Most people didn't believe that everything would end on 12/21/12. It did.

It was a slow, smoldering process. The people didn't even know the Moment happened when it did. Heaven, earth, and hell suddenly (in terms of Time, which had existed, exists, and will exist always) collided in a silent maelstrom of light and matter. To the people on the planet it seemed like nothing more than an unusually bright sunset. Dusk was when the feeling descended, blanketing their universe with a shift in the air, though no one was awake to feel it. Hell rose up from the skies and heaven fell to meet it, making Earth move forward and regress into P'an Ku.

What once was considered a total creation of God, a high and supernatural being that had always been, had now progressed in the fashion of a regression following old Chinese creation myths. The people didn't realize it yet (they were often oblivious to things, though they believed themselves to be perspicacious and knowledgeable), but they soon would.

At least, I hoped they would.

These humans, I loved them. I had the deepest of what they would call "faith" in them. They were amusing; it was lonely when they died and returned to the stone form from which they were fashioned. You may ask why I didn't simply revive them, breathe into them water and life, the way my sister had. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I didn't have that power, not since Pangu, feeling compressed and frustrated, took an axe to the calmness. After he ended in that Moment, somehow that power went to Nuwa. She started playing with Pangu's creation, this thing that wasn't quite the thing it had been before, as if it was devoid of the pureness found in both good and evil it had once known. I was aware in another Moment of not being alone with my sister, as she accidently created a "human," a thing that gained figure from a mossy stone and movement from the wetness after being dropped in mud.

It's clear that I wasn't ready for them to die. Nuwa had warned me that it wasn't a good idea to become overly attached to them, to these things she'd made simply by accident. She was never fond of the humans and had become less so once they added numbers to demarcate the passage of Time (she and Time had been in a romantic affair for awhile and was miffed that humans had had the arrogance to age it). After all, Time had specified that it grew in Moments and was not to be dictated by human measurement. That's where the issue started. Time was devastated when Nuwa ended and joined in Pangu's fate, nurturing the further expansion of a world completely different from P'an Ku. The place gained more space, more nature, more things that Time didn't believe it or its inhabitants deserved.

I tried my best to cool Time's anger and prevent the heat from affecting the young world, but even the humans- as dense as they usually are- started to take notice. Time delighted in that, in their noticing the issue and their belief that they could solve it when they really had no hope of survival to start with. You and I both know that Time is cruel and thoroughly enjoys the fact that it has the final say in things, every decision based on Time's own whims and moods of each Moment.

Soon, though, I became afraid that my presence there was only bolstering the execution of Time's vengeful Moment, so I left. It became stars and space for me, only signs and impressions that passed by as I tried to escape the Moment that would end my sister's beloved creations. In retrospect, I suppose I was looking for some thing else other than an escape, though I have no idea how to articulate what this thing was. All I knew was that as I moved more, something felt strange; I felt heavier (which was a strange concept and sensation). Perhaps it was Time's warning and calling me back.

I travelled through blackness and whiteness and vortexes that I didn't know had moved and universes that resembled P'an Ku before the new young world Time was upset with had existed. I don't know how many Moments passed before I realized that, as far away as I was from P'an Ku, I was really only a single Moment away from the destruction that I would have to witness. As Time called and decided, I returned. It wasn't long before I could hear the more perceptive humans proclaim that the Apocalypse was Nigh. And thus, it became clear that more than Time's anger and determination, I was to be the cause of their end. (Time was a bastard, both in the colloquial human sense and the literal definition, being a jerk and being borne of a few things that never saw each other again. Honestly, I never understood what Nuwa and Time had together.)

Being Nigh, I have the upper hand of intimidation and a sort of second-cousin twice-removed kind of relationship with Time. This time around, though, I realized it was not an advantageous position. On the humans' 12/21/12, another tiny Moment to Time, I made it end. I am the warning and the unusually bright sunset and the change in the air. The humans didn't even notice, though, and that hurt. I loved them and had wanted to meet them for the longest time, but not one of them makes any comment. I can hear every argument, every utterance, every breath that's made as I blanket their world and yet everyone only speaks of how the Apocalypse didn't happen. They don't understand; my "faith" in them is cracked. I don't understand. Hadn't they been preparing for Time's wrath, hadn't they christened it "Apocalypse", hadn't they said Time and I were one in the same? Why is it, then, that even those who'd flocked to Bugarach didn't think anything had changed? Once they woke up, the difference should've been obvious. I'm beginning to understand my sister's sentiments regarding the stupidity of humans- I had thought their foolishness endearing at first, but now it is simply irritating. Can't they feel it, that Pangu had reconstituted? Hell and heaven re-formed with limbo, creating my dearly missed P'an Ku; this young world was not its own. It did not belong to itself.

As more Moments passed, I remained and realized why Time was so ecstatic. Its plan was playing out perfectly. While Time didn't appreciate humans, it appreciated showmanship and the panic behind preparation, thus the spreading of the Mayan calendar and the following of it. Time had never wanted a quick, lightening-like strike to ruin the humans- it was all about a slow, molting liquefaction. It would be gradually that they would end and return to mossy stone, gradually that they would all leave the world to Nuwa, Pangu, Time, and me. The date of 12/21/12, when seemingly nothing happened, would bring a flooding of relief and then a slow build-up of anxiety throughout their human Moments. As I suffocated them on Time's orders, I remained to see the last, the end.

Time was overjoyed. I watched as Nuwa fully returned to her former self as the last human returned to stone, then to dust. It seemed I was the only one that was attached in any way to this young world; Nuwa and Time urged me to release it and allow Pangu to be again. While I loved Pangu, hadn't he been the one to end in the first place, expanding P'an Ku and molding the young world? Why did Time have so much power? Was Time so obsessed with parallelism and circularity that for everything to progress, it had to regress? I became frustrated and left once again, releasing the world and allowing Pangu his freedom. It was more blackness and whiteness now, as I took to the impressions and the shadows and the ideas that I had come across and left behind Moments earlier.

It was an average Moment when it happened. I finally rejoined them. Nuwa was being doted on, Time floating around her and making her younger, then older, playing games. Pangu was nowhere and everywhere all at once; he was yet again making me confused. Now that P'an Ku existed once more, he had little to do but irritate me. I was grieving for my human-less-ness a few Moments-worth of Time away when he suggested Nuwa re-form the humans. I was against such an idea. Wouldn't recreating them lead to my inevitable destruction of them? Time had always had a cruel sense of humor and it wasn't as if anybody had the power to stop it. I cried out as Pangu took a deep gasp and ended once again, creating a new, young world. This was all a joke to them, a game.