation, drowned in the artificial luminance. The city was surrounded by a huge, flat plain, covered in tall, yellow grass. The vegetation sang with the voices of insects, the stalks hanging still in the clear air.

George made his way toward the city along the path. For the first few kilometers, it was a dirt road, perhaps an animal trail. It was paved as the city drew closer, first with simple stones, then with asphalt. The grass grew more sparsely, and soon disappeared entirely. The walls of the city, high and solid, were surrounded by bare, hard-packed earth. The buildings rose above, shining yellow and white.

Finally, George arrived at the gates of the city. They were as grand as he could have expected, concrete slabs ten meters tall. They thundered open as he approached.

From within, the city was far dimmer than it appeared on the plain. Yellow-orange street lamps flooded the roads and alleyways, their light gushing out languidly and settling with a faint, mind-numbing buzz. The buildings were featureless, sheer towers of well-mortared stone. There were very few windows on street level, and those few were opaque, unwilling to reveal what waited behind them. George thought of getting a rock to shatter one, but decided against it.

He walked down the endless roads, making his way into the center of the city. There, he could see a large, tiered structure, similar in shape to a wedding cake. Its walls were punctured by gaping archways, from which solid beams of light shone, ghostly white in the dark. It was only as he neared this structure that he began to smell the rot.

He didn't notice them at first, secluded in the alleyways and thrown behind trash cans. When George finally saw the corpses, it came as an understandably severe shock. There were hundreds of them, now that he was in the center of the city, piled in great stinking heaps, stacked against buildings and hanging from open windows. Each body was in a different state of decomposition, and some were still frighteningly fresh. The only characteristic shared between them all was the boils. They covered the skin, the lips, even the eyes, little, oozing dots filled with pus. In the older corpses, the boils had swelled to the size of billiard balls, the skin stretched taut, shiny as plastic.

George took a step back, before his eyes were drawn back to the structure. It was much taller now than he thought, stretching into the sky infinitely, to heaven. It shone with light, beautiful and terrible all at once. He stood rapt.

He felt the light burrow into his mind yet again, consuming him. Through the slimmest connection he still maintained with his body, George felt the pox rise all over his skin. It festered and spread the boils inflating and popping in quick succession. He felt his body being consumed by the disease, while his mind was consumed by the light.

The tower was finally satiated. With this last meal, it was now ready to complete its function and die. The light grew brighter, brighter, bright enough to erode the tower from within and send it crumbling to the ground. As the looming walls fell from their infinite height, the rolling noise of its death filled the city. Moments later, fragments of stone and concrete struck the streets and buildings below, crushing everything. The great tower fell, and the world was buried beneath its rubble.