I will continue reading until the end of time!
The horizon bled rust, streaked with the desperate claw marks of a sky grappling for its last breath. Ash pirouetted in tortured spirals— a slow, solemn waltz around the skeletal remains of a world long since hollowed out. The wind coursed over the flaky ground, its swan song whistling through the cracks in crumbled buildings and over the pools of liquid nightmare laying in low places, their iridescent and vile surfaces shifting like the unblinking eyes of the careless gods who'd abandoned them.
The broken bones of civilization jutted up from the scorched skin of the Earth; metal twisted beyond recognition reached skyward in one last, doomed plea to the heavens.
And yet, in the center of this vast and endless funeral, a chair stood. And upon this chair sat a man.
His clothes spoke of another era, one before time itself died. Walls had once enclosed him, a roof had once sheltered him, but now they were whispers in the air. Yet he did not stir nor blink at the void yawning around him. He sat in total ignorance.
A breeze swept through the hollow doorway, spiralling through the nothingness where walls had once stood. It reached for the man, but his eyes stayed down, enraptured by the book in his hands.
In the distance, something crumbled. The sound ricocheted throughout the encompassing emptiness. The sky darkened— a wound festering and stretching open. The air pressed down all around the man with a weight beyond gravity.
The universe itself seemed to pause, as though holding its breath, watching, waiting. The moment stretched into eternity, the stillness absolute. Every molecule, every atom stilled, poised on the precipice of something monumental.
And then... then...
He turned the page.
