Everything hurts. I am desperately ill. This is the one thought that keeps clogging my abused mind, weighing down all conscious efforts to make sense of my situation. I am very sick. The light hurts my eyes and I have been isolated here in this cellar. I think it's a cellar. They put me here, when it all started. They bring me food and water. I think I remember some of their names, but the fever rages so hot through my body, until I thrash and cry out as my blood burns me up from the inside out.

So very sick. I think I may die.

I dream, I think. Or hallucinate. That the world is being twisted, like wringing out a rag, and tears appear in the earth and darkness pours out and everything I once knew is shattered and crumbled up and swallowed by the earth. I dream of the death of an age and it terrifies me, locked inside my illness as I am, I do not know if it is simply fever or omen.



It has been so long since anyone came to see if I still lived. I heard noises, somewhere outside, and I couldn't discern what they were. Like the animals being butchered, but we are still some time off from that, and I should not be hearing their screaming as their throats are slit. Not yet. Then, I thought I heard weeping, close at hand, but even now that is gone. There's gurgling, now and again, a strange croaking sort of sound and I do not know what it is. Light hurts my eyes and so I do not open them. I lay there and feel my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, swollen with thirst.

Finally, that is what spurs me to move. To roll from my cot, to crawl across the bare floor. I find the stairs and the wood creaks beneath me as I make my way up on all fours. I have to stop and rest twice. The door at the top is ajar. It is day light and I cringe against it, narrowing my eyes to only slits and peering through my eyelashes as I make my way across the floor.

This is what saves me. I am not alone in the room.

I hear a noise to my right, the groan of wood planks taking weight as something moves. Bigger than me. I look over and freeze, thinking this another dream, another hallucination. I see long limbs, unnatural tall, skin like it has been carved out of obsidian. Lean chest, the abdomen hollow as if there is nothing there, the arms hanging well past the hips, a distended mockery of a human. I do not look at its face. It stands too tall, hiding in the corner, away from the sunlight, and to do so would force me to let that baleful light into my eyes. My sickness prevents it. I do not look at its face, and so I live.

I try to speak. I cannot form the words, as parched as I am. Then I see – slumped against the wall nearby – a body. Someone I once knew, but fever has scoured the name from my mind. His head twisted at a sharp angle, the tongue hanging out, blue and puffed with decay. The slender abomination steps forwards, walking along the line of sunlight on the floor, and brushes against the body. As if it isn't there, and it lolls and slides sideways, the eye sockets empty save for a runny jelly. His fingers twitch. The corpse is trying to move.

My memory grows frail after that. I recall running. Blindly, through the fields, away from that place. For days and days, while the earth shivers in the aftershock and belches up ravines and lava and new oceans form, until it settles with a sigh and the world goes quiet.

This is when my fever breaks and my illness leaves me. I find myself in a forest, among oak trees, my only possession my clothing and my name as the only clear memory left to me. I am alone and I know, that come nightfall, they will come for me.

The earth has opened up and vomited up its horrors. The dead on the surface rise and walk. Even the vegetation has turned against us and I can see the vines writhing, twisting together and forming shapes, splitting into legs and hissing as they take form, the empty hollows forming eyes that track me as I flee past them. Soon they will break free and walk the earth, alongside the dead and the monstrous spiders and all the other abominations. And among them are the tall slender creatures that cannot be of this world, that cannot be born of this earth.

This much is clear in my mind. I saw – on the necks of the dead – imprints. Red-lined bruises marking thin fingers. They came, these creatures, and killed us. Genocide. I shall call it what it is. For some imagined slight, perhaps, some communication that we erred upon and invited outrage. Or simply because that is what they are and what they do, but regardless of the reason, the result cannot be denied. They brought about the end of us, while the world twisted in the throes of a tumultuous rebirth, as worlds that were once distant were brought near and irrevocably altered the fabric of our reality. I do not know if it were accident or purpose, but I see them walking the earth, holding pieces of it in their long hands, and I think they're lost. Confused in this world they've found themselves in. Thrown across the void as our two worlds collided and the realms of reality were ripped open, cast into light from dark, and then stranded as the fabric of our worlds healed and the rifts closed. I suppose, were the situation different, I would pity them. But they brought our end and my world is now far too cruel for things like sympathy.

I think shall call them endermen.