"Even if history forgets you, my dreams will go on remembering you, Black Sapling.
Even if you are to bring about the 'End' of the 'End'…"
A sunny day, and I'm walking into my usual café. I push the door open and that thick smell of coffee fills my nose.
The café is holding more people than it normally does, surprisingly. There's hardly a single empty table. My eyes search for my usual corner, but it's already taken.
At that table a girl with her hair in a bun, dyed a deep orange, is arguing heatedly with the boy across from her. Beside her, a boy with short black hair and an ordinary look was watching them as if nothing in the world concerned him. Across from him sat another girl. She had lovely blue eyes and long, straight black hair.
'Wait a second… Is she looking at me?'
When I look more carefully, I realize she isn't looking at me but at the book in my hand: 'Black Holes: The Monsters That Devour the Universe.'
She wasn't looking at me. She never had.
It made no sense that this bothered me so much.
'I thought it was eye contact… turns out it was just science scoring a point.'
What came after that was the beginning of the 'End.'
First the air went dark.
I lifted my head. It wasn't like an eclipse of the sun; it was as if, as if the colors had been drained out of the world.
Then the sound went.
As if a button had been pressed. The hiss of the coffee machine, the conversations, the car horns from outside… all of it cut off at once, sharp as a knife.
The girl at the register hurried toward the child behind the counter. At another table two friends muttered curses under their breath.
I tried to run for the door, but my steps refused to move forward. My body wouldn't obey me. I spent a while trying to understand what was holding me back, until thin, yellow, glowing, half-transparent branches rose up from beneath my feet.
I looked around me in fear. Thankfully, I wasn't the only one caught by this thing. Even if that could hardly be called a good thing.
The curses muttered quietly a moment ago had turned into shouts now. It wasn't exactly a fine time to be learning new ones, but I heard some curses I'd never heard before.
The cashier hadn't managed to move a single millimeter from her spot either. She was shouting at the child, telling him not to be afraid. The ironic part was that she looked like the one who most needed calming.
"Devran, calm down! Stay where you are, I'm coming to you."
The branches that had just begun to wrap around my feet were climbing higher and higher. As if they were a monster trying to swallow me, they rose around me with every second.
I tried to break free; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't take a single step. As a last resort I tried to grab and tear away the branches that had now reached my upper body. But I failed. It was as if they weren't there. My hands couldn't touch a single one of them.
In the end I gave up and went on watching the others around me with curiosity.
On the other side of the café, three people whose uniforms told me they were high schoolers had clung to one another. The blond, blue-eyed, fairly handsome one was trying to make sense of what was happening. Of the two girls, the one with short brown hair was on the verge of crying from fear. The other girl was trying to calm her.
My favorite table was far livelier than the others. The arguing girl had started to shout. As if she didn't much care that it was useless, she was trying to tear the branches off with her hands. The one across from her was watching their friends. The other two were trying to understand what was happening with the shock on their faces.
The branches, which had now passed my chest, began to grip my neck. They coiled all the way around it like a cold chain. I wanted to breathe but the air wouldn't enter my lungs. I wanted to scream but the words wouldn't leave my mouth. Helplessness was the only thing I had left.
In the end the branches that had wrapped my whole body closed over my eyes too. The strange thing was that the branches weren't entirely opaque. I could still make out the objects inside the café, faint and dim, like blurred shadows—until those shadows were wiped away from before my eyes.
'But what was happening wasn't that my eyes had stopped seeing—it was that the objects were no longer there. No, that wasn't right either. It wasn't the objects that were no longer there. It was me…'
What my eyes saw now were quite different things. Looking into the distance, I saw that the same branches covering us covered the entire sky. Even more terrifying was that the more I looked at them, the more my mind seemed to refuse to think about them.
In fear I turned my focus to what was near. Here there were more familiar objects: some worn, some battered, some entirely toppled thrones…
On the outside, eight white thrones were arranged in a row. Among them was a heap of dust and rubble that seemed to have once been some of those thrones. These thrones were set in a circle, all turned toward the center. But there was a gap in the circle, as if that last throne hadn't yet been set in place.
At the very center rose four black thrones. They had set their backs against one another, all turned outward, toward the circle of white ones. With their darkness they swallowed the entire space.
'Eight white thrones. Four black thrones. And among them one more gap—as if a throne were missing, or had never been set in place at all.'
Between the thrones and the branches, it was as if someone had spread the whole cosmos out around them. Planets, stars, and galaxies beyond counting…
As mesmerizing as this sight was, it was just as much torture. My chest tightened, my lungs burned, my eyes refused to see. And my mind felt as if it were being torn apart the more it tried to grasp everything at once.
'Don't look,' I thought. 'If you look, you'll go mad.'
And then came that nauseating sensation of being pulled away.
"GUHK!"
The thrones and branches I had just seen were gone now. In their place came a foul stench that made you want to vomit, soil whose source of filth couldn't be told, and a different sky.
I collapsed to the ground. As I emptied whatever was in my stomach onto the dry earth, my eyes watered from retching. My throat was burning. I clawed at the ground with my hands. The soil… this soil was dry and filthy.
'Where am I? Where is this place?'
The sounds came muffled. My ears were ringing. I tried to raise my head, but the world was spinning around me like a top.
I looked around. The people who had just been in the café were with me too. Some had fainted, some were still in shock though they hadn't passed out. The three in the minority were, like me, trying to understand what was going on.
The sharp smell of rotting earth was burning our lungs.
'The sharp smell had cleared my consciousness—as if I'd woken from a very long dream.'
The rocks around us and the distant mountains filled our field of vision. Far away there was a faint, barely visible sea. Even if its color was anything but pleasant.
With difficulty I straightened up and leaned my back against a rock. The scene I saw made my stomach clench again.
The sky… was wrong.
As bad as the earth was, the sky was just as beautiful. It was night. The stars, galaxies, and planets were still there, but they were not the same as the ones I had seen a moment ago.
There were too many moons in the sky. The planets—the things I assumed were planets—stood far closer than they should. Two stars shared the sky. And beyond even them, countless stars winked.
It was certainly not the same as the place a moment ago… because now, when I looked at the stars, my mind didn't fall apart.
I turned to the others. Though the four of us hadn't fainted, we had all crumpled to the ground, struggling to stand. I got to my feet with great difficulty. It seemed everyone had been scattered at random. No one was in the position they'd been in at the café.
After me, the others tried to stand as well. The blond high schooler was the first who managed to get up, and like me he looked the others over.
"Is everyone okay?" he asked.
"Up until five minutes ago I was pretty much perfect. Now I'm barely holding it together so I don't throw up," I answered.
"Hey!" A voice. Harsh, angry.
I turned my head. A man covered in dust and dirt, his hair a mess, was staggering as he tried to stand. There was fear in his eyes, but he was trying to mask it with anger.
"Who did this?" he shouted into the void. His voice was trembling. "What hell are we in?"
His clothes were worn, his hair disheveled. But it wasn't because of what had just happened. He had been like that from the start.
Our fourth, the blue-eyed girl, spoke with her focus on her friends:
"Does anyone have any idea what just happened?"
"Earth…" I said, my voice coming out cracked and weak. That disgusting taste in my throat wouldn't go away.
The blue-eyed girl—she was there too—turned to me. Her pupils had gone wide with shock.
"What did you say?"
Looking at those alien moons in the sky, at that sickly purple color, I whispered.
"This isn't Earth."