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Prologue: Natural Winter

  As we all stood, it concluded in a silent cold at the culmination of the last natural winter. There was a darkness to it all. The rabbles far away from the genesis became witness to a change in reflection. That last day, in that last winter, there were blizzards scattered around the continents. A blanket of blinding lights that caressed the roads in a sort of falling. Their eyes burned, their cars crashed, their dead were buried. As they faced the blanket, they were to remember the countless summer days their mothers told them to look away from the sun. Today, it reflected the sun towards them.

  Today, the sun abandoned them. Many wished for their blindness to return. But the blackness in each disparate snowflake had already stained the clouds. It seeped into their vision, cloaking them in a ceaseless midnight. And yes, they all understood the blizzard contained the absence of light. But then they thought of their mothers; inside and out, they wept for the sun.

  And then there was the genesis. There were people there, or more accurately, humans. Prior to the conclusion, the area was lit aglow by people in droves. They fell into one another like sick dancers or tired ripples. The skyline—bathed in the setting sun—remained beautiful on fire. The skyscrapers were reduced to monuments of metal twisting towards the horizon like a pot of gold in the eyes of the collective. There were scalpings and mutual graspings of hair; lives ended with a “Kiss me, you’re beautiful,” and a fading radio.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  It went like this: Skyscrapers twisted in on themselves, and the metal within seemed to scrape the horizon with an earsplitting noise; rather, it scraped against itself. They fell upon blank foundations. As the blackness had already reached the snow and the people below. The roads are soiled with a hundred thousand homeless annihilations. Perhaps millions more lay in four walls and a roof. Annihilation reached them too. Inside, they were reduced to shadows upon their walls; outside, shadows upon twisted metal. All together—from a bird’s eye view—they all fall into one another, like a mural of a community, or rather a rabble of silhouettes or shadows.

  One day, someone wanders here, searching for something new. You come upon the mural. You say “these were the last days,” and you touch and cuddle these shadows with each of your hands. And then, like always, you grow bored. So you put your hands back in your pockets, and you drift into the black snow. A little while later, you start a fire, and so the air is warm. You remove your hands from your pockets; they are covered in blood. But this is the end, so you may only wait with your hands near the fire until it dries, cracks, and blackens before falling into the snow, joining it as a thousand dead snowflakes that only now touch the ground.

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