An Idiot at the End of the World
A Melancholic Reaction Towards the Death and Rebirth of a Failing World— on Radiata Stories (2005)
You are fucked.
Bards and poets mused about the natural beauty of this everlasting cycle of reality, each one cleverly amending a new twist on the triteness of the events that are crashing down around you right now. All of them believed the cosmos had an ultimate plan of death and rebirth where a beautiful light bathed the world, cleansing the many deplorable sins that your shitty species has brought on this world.
Not one of them left alive to see how fucked you are.
You have spent a solid majority of your life training to follow in the footsteps of your father, the Dragonslayer. All that training amounted to a shitty child whose primary method of interacting with this beautiful and sacred world was to defile it by kicking everything until you got what you wanted from it.
Sometimes you got cool gear.
Sometimes you got your ass handed to you.
You wish that you had the opportunity to scream at your bratty past and warn him where you would be in less than a week. That every little piece of this world was designed to fail and you being there only aggravated the process.
You wish you had your ass handed to you more.
Frankly, you have literally never met your father at any point you were cognizant. That never stopped everyone from giving you special treatment that you really didn’t fucking deserve. Deep down, you know you shouldn’t have been knighted.
Maybe it was your pride that got you into this mess. You wanted to be incredible. You wanted to be that hero that every single person in the kingdom fawned over. You wanted to make your dad proud.
There wasn’t a kingdom left.
You wanted to be stronger than her.
Poor Ridley, she really didn’t deserve any of this. She was the daughter of a bishop in the service of a King that no longer exists in this world. She was strong in all the ways you were not.
She trained night and day to make her family proud.
You slacked off every time you could get away with it, and a few times where you couldn’t.
She could wreck your shit at any point that you were being a complete jackass.
There was some grand conspiracy in this shitty kingdom that all revolved around making her life miserable. Everyone from a thirsty and preppy warlord who ended up a burnt stain on the ground thirty minutes ago… to an overbearing dad who wanted every messenger executed for saying that this precious little girl wasn’t happy… to the dark silver dragon who wanted to destroy the ecosystem of the world and genocide all non-human life.
She was cute.
You weren’t cute.
You were an idiot.
In reality, this kinda thing was inevitable. Your fate was tied to this role ever since your dad killed the water dragon, upsetting the balance of the natural cycle. Given enough time, the world would have ended naturally.
But instead, here you are in front of a comatose girl at the moment she became a god, literally destroying the reality around you to make way for the coming of the Golden Dragon.
All of this started because you wanted to be a good person for once.
You made a promise to yourself that you were going to stop being a worthless snot-nosed brat and make something out of your life. You set your sights on cliché goals of true justice and helping the people even when the laws weren’t convenient.
That mentality is what made you lose every single one of your friends.
It’s a feeling that’s impossible to describe. When you heard news that the entire human race would become your enemy… you felt vindicated. Deep down, you always thought you deserved their scorn. There wasn’t a real way that you truly cared about that many people. All you did was talk to them, bring them some shitty spices or participate in their fucking quiz-show. They were all so nice and trusting in ways you know you could never afford again. Every one of them, so eager to run halfway across town to write their name in a dingy book contractually obligating them to be at your beck and call. All you did was see that they were stronger than you or cuter than you.
You wish you were stronger.
It totally was foul play from the royal cavalry. Once that terrible father of that poor girl got word of you leaving together, every piece was in its place for the narrative. The narrative of you declaring total war against your kin. Maybe some of those friends saw some terrible truth buried deep inside you that you wish you were given opportunity to deny. Maybe some of those friends thought you were saving the world. Maybe you thought you were saving the world.
You wish you were cute.
Moments ago, you had watched your jovial mentor and truest friend in what was left of the world kill himself.
It was more out of inaction than anything, but to call it anything other than a suicide would just be sugar-coating the truth.
You wish that he passed his entrance exam to get into the Mercenaries Guild so he didn’t have to lead a life of banditry. You knew that he performed better than you… but his father wasn’t a dragonslayer.
It was a hard moment in your life when you heard that he wasn’t going to be tagging along after your entire squad was dishonorably discharged from the royal brigade. He was the most optimistic idiot on the face of the earth. Because of this turn of circumstances, beyond any faint hope that might steal your attention, you were fucked.
He is dead.
And you are fucked.
Gods you wish you could have stopped your dad. You wish that shitty “kill unkillable fairies” disease didn’t exist to cause incredible tension between the races. You wish that excursion where you went through “Kill Fairies Castle” with that fairy kid meant literally anything. He wanted a future where fairies and humans could get along if they knew the truth of that king’s marriage. That the late king loved a fairy and all was good. You knew the truth. That kid was dead.
That kid had died in a bloody skirmish about six hours ago.
Fairies actually still die if they get stabbed by warlords.
This wasn’t fair.
This was terrible.
This was terrible and please I just want to go home so bad. I just want to forget this shitty country with its shitty rules about what shitty kid gets to be the shitty hero.
There were no heroes.
You knew that somewhere in the distance the leader of the fairies was laughing his ass off at the quaking of the earth. The shockwaves of a long forgotten holy site crumbling apart.
He got exactly what he wanted. He got the world to end by sacrificing the entirety of his people.
The Dark Silver dragon died knowing that he had failed to secure his utopian world of only humans. He did everything he could to get you to stop the ritual of absolution. The ritual where a human child would travel to this ashen world in pilgrimage to become one with the newborn god.
That destiny belonged to Ridley, and she was muttering in her sleep. By the time she opened her eyes again, this world would cease to exist.
Somewhere, there was a human king that regretted being a pawn to this terrible cycle.
Somewhere, there was a genius that figured out that it was too late and all would be lost before daylight would break.
And here you were. At the City of White Nights at the edge of the world, holding the girl that inherited God, fleeing the collapsing temple before the end came to no avail.
She spoke your name.
And the world vanished.
The Vessel of the Golden Dragon has awakened.
…
You knew she liked you.
You know that she’s going to tell you that everything was okay.
you know that there’s no reason to doubt her. she was the only person that could make things okay.
she always was.
she had a smile that only a loving god would have. a loving god that wanted nothing more than to save this failing world.
you didn’t want to be here.
not because you didn’t think that she would do a good job at being the golden dragon.
but because you didn’t deserve this.
you didn’t deserve anything.
you deserved to die with every last one of those terrible terrible humans that didn’t treat this fertile earth with the respect it absolutely needed or maybe you deserved to inherit the world that was broken and suffer a literal eternity because it was people like you that made that world a violent hellscape of death and only death and you wish you could tell everyone that you were not okay and you wish that you had the chance to be better than your father and you wish that you could have beaten her in a fair match once and you wish that you weren’t afraid of never living up to the expectations of others and you wish you actually made something of your life rather than just bouncing around between odd jobs to acquire stupid things for people you didn’t like for funds you didn’t need and you wish you could have saved your sister and you wish that you could have kept the friends you made in your time living by yourself and you wish you were cute instead of this ugly non stop kicking golem and you wish you never tried joining the royal knights and you wish that you weren’t so utterly fucked and you wish that you could have made peace between the humans and the non-humans and you wish that you were a better person than you are and you wish that you would have never been born and you wish that you had literally any semblance of control over your life and you wish there was a way that this story could end that would make everything better and make everyone happy and you wish that you saved your best friend through knighthood training by convincing him that he still has a life to live outside of his father and you wish you could tell yourself the same thing and you wish you could have had the chance to love and care for the world like the way that she always did even when she was a mortal being and you wish that you were a better person and you wish that you were happy with the life you were given and you wish that you loved yourself a fraction of the amount that the earth loved you back and you wish —
she giggled.
“You’re an idiot.”
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Here you were, in front of that same castle that ruined her life, complaining about the problems you had in a past universe like some selfish child.
Gods, you’re an idiot.
She literally gave you the chance to make everything right.
While the concept of the absolute annihilation of reality to hit some grand universal reset button seems pretty fucking terrifying, it really didn’t hurt that bad at all.
You’ve had breakdowns that were much worse than that.
Everything was truly… fine. The world that the Golden Dra —
The world that your friend had created. It felt… alive.
The air in the town felt rich with moisture, a sensation that you had never felt before in your life.
There wasn’t a drought anymore. The water was coming back. No, that’s not it. The water had never left this world. That obviously meant that the four elemental dragons were reborn.
Those stories from your kind mother about the sensation of curling your bare feet in the fertile soil after rain.
You would feel rain.
All of these experiences that were taken away from you…
They were given back. They were given back to everyone.
Ridley raced off for a short sprint before noticing that you weren’t keeping up with her.
You were awestruck admiring the new world as every person, including some you’ve had the pleasure of being friends with before this mess was right where they belonged.
The big clock started ticking and everyone went about their everyday routine, unaware of the usual idiosyncrasies that carried like what they were having for dinner that night or that the world ended three minutes ago.
“Hey, Jack?”
That voice was back. Headstrong and full of youthful pep with a dash of mild annoyance that came about from her harsh upbringing.
Nothing you would normally describe as the voice of omnipotence.
“Did you really mean all that stuff about the world, or were you just trying to get on my good side again?”
You meant everything.
She grabbed your hand and took off chasing the sun.
“Then, hurry up! What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
“An Idiot at the End of the World”
[radiata stories — 2005]
@heylasfas, 2016.
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