The dead comet was soot black and shaped, according to every tabloid hack and hyperactive broadcaster, ‘just like a potato’. As the faintest whiffs of the atmosphere brushed its sides tiny glowing will-o’-the-wisps of light, super heated gas burning with the heat of friction, danced across the stony face for a fraction of a second before dying forever. At a microscopic level tiny holes burst, one after another, little craters making their mark before they were replaced by the next. In miniature the universe played out the performance that was about to unfold; Mandelbrot as cosmic dramatist.

Particles of gas, too slow to move, were struck by the falling piece of sky. Some were swept to one side. Others burned their way through, carving pinholes in the relentless stone Icarus. Like the son of Daedalus it had flown too close to the sun, but it did not melt his wings. Instead it caught it in a snare of gravity. But for a fluke of celestial movement it would have struck the sun, with little effect. Instead its fall would end an era. Mammals had dominated the Earth only half as long as their predecessors. The same symphony of light and dark would play at the end of both reigns.

Fiery needles seared through the plummeting mass and the pressure ripped fragments away. They joined their parent in their descent to Earth. One section looked like a clawing hand. It span off looking for its own place to land. Another looked like a tiny clone of its mother. It followed in the wake of the first, like a deadly offspring.

The billions below lost their transmitted views as the inosphere was ripped apart. As the the stratosphere was pierced the night sky lit up and and the stone became a falling angel of fire. The hand groped its way to the ocean and as its molten fingers grasped the water a pillar of steam shot into the sky, visible to all for hundreds of miles. It glistened like a spiral staircase leading to the gates of Heaven.

The original asteroid came down on the land, which cracked and buckled beneath it. The fire leapt out as it hit. A wall of solid airswept across the face of the water and the soil, crushing the highest creations of men like they had swept away webs and nests. What survived the air was swept by the fire that scorched the land, leaving embers in its wake.

‘Nature abhors a vacuum’. It sounds so simple in a science class. But as the air rushed back to fill the hole it had so recently created it dragged with it the water that was escaping the hand. It plunged through every hole it could find. the ashes of the land vapourised and beneath the rolling seas of dust that were thrown into Heaven’s eye by the impact an undercurrent of steam swirled. Through the earth pulsed shockwave after shockwave. What was still standing fell as the land beneath it rebelled and twisted in tectonic fits.

A solitary cockroach sat on a lump of masonry. Above it were clouds of steam, above that the dust that would take its time in falling back to Earth, and beyond that the sun that had unwittingly caused it all. It could not see the sun through all the debris. But it could wait.