Break_the_Quill

Chapter 1 : Tidal Disruption Event - TDE

Red, a burning shade of scarlet.

Red was all Simon saw as he was pulled and stretched into the ravenous maw of the great void.

He had been around giants multiple times. Larger planets of his kin, the star that centered his life, and even nearby clusters of stars before they all disappeared. However, it was his first to encounter such unfathomable grandness. All he could sense was Them; through his gravity, magnetic fields, as if the reality itself had been folded specifically for whatever lay before him.

Even more red. That was all he saw as he approached the void. Red of his very own oxidized crust, red of his own molten lava pulsating with each decay of radioelement, red of liquid rust now violently crashing down in waves, awoken after years of serenity.

He could see the back of himself and the side of him simultaneously, all gravitating toward the center that yielded promised demise, whether it be peaceful or not. He could see himself from the past, a young planet with boiling magma interfering other planets’ orbits and annihilating dozens of them, crashing into moons, and being hurled into the endless void as celestial bodies of his star system began to crumble one by one.

The accretion disk glowed in a haunting shade of vermillion, a shade similar to red from the burning star that was devoured before him, a star he had orbited around for a long, long time. The radiance also reflected red from his fellow planet comrades, who used to throw him around like a moon with their stronger gravity and larger mass, now screaming with pain and fear as they were elongated like a thin thread by the unforgiving tow of gravity. Sounds of their agony, begging for forgiveness and peace, were also nothing but a mere treat to the black void.

Aside from it all, he felt red spread from the insides of him too. The red of his fear spreaded inside him as he felt his celestial body get stretched out to an oval, then a string, a state he had never imagined to be even possible of reaching. Red of pain followed by a state of nothingness rippled through his core as his rocky body and rusty blood were vaporized into hot plasma.

But by the end when he approached the center, a throat which devoured all starborn bodies, he saw red of his anger at the pitch black beast. Appearing after a sudden supernova, they were a vicious tyrant who ate away nearby stars one by one, leaving him and his star system in midst of nothingness before coming to ingurgitate them too.

He could not do anything; he was just a mere planet. So he prayed. He prayed, his molten blood a sacrifice to whoever ruled the physics of this universe, that this beast shall fall. He prayed, his anger the most delectable offering any being could ever offer, that he could find his peace by surviving.

option 1) ignore all historical accuracy and make the royal astronomy/astrology institution have a blue-eyed scientist and in need of help of a very certain Butcher

option 2) Grace washes up on Korean peninsula for some reason, and Simon finds it

Fun fact: Butcher (백정), as in people who carve meat, were the lowest of all classes in Joseon!

If y'all non-Koreans want to draw this and would like native Korean translations for Simon, message me or put it in my ask!!

Close-ups

Edit: Yup i ended up hyperfixating and drew the comic. It’s there.

Nobody is talking, but they all are comfortable in the silence occasionally disrupted by sounds of cricket and fireflies. Rocky is loafing, Simon seems oddly sad yet happy, and Grace is just thinking about that time when he got out of his lab at 3 a.m. after locking in so hard-

The memory of being in a Jazz bar with piano player that looked suspiciously like him comes back. How sad he looked when he played ‘city of stars’, and how good the music was. How he was there with someone he can’t even remember the face correctly anymore. How he can’t say for sure that they and everyone who was in that bar is alive anymore.

And then the radio starts humming an unfamiliar human voice, he hears banging on the walls, and Rocky RUNS out. He thinks it must be a hallucination, but Rocky comes back, more excited than he had ever been. At that point, Simon can’t even roll his hamsterball himself, he’s too weak and hurt.

So the next thing he sees is a bright, white room, with a robot arm staring down at him. He blankly stares at the ceiling, thinking he must be dead. But then he hears footsteps approaching him.

He turns around to find Grace looking at him with curious eyes, plants in pots neatly stacked behind him, star glistening through the windows, and rocky happily chirping.

I FOUND THE SUN KINDA SOUNDS LIKE ERIDIAN AND I WILL WRITE A FIC ON THAT (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b8bC1AZ8gJg)

I had an idea about Grace and Rocky as stars and Simon as a planet (that barely qualifies as 'not moon'..) with planet body horror if that's a real thing. I'll try to write it, though it would be only around 3 chapters, and I still haven't figured out the science nor how to narrate cosmic non-human narration and dialogues..

check my idea draft down below!