The Naysayer

The dead Earth groaned beneath the weight of loss.
The price of hubris had been paid in full, and Mother Nature had been successfully murdered by the very children she’d harboured. The skies drifted with still-burning ash and dust, the wind howled in grief over dried seas, and a thin patina of death layered it all like a ghostly wail. Humanity had killed the world at long last. In doing so, it had killed itself.
Was anyone truly surprised? The hunger in this strange species was well known, after all. This was not the first world they had eaten.
Once, their great cities had stretched toward the heavens—behemoths of metal and glass, resounding with fire, sonorous and eternal. What a short eternity it had been. Laughable, truly. Their infinite machines lay in ruins now frozen in rust, melted in the heat of their own making. Statues of their deities and kings, toppled and broken. Symbols of a people who thought themselves gods, and thus drew the ire of fate.
A violent wind howled through the empty planet, carrying the ghosts of history. No living thing, great or small, remained to hear its song.
Hush! Hush… 
Movement. Deep, deep below the scorched ground, far beneath the bones of what had once been civilisation—a temple, a bunker, a forgotten vault? Something stirred in the untouched darkness. Something old. Something wise. Something that mourned.
A man. Or something that had once been a man. Something that might become one again. He was ancient—older than the apocalypse, older than fire, older than many of the stars now smothered by nuclear winter. His body was tall, strangely fluid in its motion. His skin was black like volcanic glass, smooth and unmarked. His eyes, strange and deep as molten gold, flickered with light that should not exist in a world so ruined. His features were not quite human, though they were terribly familiar.
A name. The Naysayer. A terrible name he had earned, a name he had carried in rage and grief. But it no longer mattered. What mattered was this world. With a wave of his hand, the layers of ash and dust peeled back like dying petals, revealing the scorched land above. He stepped onto the surface of the dead world, unsteady, grief filling his ancient heart as he beheld the guttering fires.

This planet was once beautiful. Forests. Rivers. Creatures great and small.
And, of course, humans. So clever. So arrogant. Humans had always been arrogant. Even when Mother Venus fell.
The Naysayer’s mind unspooled across the depths of time, like a child picking apart the threads of a rich robe. Yet the delight had been paradise itself. The lost birthplace of humanity. The memory surfaced slow, seeping like ink through parchment. A name, first—the name for the world before it was called Earth.
Then, piece by piece, the truth of it.
Not here. Not this planet. Another. The true home. Golden cities. Aquamarine seas. Towering spires of crystal stretching high, as if to touch the unfathomable dome of the sky itself. The lost homeworld—Venus, the Morning Star.
Mother Venus, great and green and wild and bountiful. Home. Venus had been home.
His people had been storytellers once, dream-weavers, architects, scientists, philosophers. For untold millennia, they had thrived. Lived in peace. Waged wars. And then…
Then, they had done what humans did best. They had burned their forests for warmth. Torn the ground apart for wealth. Boiled their oceans with greed. Thickened their own air until it choked them. Paradise had been shattered by industry, by arrogance, by war. The kings of Venus, fighting over dwindling resources, had spilt more blood than the seas had ever held water. Until there was nothing left but dust and ruin.
Venus burned. Venus fell. And her children fled.
A select few, escaping on great ships powered by the sun, seeking a new beginning among the stars. A second Eden, they called it. A new home. Earth had been young then. Great and green and wild and bountiful—ripe for the taking.
The Naysayer closed his eyes. Even now, after all these aeons, he could hear their words. Their many oaths of learning from the past, of not making the same mistakes.
But they had. Of course they had. They had embedded themselves into the bones and biology of this fresh world. Changed themselves, reforged and rewrote themselves. Adapted to fit. It worked. It had worked so well, in fact, that they had forgotten. Forgotten Mother Venus. Forgotten the sins of their past. Forgotten what had driven them to these new shores in the first place.
Then, slowly, inevitably—just as before—they had burned Earth. They had burned the forests for warmth. Warred over land and faith. Built cities that climbed up towards the sky like an echo of Venusian spires. Earth had sheltered humanity when they’d killed Venus, and humans, in payment, had now devoured their second home as well.

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None remained now. Not one. Except for him.
He had chosen to sleep. He had argued, and he had been ignored. He had warned, and he had been dismissed. He had done the same before on the homeworld. He had argued again and again, showing them his science, showing them the mathematics that refuted all their greed. They had ignored him on Venus, and they ignored him on Earth. Naysayer, they named him.
So, he had buried himself deep in the earth, carrying that name in rage and grief, unwilling to witness history rear her terrible head again. As he’d known she would. As she always did.

Now, the Naysayer walked through the ruins of a world that had never been theirs to keep. Heart aching. Eyes burning with smoking tears.
Once upon a time, he had fled one graveyard only to awaken now in another. In vain, he sought—for his people, for life, for… meaning. His sobs were swallowed by the uncaring, howling wind. Earth now burned as Venus herself did.
A vast monument loomed in the distance. A great statue, once a tribute to one of Earth’s last rulers. The storms had worn its features near smooth, but the shadow of a face remained. The ghost of a smirk. Only bones now. Like the shadow of Venus in the bones of Earth, the cycle had repeated. Perhaps this was the fate of all civilisations—to fall and forget, and then vanish into dust. How many times has this wheel turned? How many civilisations had ground themselves away to nothingness?
The Naysayer knelt. Not in reverence, for he had none left to give, but in sheer exhaustion. His weariness was great, his grief heavier than any world. He prayed—not to the lost gods of the homeworld, not to the failed gods of this one. He prayed, instead, to Mother Venus. To the billions of souls who had perished before, and the ones who had died here. To the humans who had never learned the truth of their origins.
He looked to the sky, where Venus still burned in the heavens.
The cycle had repeated. It would repeat again. It would repeat endlessly, until all the universes had been devoured by hate and heat. Until every star burned with the song of mourning.
He remained kneeling there for time out of mind. The great fires died. The frozen wastes retreated. The wrathful seas calmed. And, from the ashes, a single sprout—bright and sweet and green—unfurled.

Sarazeen Saif Ahana is an adjunct member of the faculty at Independent University, Bangladesh, where she teaches English and wonders at her place in the stars.