It was frustrating.
This was a new emotion for it. Blind, seething, all-consuming hatred, it could do for days; tectonic rages, no problem; scorn and contempt, been doing those since day one. Even a bit of triumphant exultation, because what was the point of being the Personification of the End Times if you couldn’t enjoy yourself now and again? All good and proper things to feel when you were the Nemesis, the Oh Dear Gods What Is That Thing, the Last Line in This Little Story Called Life.
But instead of all those nice and proper feelings, what it had on its apocalyptic plate right now was a large, heaping serving of indigestible Frustration.
The last man lay at its feet, inasmuch as any of its multitudinous hooked and clawed appendages could be called feet. What was left of the man lay there at any rate, quite finally and irreversibly dead. That was not what frustrated it. No, the frustrating thing was that everything else in existence obstinately refused to snuff it too.
Here’s what should have happened after the last human died: Nothing. Not “nothing much” nothing, “oh, this is a bit dull” nothing, but absolute, total Nothing. Goodbye, so long, cheerio everything. One hundred percent pure, unadulterated oblivion.
It worked like this: Human belief defined the world. Gods, gravity and goodness could exist only if they were believed in. With nobody left to believe in anything, everything should have ended.
Only, here it all still was. Still being, rather than not being. The body was still there. Sky, air, sun, white fluffy clouds, all present and accounted for. Mountain still distressingly solid. It could only mean one thing: The ‘last’ man quite patently wasn’t.
Frustrating.
“Don’t worry my beloved follower I am here to--oh damn.”
The pony-sized avatar of the spider-goddess Yeurgh popped into existence on the mountainside. Its eight eyes looked down at the body, then back up at the Bane of Absolutely Everything, and she sighed. “Tch, no sense for the dramatic. Heroic last words, tearful goodbyes and all that. Couldn’t you have waited a minute?”
“No.” It thundered. A pause. Then, irritably: “Why are you still here?”
“Hmmm? Oh, residual self-belief I suppose. I’ll probably be popping off shortly.” Indeed, the great spider was already turning filmily translucent, her existence fraying into an airy blur. “So disappointing. Not much glory in being the second-last human alive, is there?”
A half-dozen of its eyes frowned. “Where is the glory in being the last? There would be no one to remember you.”
“You’d be surprised,” the fading goddess sniffed. “Pity, and they were doing so well, too. The endless march of progress, medicine, mathematics, philosophy and all that. But in the end they couldn’t think further than ‘Après moi, le déluge,’ eh?”
“What?”
“Whoops, wrong reality. Nevermind.” Her body slowly dissolving into nothing. “What a waste though. All that potential, and they still decided to believe in you.”
“I require no belief,” the Door Slammed Shut in the Face of Existence said haughtily. “I am inevitable as fate, as inescapable as destiny.”
“Of course you are, dear,” said the spider-goddess. And she was gone, leaving only the echo of her chittering laugh.
In the deepest bowels of the earth, under the tallest mountain, there was a room. In the room was a man.
The room was as modest as the door, lined with books on every wall, with a small wooden desk at the center, illuminated by four long white candles. The man sat at the desk, reading by candlelight, and the only sound was the faint flick of the pages.
The door exploded inwards, showering the room in wooden splinters and snuffing out one of the candles. The man looked up and frowned in mild irritation. He picked up a cloth bookmark, and gently closed the book around it. Brushed a splinter from the desk.
A presence entered the room, titanic, terrible, a nightmare vision given form.
“Found you,” its voice hissed and gibbered and bellowed all at once. “You are the last of your kind.”
The man looked up mildly, opened a drawer in the desk, and pulled out a bottle and then two glasses. “Jolly good,” he said. “Calls for a drink.”
The End of Everything laughed. “Speak your last. Have you nothing to say?”
“To us,” he said, uncorking the bottle, and began to pour. He raised the glass in a toast. “Alone at last.”
The thing reached out with a long, wickedly curved claw. And stopped.
The man took a sip, watching the claw with amused interest.
Several of the thing’s pupiled eyes narrowed in suspicion, and even some of the multi-faceted ones managed to look a bit squinty and doubtful. “Trickery will not avail you now.” A hint of uncertainty crept into its voice, then it rallied. “I will destroy you!”
The man sighed, put down the glass and clasped his hands in front of him. “The words you are looking for are ‘thank you,’ old boy.”
The thing fell silent. It regarded him with baleful eyes filled with fire and unending hate. He smiled encouragingly at it.
“Why would I thank you?” it asked at last.
“Well, isn’t this what you wanted?”
“I did this, I, and I alone wrought your downfall!”
“Did you?” he cocked his head to one side. “Tell me then, if you’re the personification of death, destruction and despair, then whose personification are you? Humanity, that’s whose. If we’re the center of creation, then we created you, my boy. You’re us. Warts and other bits and all.”
The Big Cheerio puzzled on that. “Your kind wished for their own destruction?”
The last man beamed. “Precisely, my protean horror, precisely. Just look at history,” he tapped the book in front of him. “We’ve always been expecting for the apocalypse to be just around the corner, wishing and hoping for it even. Fiery comets, solar eclipses, ancient prophecies, years divisible by round numbers, years not divisible by round numbers, you name it, we’ve forever been seeing signs that the end times are upon us. Many have seen that as a good thing, something to be desired. No need to worry about tomorrow if there won’t be one! You’re just that, given form.”
The Insatiable One looked genuinely perplexed. “You wished to die? All of you?”
“Oh no, but enough of us,” the man replied. “Creation is a collective consensus, the world is as the majority of us desire it to be. Once enough of us wanted an apocalypse, one happened. You happened. Now I’m all that’s left, you know what that means?”
The walls, ceiling and floor of the room fell away, just sort of folded in on themselves until they disappeared, leaving the two standing in nothing. No ocean, no sky, no stars. Just, nothing.
“The world exists only because it is believed in,” the last man continued. “Thanks to your diligence and hard work, I am currently the only thing with any belief in anything.”
“You planned this?”
“For an eldritch, unspeakable horror you’re not much of a conversationalist, you know?” he tutted. “Yes, planned. All my life I’ve pushed against the world and felt the weight of people’s beliefs and expectations resist. Now, there’s nobody else to push back. Don’t you see? I am the only watcher left. Nothing can be except that I wish it to.”
The man spread his arms wide as he turned in a full circle, taking in all the things he had wished to not exist.
“The question remains then: Why?”
The man rubbed his hands together. “It was time to make some improvements.”
“Improvements?”
“Well, changes at any rate.” The man nodded firmly to himself. “Do things differently this time.” A round, blue globe sprang into existence in the void, spinning gently. “Make reality a bit more solid, for a start. Don’t want to have to go through all this again.”
“It will be…” the thing began, apprehensively. “A perfect world?”
“Oh good heavens, no,” he chuckled. “Of course there will be room for you, old chum. Can’t have good without a bit of evil, eh? Here, have some free will, just don’t cause too much trouble with it or I’ll turn you into a slug.”
He laughed at the thing’s expression, and took its shadowy claw in his hand. He gestured to the world below them.
“Now, let’s go make history.”
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