The world has ended.
Or at least the "civilized" one.
Only rubble and ruins lie before you; old hotels fallen into disrepair, dusty walls. Skeletons of ruined buildings plead with the wind for a bit of mercy: that it may finally destroy them once and for all.
The picture of desolation before your eyes provokes in you a sense of calm and peace that you would never have expected. There was no violence, no armies sweeping the civilians, no clashes, no blood. For once, peace did not come through war. The prayer you've recited for years before bed has come true: "Our Father, who art in heaven, make everyone in the world die except me"...
You wander around, stretching your aching limbs. It's as if you had slept for millennia. And upon your awakening, no one else exists. A flower among the rubble lifts its proud gaze to the sun: evidently, roses weren't growing for us, it's now clear to you.
In your hands, a bleached CD, "Quietus" by Evoken. If only you were in a world where the internet still existed, you could write a review for DeBaser, talking about the invaluable importance of Evoken. A band that for years has never missed a single album and has managed to blend the class and majesty of Albionic Doom with the stifling atmospheres of Scandinavian Funeral. But you don't care. Because why remember one song over another in an album that managed to reshape an entire genre without anyone noticing, distracted by the glitz of ex-doomer English hipsters or the skulls tattooed on the buttocks of young Finnish sprouts?
But DeBaser no longer exists. The editors disappeared. Comments evaporated. Users pulverized. Like everyone else in the world, after all.
Seduced by the echo of piano notes resonating in a guitar riff that shakes the ether, you wander in the void of a world that seems unreal even to you, who have always despised that world, now embracing televisions with tears of joy. A piece of paper, on the ground, half-crumpled, bears phrases that no longer make sense: "...with a sound full of annihilating and sulfurous atmospheres, Evoken return, an American outfit from Lyndhurst; this chapter will delight those who have so far tenaciously sought something that could be both extreme and understandable, depressing yet simultaneously airy, as if the marriage between Classic Metal and Extreme Metal had finally been achieved... Note how the band's conceptual universe tries to avoid every cliché by focusing on issues sometimes more concrete, at other times intimate, but always personal and the result of a superiority that becomes manifest after a few listens..."
You stop. You do not understand the arcane meaning of these phrases, but you realize that they belong to a time when words could unite people and allow them to share their lives. But fortunately, it is no longer so. Your heart is the cathedral where the strings of "When Ghosts Fall Silent" resonate, until, dehydrated and exhausted by this immense experience, you lie down on a hill to enjoy the last moments of your life.
It couldn't have ended better than this.
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