Hell On Earth

• Navneeth Krishna, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2022

A crumbling once-steel skeleton of a skyscraper, made into stone by an unholy rainstorm of hellfire and nuclear death. A child’s skeleton, preserved between layers of sediment, wrapped in the skeletal embrace of its parents. Such are the horrors of war, entombed in irradiated rock centuries after the fact, an everlasting testament to human cruelty; a monument to the carnage of ages past.

A month has passed since the remnants of humanity ventured from their subterranean catacombs and begun resettlement of the broken Earth, sowing seeds in half-glassed sand dunes where soil was once available in abundance.

The bones of whales lie upon drained seafloors, the water boiled away by the detonation of a thousand stars in the sky above. Streams of molten steel run through jagged canyons, the tenfold-intensified sun beating down on any life that dare draw breath in Hell - because that is what this is, Hell made real through man’s own cruelty. And what is Hell if not the absence of a God - the gods turning away from their creation, who themselves have forsaken their creators.

Such are the horrors of war, a monument to the carnage of ages past.