By No Eye

     Mankind is the race of endurance, for there is no event which they cannot survive. They survived what was called by some the First True War. They survived the Scattering, the day the Earth shattered. Their seed was sown among the stars, among the races of the inky blackness. And still mankind survived, even the pure strain. The universe expanded, light-years upon light-years. Stars died, galaxies were swallowed up. And still mankind endured.

     Mankind endured to the point where the arc of civilization inevitably turned downwards. The great gates between worlds died, cities burned, forests became deserts, and pinpricks of humanity were separated, knowing each other only as alien legend. Life was at its end, and man was clinging to the last bit of hope as one holds to a lover going away on a long trip. Mankind dwindled.

     Great cities on these separated worlds became towns, towns became villages, villages a lone hut in the shade of a mountain. Even wildlife became scarce, on its last legs from the wave of overpopulation’s hunger.

     Then mankind truly lost the will to live. Worlds that had once been a scattering of hermits now only were home to ghost-echoes and rushing winds, empty biospheres in the mantle of space. Even more was forgotten by those that still lived. No one knew the world they lived on was round any longer, no one even knew why winter came and why the spring always followed. No one remembered a newborn’s cry.

     Still they lingered. Their spirits broken, their bloodlines ceased, they continued to exist. Somehow. A man sighting another man was as rare as diamonds supposedly were, but no one knew what a diamond was anymore. There were no children, for they had all grown up the moment they found the urge to kill, yet there was no one to kill.

     And finally, billions of years from when their story had begun, mankind died out. The last of them gave his last breath and laid back to stare at the stars, the stars which had defeated all life.

     And the universe continued to expand. Soon, the shadows between worlds became the worlds themselves. The stars winked out, one by one, turning in on themselves and pulling at the threads of space. Asteroids bounced aimlessly about space, nothing to alter their course where once had been gravity. Now there was only void. There was only darkness.

     The darkness would endure far longer than man ever did. Far longer than the stars, far longer than the planets, far longer than the black holes. The darkness would sit. The darkness would wait. The darkness would exist until what was unknown to any mortal mind came and replaced it.

     The void ebbed. It is the nature of the universe to spiral ever downwards, but what happens when the bottom has been reached? None were living to witness it; none know what happened the moment that light was glimpsed by no eye for the first time in time unsearchable. Perhaps it had been millennia, perhaps a single day.

     And the Light was seen by no eye.