HFY Stories_ When Earth Broke _ The First Godslayers

Space Stories | HFY SciFi

#scifistories1977 #hfy #scifi HFY Stories_ When Earth Broke _ The First Godslayers. This story is written by a human author and adapted with care into a visual audiobook format by our team. How This Video Was Made: Narration is performed using AI voice technology (ElevenLabs), guided and edited by a human to preserve tone and pacing. Visuals are created with AI image tools, but every image is manually prompted and selected to match the story's themes. All elements — audio, visuals, and timing — are manually assembled in a video editor to produce the final format you see on

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00:00It was in the twilight of the third millennium A.D., after humanity by and large thought its

00:05existentiality was no longer at risk, that the earth itself began to churn. Vibrations,

00:11rumbles, and magmatic eruptions sprouted across not just the active plates, but seemingly along

00:16every seam on the plane's crust. The bafflement of the scientists, rather than amusing and

00:22satisfying those who wished to remain ignorant as in ages before, now terrified the enlightened

00:27but uncertain masses. Our people were only a few centuries into rebuilding, recovering from a

00:32thousand unbroken years of extraction, production, and devastation. But with each passing year,

00:39the quaking grew, and the danger and consequences to those caught in the natural disasters

00:44became more and more dire. It was into this period of despair, one that felt cruel and unearned,

00:52given how far we had come from the self-destruction we had nearly called upon ourselves,

00:56that we thought we had been granted a gift, a reward for our dedication. A single vessel from

01:02beyond our solar system arrived, and while wary, we greeted it with peace and curiosity,

01:08rather than fear and violence. Our reward for this caution was the voice of the envoy,

01:13who had traveled to reach us. It was a creature with properties akin to both slime molds and aquatic

01:18invertebrates, and their appearance was unusual, even unsettling to some. Communication proved difficult

01:25and took some months, as their kind used direct bioelectric impulses along mated tendrils,

01:31rather than clumsy acoustic waves sent through mere air and media. But with patience and urgency in

01:36equal measure, we managed to bridge the gap of communication, and learned that the creature

01:41called itself gateway, or portal, depending on the interpretation of specific impulse signatures.

01:47They said they traveled from a star cluster near the edge of the universe,

01:50a system some billions of years older than ours. We hoped they had wisdom to offer,

01:56and our hopes were revived when Gates spoke of the bubbling, cracking, and quaking that had occurred

02:01on their home planet nearly a quarter of a million years prior. But rather than offering news or hope,

02:07they revealed a doomed prophecy. For within our planet, what we thought we knew of the composition

02:12beneath the Earth's surface was wrong. There was heat, but it was not just that of pressure and

02:18friction. It was the heat of xenobiological processes. There was magma, but it was not

02:23mere rock and metal. It was lifeblood and yoke. There were stirrings and movement, but they were

02:29not just tectonic shifts or a spinning metal core. They were the stirrings of a creature older and larger

02:35than any being our planet had ever known. A creature beyond anything we could have imagined possible.

02:41Our world was not our own, but merely the shell of an egg that was beginning to hatch.

02:46Gate was apologetic for this news, and said that after such a devastation nearly wiped out their

02:51kind, they had pledged themselves to travel to all such planets, harboring intelligent species,

02:57to offer them a chance to escape before facing decimation and annihilation once the hatching began

03:03in earnest. We were told there were others, others who had followed in their footsteps and fled,

03:09and others who had instead sought to beseech the entity within, hoping for salvation and power.

03:15But when we asked if any had tried to fight back, the question was regarded as impossible.

03:20It was like fighting a god to kill the unkillable, and few they'd spoken to had dared to try.

03:26Instead, they had to watch helplessly as the titanic behemoths left to find new planets to seed

03:32and to doom any life that might emerge upon it in later eons.

03:36Well, I don't need to tell you that humanity is a bit more stubborn and creative when facing down a

03:41threat. We had risen to the occasion when our very biosphere was on the brink, clawing back a measure

03:47of habitability and growth when all hope had seemed lost before. So now, we had a new unified threat,

03:53a new unified task to stand behind. Centuries before, humanity had stood firm against its own

03:59destruction, and now we began to devise how we could escape it once more. Gate was surprised at our

04:04willingness to stay and fight, but gladly offered whatever aid they could. Little by little,

04:09we dug deeper into the mystery that lay beneath our feet. Painstakingly, even with parts of the

04:14planet beginning to shake themselves into mere rubble, we made tiny slivers of headway. An

04:19international group of nations and space forces managed to develop a fleet of ships capable of

04:25evacuating as many as possible in advance of the inevitable destruction. Our methods of slowing or

04:31stopping the creature before Earth was consumed looked to have little chance of being ready in time.

04:36The fleet could fold a paltry amount, less than half of the population, with the lucky chosen by

04:42lottery for the most part. But Gate was still astounded and congratulated us, as his own species

04:47had been decimated to less than one in a hundred individuals making it off as their planet cracked

04:53and burned. But still we tried. We searched. We looked, even as the ships began to load and fly off

05:00world. Small possibilities, ideas, experiments, a mishmash that showed some promise but no more.

05:05And still, the Earth continued to break. Finally, nearly three decades after Gate arrived with their

05:11warning and condolences, the day came. The Earth shook with force, the last few escape craft managing

05:17to make it off world, just before the tumultuous ejection of chunks of crust and mantle would have made

05:23successful departure impossible. But as we pulled back and as the first glimpse of the newborn god

05:29became visible, we initiated our final gambit. As the last remnants of humanity ignited deep space

05:35engines preparing to accelerate beyond light speed, we engaged the engines of our last resort,

05:40a project codenamed Stone's Throw. It was the work of countless factories and enrichment facilities

05:46across the planet, isolating and amplifying heavy elements, radioactive materials, and even a few

05:53magnetically shielded antimatter payloads. As much volatile, reactive, and dangerous material as we

05:58could possibly afford to spare, aside from the resources needed for the escape fleet. Gate had admired

06:04our zeal, but warned us that such weapons were only a tiny fraction of what would be necessary to kill

06:09a god. We would be lucky if we were able to draw so much as a single drop of celestial blood. They warned us that

06:16their own kind had done similarly. Every weapon and explosive, every railgun and mass driver were

06:22targeted on a single point, and all they produced was a single city-sized drop of icor, before the sting

06:28angered their god, and the offending weapon arrays were wiped out, along with nearly half of their initial

06:33survivors. We thanked them for their input, but continued on with another goal in mind.

06:39As the array of armaments had been placed in a bunker drilled several kilometers below the surface of our

06:45own moon, on the other end of our soon-to-be orphaned planetoid, we built hundreds of engines,

06:50enormous brethren to those powering our fleet of escaping ships. As the fleet jumped, our final

06:55observer probes were activated, relaying images of our burned and dead planet flaking away from the

07:01slowly but inevitably uncurling mass within. Gate again commented that placing such weaponry within

07:07the mass of an object like the moon was an ingenious improvement, but still not likely to do more than

07:13anger the godling as their people had discovered before. Humanity paid them polite but little heed,

07:19as we engaged the moon and began flying it in the direction of the slowly shifting shape.

07:24The fleet had just arrived at a regrouping point outside of our Oort cloud, a safety point to allow

07:29time for the full charge needed to leap to a habitable system we had identified as a possible

07:34replacement home. But as we watched the probe's broadcasts of the moon hurtling toward the impossibly

07:40huge eldritch shape, the moon soared past, missing an outstretched continental tentacle by a few

07:46hundred thousand miles. Gate, for their part, was surprised and apologetic to the extreme,

07:52as they understood that turning such a massive projectile would be almost impossible.

07:57To our observing leaders and scientists, they said sorrowfully,

08:00it is the worst of lucks that you missed. But at last, we knew there was no changing the course of

08:06action, and so the final part of Project Stone's throw was revealed, simply telling the alien

08:11emissary, we weren't aiming for the god. A few hours later, having accelerated to an impressive

08:19speed, the moon impacted our own sun, once worshipped as a god itself by humans too young

08:25to know better. With our own pen we had pricked and burst the form of our star. As anticipated and

08:30calculated, it spilled forth nearly all its fusion and fury in a narrow path, the one occupied by the

08:37thing that had most recently been the center of our homeworld. But creatures of that scale do not

08:41move quickly, not nearly quickly enough. It resisted for an hour, burned for a second hour,

08:47and began to die by the third. By the time our probes had become too damaged to transmit a signal any

08:52longer, it was clear that the god was now little more than burnt scraps of titanic dead flesh.

08:58In the days to come, Gate would depart with their craft, heading back to their refugee fleet,

09:05so that a new message could be spread amongst their people, a message of hope. Not of a god that killed

09:11their world, but of a world that killed their god. Of humanity, the first godslayers.

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