It’s felt like years since she was stranded. Or perhaps seconds, stretched out to eternity while she struggled to compensate for transdimensional temporal anomalies. Not that it matters, anyways. She is here, and she is now.

Lying before her are the criss-crossing valleys and canyons, rivers and oceans, the floating isles and the behemoth that consumes the sun twice--once at dawn, and once at dusk. Far below, the warm colors chase the cooler ones away for the day, the sun rising higher and warming the land, warming her, but it isn’t enough.

It never is. She's itchy. When she lifts her hand to scratch herself, her vision narrows and abruptly explodes outwards, every detail of this wretched world coalescing into a single image she cannot get rid of. That of the consumer of the stars.

Too much time has passed. Whether seconds or years doesn’t matter. Every single interaction that played out has led her to this moment. Martyr. Monumental. Memorable. Titles she knows won’t matter in the end. She doesn’t even know if she’ll survive.

But she doesn’t care. Pain is a concept she’s accustomed to. It’s something she confronts head-on, because at the end none of it matters. Whatever lies beyond the other side must be better than this. Pure bliss of which she hasn’t appreciated its existence until today.

She knows it must be unfair to those who never had a voice, but everybody and everything below her will die. She is the judge and the executioner, the person who will deliver these peoples' ultimate fate, the one they brought upon themselves.

As she feels about pain, she feels the same about them. Whatever happens to them after is beyond her capacity to care. Every one of them has the potential for cold malice. This is her last gift to the rest of the worlds looking up to her. Her last act of heroism, because she now knows she will most likely die.

And that's okay, because she’ll go out a hero.

She draws in the energy of every living organism, from the colossal trees comprising the northern forests to the microorganisms thriving in fertile farmland, rips the skies apart and reaches for the sun, delivers a swift slice into the earth, summoning the rolling magma miles beneath the continental shelf, and lets the energy encapsulate herself.

For a moment, the strain of a million billion lives weighs on her shoulders. The mantle of responsibility threatens to crush every atom making her up into bits. She’s no Atlas. What is she doing? She glances out towards the land where this all started. Where it will all end.

Too many people have sacrificed themselves to protect her. Vanishing without another word. Unable to ever see the fruits of their labor. She doesn’t have a choice. Their sacrifices won’t be in vain.

But beyond that, the last bit of her humanity screams out towards the cosmos, through the fabrics comprising the universe and touching her own, one last time. That’s why she’s doing this. For them. They’ll never know what became of her, but they’ll exist another day. A day beyond her reach forever.

Her limbs shake. She collapses to one knee, the ground around her icing as the energy gets drained. She looks up at the behemoth. At the ravager of worlds. Too many horrors have devastated the grid. She won’t fail. She can’t. She won’t. She summons all the built-up sorrow and agony and scorching rage and wills it to end.

And it does.