It started subtle; small. He barely noticed it at first.

He would reach into his pocket, and there’d be a chocolate bar there. Useful, typically – for the family was so big, and so rotund, and there were so many children. Having a chocolate bar handy was better than having a bar of gold.

I don’t know his name; that’s lost with the rest. But I suppose he wasn’t important, in the end. No-one cared while he still lived. When his youth passed it was more obvious, to be sure; he stopped buying chocolate and yet his pockets always bulged. As an old man he would walk down the street and his pockets would pour shiny-wrappered bars onto the streets in an endless flow; hundreds every day.

He was a stoic sort, an old soul. He never let it show how much his chocolate haunt disturbed him, though his constant entourage of chubby children warmed his heart, a little.

He had never bothered going to a doctor in life. He simply accepted the fate of waking up every morning to a bed full of fine truffles and cheap treats, and the endless bars that appeared around him when he wasn’t watching.

The troubles really started when he died. His family received numerous donations from the local village, a superstitious lot, to entomb him in a large, strong crypt. They obliged quite willingly, and his final resting place towered above the rest in the graveyard. For a while.

You see, six months later the crypt burst. It was not dramatic, no great explosion – a seam of broken stone, and a wave of rotten chocolate poured forth. No efforts could quell the oncoming flow then: the trickle became a tide and where once a graveyard sat, soon a massive mound of crinkling foil and chocolate treats loomed over all.

But the tide continued unending, and within weeks the village was entirely buried. There was little media coverage then; nobody cares about little villages. People only began to panic when the edges of the tide reached London.

Then the reaction was strong. First the military police, then the army: but bullets and bombs did nothing to subdue the flow. Once London fell to the chocolate, parliament fled to Scotland, and from there they unleashed their final assault; a nuclear device was set off right on top of where that great tomb had once stood.

The centre of the mass was blasted into ash and caramel and chocolate lava. But from that crater the flow resumed again, bursting from the Earth in sweet vents.

It grew faster, and faster. Within a month England fell, and Scotland drowned beneath the storm of sweet death. A temporary land bridge of buoyant bars spelled Ireland’s doom. The flood began to spread outwards, stretching miles every day.

The US tried to save the day, then. With England lost, a barrage of the world’s finest weaponry was launched against the focal point of chocolatey oblivion.

With hindsight, dear reader, I’m sure you know they failed. Miles of the chocolate landmass vaporised in an instant, but it took mere minutes to rebuild what was lost.

A month. A single month after the last bombs fell, and a layer of chocolate covered the surface of the Earth. From the bubbling molten pools of the Sahara to the frozen, crackling peaks that invaded the poles, chocolate was always underfoot.

Humanity did so desperately try to adapt, as it is wont to do. On reinforced barges, bastions of humanity floated, ark-like, weighed down with animals and artificial gardens.

But that couldn’t last long. Those steel beasts stayed afloat for another two months before the infinite chocolate sea beneath them breached the atmosphere, and humanity froze, and suffocated, and disappeared from sight.

And then there was one. Here I am; just me left. I watched the moon as it was swallowed just last night. The flow is so very heavy now, it constantly collapses under its own weight – perhaps one day it will reach some sort of critical mass, and a new chocolate-born sun will burn bright in the sky, until even the sky is swallowed in sugar and milk and cocoa mass.

But I’ll be long gone by then. From my viewpoint here on the red planet I have watched humanity die, and soon I will join them.

No-one will read this. I am not so naïve as the leaders once were – the universe is to be swallowed by a village boy’s chocolatey pockets. But it is comforting; to write this. It keeps me distracted from the great sphere, growing ever-larger, ever-closer.

Perhaps I will eat one, before I go.

Just one; no need to be greedy, now.