The end

A little story about the end, as I hope it might be. The painting, by Niko Pirosmani, is one that seems to fit a lot of my stories.

The End

They had run out of time. There were no more moons left, there was no more hope. Nothing more would rise in the sky, night or day. The standing stones watched but refused their help. The magic that lay beneath them slept, and it would sleep now forever. The Sleepers who had been laid to rest, or to wait, beneath the stones would never waken, though this was surely the end, and they were the only ones who could avert it. It was their function, the reason they waited, suspended between life and death. So said the stories. Men’s stories. The Sleepers were men too. So they slept.

The fox watched the setting sun and called the vixen. Together they slipped through the gateway between the stones to the otherworld and left the earth to its dying.

Vixen stopped and looked back. Dog fox sat and wrapped his brush neatly over his toes. The sky beyond the stones was darkening, though not with night; it was dark because the sky was empty. The pale sun had set and no moon would rise. The stars had all fallen, and the universe had turned its back on the earth. A flock of birds swung, swift, feathered darts, between the stones. An owl followed, another. They were the last. It had been decided long ago, long before the Sleepers had even been thought of, that the owls would be the last. They swooped low and silent between the stones, and the air they brought with them in their feathers smelled not of humid earth and dead leaves, the taste of mice and voles, starlight, moonlight and green things growing beneath tall trees. It smelled of nothing at all.

When all that was left of Earth had passed between the stone pillars that marked the border between one world and another, the stones fell together and shattered. The doorway had gone. Fox shook himself, vixen yawned, and they trotted, side by side, into the suddenly starlit night.