Hamartia

Hamartia - Finale

Mikaela startled awake, sucking in a huge breath as she jolted upright. Her vision blurred and warped.

"Hey," Ty's familiar voice said as warm hands framed her face.

"Hey," she said with a soft smile as her vision finally cleared. He looked dirty and exhausted. "What happened?"

He leaned forward and kissed her gently. "You lost consciousness. Missed me being a hero," he said with a flick of his brows.

"I didn't miss that," she said. "You're always my hero."

He smirked. "You must have lost a lot of blood," he laughed. "If you're fawning over me."

She leaned her forehead against his. "What happened to 3A?"

He flicked his chin at the viewport. "Take a look. We're still in orbit. I figured we should stay put until the pilot was awake to chart a course home."

She wobbled to her feet, Ty at her side for support. He was careful not to touch the nano-bandage fastened over her wound like a second skin. She gasped when she got her first look at the once iridescent blue-green planet now shrouded in a sickly grey cloud.

"The sensors are detecting massive heat. It's completely dark too."

Mikaela felt tears dripping down her cheeks. "We destroyed such a beautiful thing."

His hand ran up her spine and stopped at her neck. "Maybe something new will be built on its ashes. Life is tough that way. It might take a few zillion sun cycles ... give or take a few hundred zouthand."

She nodded, leaning against him with a long sigh.

"Let's go home, love," he whispered as he kissed her temple.

Mikaela turned away from the destroyed 3A and plugged in the coordinates she knew by heart, taking a seat in the pilot chair. 4A was a dry red rock, but it was home and she'd never wanted to be somewhere so badly. The computer accepted the new flight trajectory and the engine kicked on, rocketing them deeper into space. Her finger hovered over the FTL button as she looked to Ty in the seat next to her.

Her lips tugged into a lopsided smile. "Second time's a charm?" she asked.

His face cracked into a megawatt grin just as he said, "Hit it."

~

A piercing, deep, stabbing pain. A wall of water raging forward, destroying everything in its path, drowning beasts of the land and leaving sea creatures stranded to die. Massive incandescent boulders and tiny glass beads falling from the sky in thick burning fiery sheets. A plume of ash and smoke rising into space, spreading like a mourning veil over the planet.

Burning.

Chaos.

Death.

Darkness.

But then ... a tiny spark.

66 MILLION YEARS LATER ... GIVE OR TAKE A FEW HUNDRED THOUSAND.

He was a man, a scholar, and a humble servant of God and, as such, studied the carving with a natural bias. The rock, a giant boulder slapped awkwardly into the desert as if it had fallen from heaven itself, appeared older than time, yet there were words and pictures scratched onto it's surface.

He studied these carefully. The scrawl was strange and barely decipherable.

First, the name of the man's home — 3ARTH — though the E was backward.

Beneath that were three more words: EVE, SIN, and ADAM.

He leaned closer to the eroded rock and wondered if there were meant to be more words, if letters had been erased by wind, water, or some other strange phenomena. The three words remaining were unevenly spaced, which could imply the message was incomplete. He sucked in a breath and exhaled on a growl.

Scholars enjoyed puzzles, but not unsolvable ones.

The pictograph was an even stranger mystery. Two figures clad in nothing but leaves. One female in form and the other male. The male figure's expression was full of fear, while the female expressed only contempt and loathing. Clearly, the female meant to harm the male with the poisonous apple drawn beside him, the delicious fruit a harbinger of her deadly serpent.

He withdrew his journal, quill, and ink from his humble traveling bag to jot down a few notes. A story was forming in his mind's eye. He prayed he could translate his thoughts into the written Hebrew word, so that he may honor his God. He'd been traveling for most of his life, viewing relics such as this one, collecting similar stories.

As he closed his journal, he looked once more at the inscribed rock.

This was the story he'd been searching so desperately for, he suddenly realized.

The catalyst of mankind — the genesis.