Submitted for the November 2025 prompt: Celestial Signals

The sky lit up with the brightest stars Edgar had ever seen. An ethereal tapestry woven into the night. He turned to his friend Jack, the two of them sitting on the hood of his father’s car, overlooking the city below from their perch in the hills.

 

“Is this really happening?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the stars be so bright.”

 

“It looks like they’re getting bigger,” replied Jack. “Wait a minute… Ed, they are getting bigger. This is really happening!”

 

The stars grew in size as they both remained on the hood. Edgar, unable to move, could only assume his friend felt the same dread. These weren’t stars at all.

 

“Asteroids?” said Edgar. “They’ll land in the ocean, I’m sure of it. Statistically speaking, that’s the most probable. Still, this is something to behold. Once in a lifetime type of thing, you know?” He was met with silence from the friend he’d known since childhood. “Jack?”

 

“I don’t know, Ed. This doesn’t look good.” His friend got up and pulled his legs in close. Edgar heard the hood of the car flexing, no doubt leaving a dent where Jack was sitting.

 

“Get back down,” said Edgar. “If we dent the hood of the car my dad will kill me.” He noticed beads of sweat on his friend’s neck. “Jack, it’ll be fine. They’re probably thousands of miles away. Do… do you think the aftershocks will reach us or something?” He turned his attention away from his friend and back toward the asteroids. Only as they grew closer, he noticed each one had several blinking lights flickering in sync with one another. “Those don’t look like—”

 

“No, they don’t,” said Jack, interrupting him. “All we can do is hope they’re friendly.”

 

Edgar got up, his position matching that of his friend’s. His gaze locked on the impending confrontation before them. Were these ships? Were they friend or foe? Two of the ships parted from the others. It didn’t take long for Edgar to realise they were getting bigger as the seconds passed, and closer. The lights, once in rhythm, now flicked erratically, the two ships no longer in sync with one another.

 

“This doesn’t look good,” said Jack. Edgar noticed tears streaming down his friend’s face. “I don’t like the look of this at all.”

 

“We don’t know what they are yet,” replied Edgar. “Scouts. Surely, they’re only scouting ships. Here to see what humanity is up to or something.” He wiped the cold sweat from the back of his neck with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “It wouldn’t make any sense for them to come here and just—”

The sky lit up as if the sun rose into position in a split second, only to disappear just as fast. Edgar rubbed his eyes as they adjusted back to the darkness of the night.

 

“No…” he heard his friend mutter. “It can’t be… this can’t be happening.”

 

Edgar blinked, his vision returning to him as the geometric shapes that’d formed while rubbing his eyes disappeared. The world below, the city he’d spent his entire lifetime exploring, loving, and loathing, had vanished. In its place sat a landscape of smoke and ash.

 

Had his family managed to escape in time? Had anyone? He pulled his phone from his pocket and called his mother… it rang for what felt like an eternity before he was met with her voicemail.

 

“What do we do?” asked Edgar.

 

He expected the shock of the situation to result in silence from his friend, a rhetorical question to be met with nothing but a shrug or a whimper of shared sadness. But instead, Jack replied with laughter.

 

“This hardly seems the time for laughing,” said Edgar, “much less a smile of any sort. Do you understand what just happened?”

 

“There is nothing to understand,” replied Jack. “They came, they saw, they destroyed.” Jack turned to him, his eyes as wide as his grin. “There is nothing we can do about it. So, why fret at all? This is our new existence… or I guess I should say, extinction.”

 

“You’re scaring me,” replied Edgar. “We have to get down there. We must check on our families.”

 

“What’s the point? You saw how many ships there were in the sky. You don’t think the same thing is happening all over the world? Look out there.” He gestured toward the rubble. “Where did the ships go? They’re not here anymore.” He shook his head. “They’re onto their next target. This is it, Ed. It is how it all ends.”

 

“I don’t accept that,” replied Edgar. “We’ll fight back. Humanity will fight back. This isn’t how it all ends.”

 

“I should’ve seen the signs,” replied Jack, his voice now sullen, his gaze lost somewhere in the sky. “You saw the videos, right? The unexplained ships, the blinking lights… we were all so eager to dismiss them as fake or as the government’s handiwork. Hoaxes. They gave us a warning, and humanity didn’t take the time to decipher it. We could’ve been prepared, but our own hubris prevented us from doing anything. And now,” he again gestured to the rubble, “look at all we have left to show for our efforts. We’ve spent our lives building and building, centuries gone in nothing more than a snap of the fingers on the cosmic scale. They’re here to make space for the next species. We failed their test. We didn’t make anything grand of ourselves.”

 

“What’re you talking about?” said Edgar, his voice gravelled with grief. “There’s more to life than building and creating. What about love? We just need to show them we feel something more than a calling to create; we feel love for one another. We don’t only build homes, but families as well. Maybe if we show them there’s more to life than…”

 

“That’s the problem, Ed. We failed to show them.”