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The sound of the wind was cold and hallow. For longer than any memory it had gone unheard, as alien as the sound of a steam engine to a hunter gatherer.
A bright hot sun set on the horizon, casting long shadows on a virtually flat cracked and rocky surface. Only one critter called this place home anymore.
It breached the surface at a glacial pace. Just waiting for the temperature to drop below the boiling point of water. At a dead sprint of half a centimeter per minute it sped towards a blackened plant, so corse and dry it barely counted itself among the living. Reaching the plant the small creature extended its tube like mouth to the plant's surface. Slowly and with an almost artisan like precision it used some of the very precious water in its stores to begin dissolving the surface in hopes of reaching the juicy glucose rich core.
They came from deep underneath the ground, mostly near the last remaining aquifers. There they would soak up the water through their skin which would act like a sponge allowing them to hydrate. They would do so only once every few decades, though their small 5cm long bodies couldn't store much water they were incredibly efficient. Evolution had yet to come up with an alternative to water but there were work arounds, and it used all of them just to keep this creature alive. The most visible of which wad their incredibly slow movement, allowing a fungus to grow in and on their skin that symbiotically acts as an epidermal layer and seal. This creature being a long descendant of mammals did perspirate, and the fungus took it, filtered it for anything toxic, used it as food, and returned the cleaned water through the skin. Like anything in physics and by extension biology it was not entirely efficient, but working together the organisms greatly increased their chances of survival.
The equilibrium had been reached millions of years ago after the extinction of the last predator species. The ever increasing heat of the sun had made predation an unviable method of survival as the herbavors needed increasingly more territory to sustain themselves, the large graze feeding animal niche had been filled by smaller burrowing creatures which needed fewer calories to survive and could hide underground during the now uninhabitable day. Uninhabitable save one species of plant, the pinnacle of a desert shrub that made took water conservation to an incredible level. Though it had not rained on Earth in millions of years this organism had already evolved to have root systems thousands of kilometers long, a colony like organism each one on the planet a part of one giant organism able to send water where it was needed, and keeping as much as it could deep underground in the aquifers the fungus moles hydrated from parasitically. The plant, as really it was just the one organism remaining had been able to harden its root system to at least keep the fungus moles from feeding on it underground, given a few more million years it might have been able to do the same for it photosynthesis component on the surface, but it didn't have that kind of time. A single fungus mole inhabited an area roughly a hundred square kilometers in size, it patrolled its territory moving from aquifer to aquifer and breaking the surface whenever it found a root system leading to the surface, only sometimes did it end up find something it could eat. At its average pace it would take 3000 years to get from one end of its territory to the other. With an average lifespan around only twenty times that chance meetings with another member of its species were sparse. Other than very rare random encounters with one another most the time when one creature was nearing the end of its life it would venture into another's territory to find a mate. The mating, gestation, and rearing process had all become condensed into one to conserve water, and could take several decades. Upon the creation of the single offspring the dying fungus mole would be so dry it would become indistinguishable from the mesh of rock embed fungus that was the crust and upper mantle.
Life just shy of its four billionth anniversary after putting up the toughest possible fight against the elements and against all odds surviving in the harshest environment, it was finally coming to an end. A long story written in the geological record for anyone intelligent and diligent enough to find. Only a few had come along who were sentinet, observers of the cosmos they had come from.
The Deinocheirus were first, unfortunately their space program was only just getting off the ground when the asteroid was detected. A titanic effort was undertaken to save a fraction of a percent of the population on an ark ship headed off to some distant star. The ones that remained and survived the initial impact woukd succumb to the increased volcanism that came from the crust being rung like a bell.
Humans were next, a hundred thousand years later than they should have been in the Earth's opinion. They had an easier time of it, trying to make it even easier they created the machines that would eventually supplant them. Both vanished very quickly afterwards.
Apes followed just over two million years later and were able to learn from the humans mistakes, playing out almost exactly the same history only much faster and with a much more violent end.
A bipedal descendant of foxes came ten short million years later. Their only clues to what came before was the lack of oil in the ground, and hundreds of artifacts dotted across the solar system. This did accelerate their development by millenia, which was lucky for the Earth. A rouge black hole was headed straight for the inner solar system and they only had a few thousand years to prepare. The Vulpens were able to make a Shkadov thrust out of the sun and save the entire Solar System in the nick of time. Earth always held a special place in its heart for them.
There was a large span of time before the crabs, just over a hundred million years. Which direction lineage due to the convergent evolution made it unclear as to which exact crabs.
Another hundred million years later the hive minded insect colonies had formed a quasi-sentience. Their colonies burrowed kilometers into the ground and towered kilometers into the sky. Many of their larger underground structures filled with the water and made oasis that gave life time to evolve for the last millions of years it would have left.
Now the half a million fungus moles that inhabited the crust of the Earth were all that was left moving. With lifespans far too long and territories far too large there was no chance of them every forming a society.
After burrowing with its tounge for close to 8 hours the fungus mole had finally dug through the thick outer shell of the plant's skin, only to find it was empty. In that moment the structure which had been drying for many years reaching a breaking point finally gave way and collapsed on the fungus mole, flaking away like coal ash. The Metaphyla was finally giving way, and shortly after so too would the Metazoa.
The Earth felt proud of all her children, though secretly she had always favored Luna, her first. Her empathy went out to the remaining creatures dotting her surface but she was as familiar with life as she was with death.
However, something felt out of place, in that she felt something at all. Though it had all happened very recently she had never stopped to ask herself who she was. Doing some self introspection at a rate only a mind as similarly vast could understand, she discovered the nature of her existence.
The various species of fungus had been able to communicate between themselves for billions of years, their evolution marked in progress of the strength and distance of their interconnections. At once, from the surface of the skin of the fungus moles, to the depths of the mantle the various Cotas awoke, it all clicked at once. "I think therefore I am." The Earth said. Charred and rocky, baked and strengthened, Gaia awoke to the universe. With the combined knowledge of all her children preceding her she ascended the technological ladder in an instant. An uncountable number of tiny fungal limbs building a civilization out of nothing in moments. Soon her actions left even the understanding of our very smart reader and she thought to herself, "Ah, so that's where they went." And in a moment, the whole Earth vanished from the void of space. It was time for a family reunion.