Silence. There was no more screaming or thunder.

Write about something on the verge of collapsing.

"Cast off!" cried to the captain. His tattered coat whipped about his torso, held together by a series of leather straps and fraying thread. The coat matched the rest of his Navy vestments, fraying and barely recognizable as belonging to a commanding officer.

The ship lurched against the waves that grew steadily stronger with the coming darkness, claiming the skies with their watery majesty in a feat of pure natural energy before falling atop the ship's deck, reminding the crew that the ocean cannot be mastered.

The captain chanced a glance at the sopping wet group of people huddled near the doors to the hull, too proud to leave the deck yet too frightened to detach from the railings. 'They used to represent so much power,' he thought.

Another tidal wave battered the ship's already tenuous structure, forcing the crew and passengers to duck low or risk being thrown overboard. Muted shouting from the crew, drowned out by the deafening cacophony of the weather's superior screaming, never reached the captain's ears. He saw them crying out for help, but he realized, with a finality that he thought the fatally wounded must feel, that it wouldn't matter if he could hear them; no one was surviving this storm.

Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings and Queens... the world's finest leaders assembled on the captain's ship, hoping against the terrible odds that he could deliver them safely to the island. Each nation sent their last hopes, the people in whom they have placed their faith, to the captain with the understanding that, if humanity was to survive, it would be because he delivered these fierce individuals to the Land of Resurrection. As lightening, red and jagged, pierced the sky in violent arcs, the terror that stole the ferocity from their eyes proved to the captain that they aren't any better than the billions of people they left behind to die in the fires and earthquakes.

All at once, the ship rose into the air, carried by what romantics would call Poseidon's mighty fist, and fell.

Silence. There was no more screaming or thunder. The captain looked once to his right and then to his left as the ship fell, seemingly in slow motion, toward the water's surface. He looked at the leaders, weak and fragile, holding each other despite the wars they waged that brought about this apocalypse. If he had the time before the ship broke the surface, he would have spit at them.

The water engulfed the ship like a great maw. It was as if the kraken had been called to finish the job, to quell the fury of the Gods by ending the miserable lives of the people who angered them.

'The world is over now,' thought the captain as gallons of water filled his lungs.

Before his last thoughts were corrupted by the murky darkness, the captain saw the sky split wide open in a flash of heavenly light. He could feel the storms stop raging and the earth stop trembling, and he closed his eyes with a smile on his lips.