Fires still raged across the planet, incinerating everything in their path. Nothing had been spared from the heat of a solar flare. This small world was ruined, and would probably be incapable of sustaining life for many millions of years. All it took was a single solar flare that just happened to fire in the right direction.
“Do you think he did this?” Psiksi muttered as the two ships hovered around the planet’s moon. There, they were somewhat safe from the electromagnetic waves still blowing around the planet’s remains. The ships may have been shielded from solar flares, but they didn’t want to take any risks.
“Who? Ar…. Our brother??” Eksi shuddered. All of them had a slight headache. Eksi seemed to have it worse than the others, and the electromagnetic waves were almost certainly to blame. “Possibly. I mean, he’s not going to kill everything personally, is he?”
“He totally did this…” Veekay’s voice crackled over the radio. “Also the signal here is shit. I can hardly hear you guys.”
“I hope he didn’t…”
“He did.” Veekay seemed certain. “That sun, I bet you it has never flared up like that before. And even if it has, it’s got to hit a very specific angle to completely fry this poor planet and its three billion sapient inhabitants.”
“How are you so certain?” Psiksi snapped. “You never…”
“Are you defending him?” Arksi snapped. “He IS Death! He almost certainly is behind all of this. Maybe not directly but he certainly had a hand in this! As far as we are concerned, he is dead to us as a sibling, he is nothing more than a monster.”
“But…”
“No buts…” Arksi sighed, then apologised. “Maybe I should have given you all more time to wake up… Because you are NOT thinking straight, Psiksi.”
“So why are we here?” Thitaksi asked, desperately wanting to change the subject. “Surely he killed everything and all that, but why are we floating around in orbit around this moon?”
A second voice crackled on the radio. “Because he’s still here…”
“You 100% sure that’s him?” Veekay and Elkay spoke quietly.
“It’s a yellow and black entity. Of course it’s him.”
Arksi tutted, then prepared his ship to land, only for Thitaksi to stop him.
“You sure this is a good idea? Last time he just disabled our weapons and told us to leave him alone. And here we are, about to go down there and do the same thing!”
“He has a point!” Veekay shrugged. “But this might be our chance to capture him. He’s… he hasn’t don’t anything since we spotted him.”
“When did you spot him?”
“About an hour ago when we got here…” Elkay admitted. “I mean, I wasn’t sure because he was a black lump for quite a while. But he has been looking at the planet and he looks miserable. And he killed the three curious animals that approached him then crossed something off a list. Probably somewhat upset that he’d killed like three billion people… We won’t be able to sneak up on him but since he seems so docile…”
Arksi growled. “We ready our special weapon now, we go down there, we capture him and that’s it.”
“What special weapon?” Elkay muttered, hopefully in a way that Arksi couldn’t hear him.
“They have a Time-Cage. Apparently the Whenvern has used it before, to great success…” Veekay quickly explained. “But this was a long time ago, and I don’t trust the Whenvern…”
“Well we do trust him!” Arksi butted in. “The Time-Cage ensures that he won’t be affected by time, thus unable to…”
Arksi fell silent. Thitaksi and Psiksi stared at him. He was looking in the viewport, down at the moon.
“Unable to what?” Elkay asked.
“Doesn’t matter…” Arksi grunted. “He’s disappeared…”