During the early 1990s, single-use magic wands began appearing in dollar stores throughout America. For the most part, these were simply hollow, black tubes of polystyrene filled with a light dusting of powdered aether. Each contained just enough mystical potency to help with a single household task, whether that be washing the dishes, grilling burgers, or cleaning stains from the carpet. No incantations or prior initiation were required; after a few seconds of vigorous shaking, the wand’s plastic tip would pop off, allowing the pressurized magic to escape as a jet of violet smoke.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, several gigantic teeth were found mellified in a pit of ancient lobster honey. A team of paleontologists cleaned away the sea-green ooze, which, by their account, had gone undisturbed for at least five-hundred thousand years. Initial reports suggested that they belonged to an unknown creature which died while attempting to swallow an entire lobster hive at once.
“Someday, the dead will rise from the earth,” the gravedigger spoke. “Everyone who deals in corpses knows this to be true, whether or not they’ll admit it.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“We plant them like seeds for a reason, my friend."
Old-fashioned radios produced sound by boiling liquid lightning. The distinctive drone that emerged, of churning static and leaping foam, came to be known as “white noise.” This term is said by some to be arbitrary in origin, though others believe it was derived from the color of the electric vapor that churned through the innards of these devices.
This far out in the wilderness, the gods could no longer hear her prayers; even if they could, the roaming charges would be immense. She’d thought about bringing a radio with her and relaying her messages back to someone who could pray on her behalf, but getting away from all that noise was one of the main reasons why she left to begin with. She had grown tired of her altar pestering her to download premium gods, as well as of the dull, smokeless scent of autocandles.
There exists an incantation which, if uttered properly, can duplicate the mind and body of whosoever dares to utter it. There exists another, similar in nature, which allows one’s own reflection to be drawn out of any mirror. Lastly, there is one which causes a perfect opposite of the self to appear in juxtaposition with the original, causing both to immediately cease to exist.
As it turns out, all three of these incantations can be learned by parrots.
“How’d you get thrown in Hell?”
“Didn’t get thrown in. I was born there.” He sipped his wine. “Both my parents were damned. They did their time in the inner circles, then got jobs, fell in love, and moved out to the suburbs. It’s not much different from the Earth that far out, if you can get used to the lack of a sky.”
The end of the world is neither exactly a time or a place; rather, it is a four-dimensional surface, curved and chaotic, which courts the path of the planet on its journey through space-time. Were one to visualize it using only three dimensions, it would seem almost ribbon-like, a black helix of fluttering death. Asteroids entangled by this dark fabric are certain to be drawn into the Earth’s gravitational pull.