The people of Earth had seen the end coming for millennia, and because they were helpless to stop it, they put all their efforts into escaping it. They built massive space arcs that left the planet full of the populations of entire nations.

Many of these failed and drift in deep space even today as hollow graveyards. Some survived for a few centuries before finding barely hospitable worlds to obliterate each other on over religious reasons in true Earth fashion. Very few actually achieved something resembling success and managed to establish what could be very generously described as civilisation.

Of course, these civilisations had almost no memory of where they had come from or why they had to leave. All that existed in their libraries were myths built on myths built on myths. One of these myths, as recounted and refined upon by an apprentice Antikorian archivist writing her post-doctoral thesis on young universes of the N’th Choral domain, contains an account of the reason Earth met its doom.

An excerpt from it is as follows.

In the beginning there was a cloud. The planet’s most powerful telescopes saw it growing in size as it came towards them from beyond the galaxy. In later centuries, particularly the 35th and the 37th, more refined scans of the cloud’s path revealed that it was actually coming from even farther away, so far away that its point of origin might have been beyond the beginning of the universe.

By the 51st century, the cloud came to be known as The Finger, because that is what it seemed to look like now - a long finger reaching towards Earth from the other side of space and time. It was around this time that a brilliant young mind from Iceland came to be earth’s foremost expert on cosmology. Einar Jónsson was the first to define what he called The Hand - no less than five clouds extending towards Earth from all directions. Though Jónsson died of Vyperplasia at the age of 234, his work was carried on by scientists all over the solar system. They discovered, over the course of the next few centuries, that The Hand had been on its way for at least 250,000 years. They also discovered that it was not, as had been previously believed, a cloud at all.

Scans showed that it was displacing matter on its way. Several star systems and at least one galaxy had had their gravitational centres knocked off course by the fingers. When The Hand inevitably reached Earth, the effects were bound to be catastrophic.

And catastrophic they were. In the 304th century, when the five fingers of The Hand finally converged upon Earth, they displaced the entire solar system. No human colony on any inhabited world survived. The sun itself veered off course and took much of the planetary fragments with it as it swirled into nothingness as a result of the massive gravitational eddies created by The Hand.

What remains of humans and other sentient Earth cultures now survives on the fringes of galactic civilisation. They have little or no memory of their past and it is unlikely that the reasons behind the Hand of Doom will ever be understood.

The Antikorians are considered cosmic record keepers of a sort by the denizens of many young universes that are aware of them. But in the larger picture, they are but one of many such cultures. There are scales and levels of reality to which even the Antikorian Archive is oblivious. The Ancients of Baffoo, the Gods of Pentachra, and the Mystical Makers of Merx are just some of the cultures that are actively engaged in the study of Antikoria and its origins.

One of the Merxians, a nameless transdimensional entity that calls itself Hepath when it is in need of vocalising thoughts, came across the above-cited account of Earth’s doom and laughed. Then it created a copy of the account and stepped into the pocket dimension of Bloka - home of the entity known as B’hrahm.

“You know the 5-second rule is bunk, right?” Hepath said when it met B’hrahm. “I told you it’s bunk, didn’t I?”

“Give me a break,” replied B’hrahm, yawning.

“Well I hope it was worth it,” Hepath said.

B’hrahm snorted. It wasn’t. But he was not about to admit it to Hepath. Earth would obviously have tasted better if he had not accidentally dropped it into the creation he had just printed out. The few seconds it took him to fish it out had been enough for germs to sour it beyond belief.

“They had the right idea about you though, didn’t they?” Hepath said, still chuckling. “A day of Brahma - that is what they called you, right? - is 4.32 billion human years, they used to say.”