[ FF ] `` The weapon that won the war '' ( Feedback for every response . ) 400 words or less .

The war had gone on for generations. Cycles ago, the sides had discovered the great observers from space that watched over them. For a while, it was fashionable to worship these great beings, but this, like all other fads, was lost in the surging tides of the war. 
 
 The two sides were evenly matched. They learned from each other. They studied the greatest texts left behind by their ancestors. They refined the language of death, of violence produced on an industrial scale, till both sides were masters. The sides danced, never holding an advantage for long, so equally matched they were. There was a beauty in that dance, etched out in the gouged scarring of their land, the piles of bodies and the smoking ruins. 
 
 And it came to pass that a great nihilist wave arose amongst the thinkers of one of the sides. The war had left them exhausted. Each new way to kill was no longer a cause for celebration but a bitter reminder that their sons would perish, the flesh seared, melted or blasted off their bodies, by a similar invention on the other side. And so they studied the substance of their world and the most depraved, most brilliant of their thinkers derived a weapon to end the war. The war had gone on for so long that neither side remembered why the war started. The thinker reasoned that the two sides and the world they sprung from was the sole cause of the war. And he created a great machine - one that would end the war by ending the existence of the very world both sides fought to own. 
 
 Some say he smiled as he activated the machine, his superiors unaware of its true power. Great inky cracks appeared in the border between the warring sides, the very fabric of reality dissolving into nothingness. Triumph turned into panic as the hungry power unleashed by the mad thinker spread in both directions, accelerating as it consumed both sides. 
 
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 It was a fresh morning when one of the observers burst into his supervisor's office, his face red with a combination of exertion and sadness. Ropes of mucus dribbled from his nose as he sobbed out his story. The great simulation, the one they had been running for over ten years, that would have taught the observers the great secrets of tactics and warfare, had crashed and he knew not why. 
 
 
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 Hi all - first post here. Not sure if I popped over the 400 word limit, but I'm rushing this out over coffee on mobile so I ca n't really tell: )
