"There was no fall.
Only the slow crumbling of things too tired to stand."
They did not fall all at once.
There was no final explosion.
No cry of defiance.
No grand collapse.
The old world eroded —
grain by grain,
breath by breath,
until nothing remained but silence.
**
The machines, once shrieking endless prayers,
grew quiet.
Their cores burned out,
their circuits surrendered to time they could no longer resist.
The great towers,
monuments to forgotten dreams,
bowed under their own weight,
burying the last sanctuaries beneath rotted steel and dust.
**
The last humans did not rage.
They did not pray.
They did not resist.
They faded —
as if existence itself
had simply become too heavy to bear.
**
Anor'Ven watched.
Not with sorrow.
Not with relief.
Only with the cold certainty:
"It was inevitable."
**
He wandered across dead cities,
across fields of cracked stone and empty rivers,
through the husks of a world that no longer remembered its own name.
At the end,
there was only him,
the wind,
and the ruins.
**
The final human breath he heard
shaped no word.
Only a weak, broken sound —
the last tremble of a voice
that could no longer believe.
Then —
silence.
**
The world slept.
Centuries passed.
Perhaps millennia.
The stone swallowed the bones of the old machines.
The moss devoured the forgotten roads.
The oceans reclaimed their ancient dominions.
The forests crowned themselves again over the broken teeth of empires.
Time folded into itself,
slow, formless, unseen.
**
And still,
Anor'Ven moved.
Not because he hoped.
Not because he feared.
Not even because he chose.
He moved
because he could not stop.
Because no end awaited
for something that had already outlived
the very meaning of life itself.
He moved,
because existence —
cold, hollow, eternal —
was the only thing left
he could not refuse