One Last Hope...

She stood over the ruins of some city that must have been buzzing with life until some time ago. She picked up the dead flower that lay besides her feet. “What a destruction!” she thought, as she gazed across the horizons. The remains of a once flourishing planet were surrounding her. There was neither a movement nor any trace of life.

As she paused for a while, the events of the past played out there, in front of her eyes. It was a judgement day to say the least. Clouds rained fire, oceans heaved and the planet quaked for once and all. The most developed species were destroyed as were the most primitive forms of life.

 Those poor creatures struggled, they fought back, and they tried their best. However, they were just too small to succeed in conquering their own demise. It took sometime but eventually all of them were gone, wiped out.

She saw that all happening with such nonchalance. She was never inclined to help them. However as the time flew by, she started feeling this knawing agony. It was a terrible void that even she could not really deal with. Finally relenting, she decided to shed all those inhibitions and her mighty ego. She left her den in the pursuit of the signs of life, if there was any to be found.

She was now frantically searching for some survivors. She had travelled through those hollows. She wandered across the planet and floated over the mountains and seas. Her solitary voyages however remained naught but a vanity. Her journeys did not bear any fruit. She was sorely missing something in this quest. She knew that things cannot go on in this way for long. There were a lot of questions she had determined to find answers for.

It was after a lot of futile efforts, that she decided to take a break and reenergise herself. That is why she had stopped here for some time. Nothing except silence breathed as wind whistled sinisterly in the air. She shrugged off the uncomfortable feeling that crept in her mind. She again looked at the dead flower in her hand pensively. 

“This solitude is almost menacing, I have to find a life, any life, here at any cost.” She finally conceded it to herself. “What am I without a life around? Why have I become so vulnerable to disappointments? I have never tried to create anything, but if it needs could I?” She asked herself a gauntlet of questions.

“It was I, who reigned supreme for all these ages. It was I, whom all feared and none could escape. I was the entity that held no bars. It had been my choice and only my way. I was the one who could rise above time and heck, even alter its flow... “No! It's not possible! I can never now, be so weak!” she uttered. A denial rather than an affirmation was apparent.

Hope was the feeling she had so despised for eons. It had created obstacles in her way at every point. When those poor living beings resorted to their hopes and prayers at her first sight, she just used to laugh at them. She had taken such immense pleasure in crushing those hopes. But today, she was afraid that she, herself, was falling prey to that very same venomous feeling of hope.

She gave up her attempts of feeble denials. “All I am left doing is to voyage endlessly in these empty hollows, with no respite or reprieve?” There was no point in refuting the undeniable truth. “If there is no hope, I have nothing to defy. If there is no pain, I have nothing to relieve. If there is no love, I have nothing to take away. And yeah, if there is no life, I have nothing to end. I have to try even more.

 Life has been omnipresent and it has always reborn. It will be somewhere, somewhere below into the ocean or in some remote cave. I have to search; I have to try even more. If something comes alive, I will get the scent of life before anything. Because all may end but I never shall.”

Then Death, having made her mind, stood up. She spread her wings and started her search once again as she clung on to that one last hope of finding a life.