When shadows rise and jesters grin, when the wise become fools and the fools gorge themselves in wit, when the kings find themselves peasants and the poor find themselves with power never before acquitted, when the senses have betrayed your sense of reality and reason fails to marry rhyme, then can it be considered the end of time, the passing of one age into the next as is customary.
If you think about it, if you sit down really hard and think about the passage of time and how strange it is, it becomes clear how abstract everything is, how the customs and traditions of our day and age seem rooted in iron and stone, how our lives right now seem like they will always continue as they do now, without any change or conflict.
It is easy to think this way when we have not known any better, when we are two decades or less old and have lived out perhaps only one third of our lives, maybe even less. There is so much that we have yet to learn but it is important to not consider our ignorance of this dynamic world as a bad thing, as some irrefutable flaw that makes the young inferior to the older members of the human race, those who have been around longer and have grown use to change and know it by heart.
It is rooted in many cultures that it is custom to follow the wisdom of the elders, for why should we question the teachings of those who have been around longer than us, the new generation? How can we expect our world view and understanding of reality to compare with those who have seen the sun rise and set thousands of more times than we could ever dare to dream of?
To live one's life with this mentality, to never question or challenge authority, to accept the mentality that the wisest know better than the young, that those in charge ultimately should be in charge, that is what keeps society at a standstill. For if we sit down and allow ourselves to be contented with how things are without wanting to change anything, then our world really will not change.
And maybe that's good if our world doesn't change, if we all sit down and relax and keep things the way they are. In the height of the twenty-first century on this green and blue rock that orbits a rather distant star, we find ourselves in a time period without any conflict, where the world is not at war with itself and the threat of freezing in a nuclear winter is considerably a lesser threat than what it once was.
So why should we want to change anything? Why should we want to question our elders and our authority when everything seems fine right now?
In truth, humans have one flaw. We can surround ourselves with hundreds of people, befriend everyone around us, text and chat with others online for hours on end. But no matter how often we do this, reach out and connect with others, we are always alone, always our consciousness forced to be by itself. We will never know what someone else is thinking, we will never fully understand how people react to varying situations. We are limited in our world view even if we live in a time period at the climax of technology, where seven point six billion people can reach out to one another at the push of a button. We are more connected than ever, but we have never been more alone.
We can only ever really know what we choose to understand, from what we see. We will only ever gather knowledge and understanding about what this world is like through what we observe. You can't hop into someone else's mind and read what they've been through, you can't ever confirm your own life experiences with someone else because our minds, our consciousnesses are trapped behind a few inches of bone.
Because of this limited world view, it is clear then to realise that while the time we live in right now seems peaceful, there are hidden factors, small unknown dangers that are blossoming in this world's current climate, threats that our small vision and understanding of the world cannot begin to comprehend. We live right now in a time where climate change is not a problem, where the rise of the average global temperature is barely felt, so why should we make all these changes, challenge authority and try to reduce our carbon emissions?
Small, unperceived, this danger will continue to grow and fester if we allow ourselves to be contented with how things are, if we allow ourselves to be blinded to these small problems and decide to remain content with how the world is today and do nothing to fix what we choose not to see.
So if we allow ourselves to be contented with how things are, if we decide it best to not challenge authority, it could ultimately bring about the utter destruction of our race. The human species cannot and will not live in contentment. There will always be some small thing that we are striving to change or fix, a piece of hay out of place that hasn't yet been smoothed over. It happened with the English with Richard the second and Henry the fourth, when the crowds and the masses were intolerant of the first king and cried for the next, and when Henry surpassed Richard, than the crowds turned their noses and opinions against the new king they had once wailed for, now admiring the corpse, the ghost of the memory of Richard the II, now wanting him instead of Henry the IV, the one whom they had once fought wars and torn each other apart for.
But let us not get off track.
I understand that you want to hear more of this story. As the narrator of this fascinating tale, you most likely find it bothersome that I get distracted so easily. You would have rather wished it so that I had continued exactly where we had left off last time, jump head-first back into the plot of this tale without throwing in references to long forgotten Elizabethan plays. But I find it better when I throw philosophy into my story, when I add in a few extra elements to allow the gears inside your mind to start turning, so that you can apply what I have just spoken about to the tale that we will now resume, how you should not remain content with how things are.
How strange, it must also be for you, the reader, to have the narrator speak directly to you. You're used to me remaining omniscient, a voice telling this tale but never speaking in direction. It probably makes you feel uncomfortable, just a bit on edge. But now that I have made it clear that I am the one telling this tale, you must be wondering who I am.
Because that is the nature of you, the listener of my story, to figure out everything. It is often agonising if there is something that you cannot know, some small plot element that has not been explained in full.
So I'm going to keep you on the edge of your seat. Upon the conclusion of this tale, I will tell you my name, reveal who just exactly is the one telling this story. But for now, we shall resume the tale.
You did not know why the painter looked at you the way he did, why the light that glimmered in his eyesockets as if by magic seemed to reflect not your current form, but rather the ghost of a person that had once bore your face from a long time ago. You hated that feeling, the way that someone could know you better than you knew yourself, though you were quite sure that you had never seen the painter before in your life. Meeting a skeleton that had a giant paintbrush slung across his back was something you probably wouldn't forget that easily.
Weren't you supposed to know yourself the most? Weren't you the person with whom every thought was heard, every emotion completely registered? Know one else could have known every thought that went on inside your mind or what specific feeling had manifested in the depths of your subconscious. You and only you had the front row seat to what went on inside your head.
And yet the painter seemed to look at you as if he was looking at a part of himself, as if you were nothing more than a mirror to himself, a glimpse of a person whom he understood completely and entirely. The thought unnerved you, the way that someone could know every emotion, every thought that went on inside your head and predict it with unceasing accuracy. It stripped you of your independence, of your security. For even if bound in chains and shackles, man would always be free inside their mind, the one place that no one but themselves could break into. And yet it seemed as if the painter had invaded even that part of yourself and you were now sharing your mind with someone else, a place that you had been used to living inside of - alone - your entire life.
All of these emotions, of course, lasted only for a few seconds, a small blip when considering the whole progress of time. You did not have hours on end to dawdle about confusion and existential crises when your own life was about to end from the dozens of shadow creatures that were racing towards you, the darkness of the world gone mad.
Even that was unnerving by itself, the way that something you were so used to, a shadow following you every moment of your life, was now a potential enemy. How could one stay sane if their very world, the normal and the ordinary, was now the extraordinary and unforgivable?
"We have to do it now!" The skeleton with the golden bow shouted, looking over at the painter. He released the weapon and you watched in astonishment as the golden beacon of light glimmered through the air and shot straight towards the shadows. You wondered for a crude second how the skeleton expected his arrow to do any damage, for how could shadows have a physical form in which you could inflict damage upon?
But when the arrow struck the flank of the shadows, the creatures let loose screams of utter agony, demonic screeches that pierced the silence of this world as they were set alive in tongues of golden flame. For a moment you couldn't help but pity the daemons in the hell that had been unleashed upon them, but then thought better of yourself, remembering that you would have probably faced a much worse fate had they been the ones to gain the upper hand against you and the two skeletons.
"It won't stop them for long," the skeleton muttered as he notched another arrow, his gaze hardened.
"Surely that must have been enough to kill them?" You gaped, looking back at the creatures that weighed in agony. "How can anything survive that?"
The skeleton with the bow looked at you as if you could have not asked a dumber question. "The shadows aren't alive in the way that you and I are, you can't kill something that is neither alive nor did. They're kind of like viruses in the sense that they just exist and function without clinging on to life. We only know how to hurt them, but we don't know how to kill them. There was once a person who could kill them, their magic was strong enough to wipe the shadows from the face of existence."
"Well why don't you call up your buddy and get them the hell over here?" you snarled.
This time it was the painter's turn to speak. "They died a long time ago," he muttered, his knowing gaze lingering on your longer than you felt comfortable, the way he stared at you, knowing parts of yourself and your mind that you did not even know.
"We have to erase this universe before - "
Whatever the skeletons were saying faded away, lost amongst the growing sensation of darkness inside your mind. Something ancient and foreboding was prodding inside your thoughts, belonging to an entity that was perhaps as old as time itself, having existed when the whole of reality was just beginning.
There was a sense of surprise coming from this entity, the entity that was pervading your mind and dulling out your senses to the extent that your identities almost seemingly merged together. The surprise was not one of anger, or at least that was what you were able to discern, it was hard to tell when someone was literally invading your mind. It was the kind of surprise and shock that came when you saw someone that you had not seen for a very long time, someone that you had thought to be dead given the long amount of silence that had elapsed since you had last spoken to them.
And then came a voice, one so clear and yet rotten and cold that you felt your blood chill to ice. Alive? The voice whispered inside your mind, though you did not think that it was talking to you directly. Perhaps the voice did not know that you were even aware of its presence at all. How can they be alive after all this time?
The feeling passed as quickly as it had come and when you came to your senses, you found yourself collapsed on the ground, both the painter and the skeleton with the arrow staring at you with expressions of worry, which was another curious thing to note as you knew neither of these two skeletons so it seemed quite strange that they would feel such concern over your wellbeing. There was again that suspicion that there was some knowledge that the two of them possessed that you did not, a feeling that you decided that you hated, the way that people could know more about you than you did about yourself.
"Are you okay?" The skeleton with the bow asked, helping you get to your feet. "You took one glimpse at the shadows and sort of froze up before passing out."
"I'm fine," you murmured, rubbing a particularly painful spot on the back of your head where you supposed you had hit whilst falling down onto the ground. "And speaking of the shadows - "
"They left." It was the painter's turn to speak, his hardened gaze never once leaving yours. You were beginning to think that he hated every fibre of your being which was probably the truth now that you thought about it. But what could you have done to someone you had never met.
Or perhaps, someone that you didn't remember?
"What do you mean they left?" You spat, not sure if the source of your frustration came from the fact that these two skeletons were probably the hardest two creatures in existence to pry any coherent information from or that the painter hated you for absolutely no reason. "Last time I checked, they seemed pretty hell-bent on ripping us to shreds."
"They were," the skeleton with the bow replied, "but after you tensed up, it was like the shadows responded the same way, waiting for some sort of command." The skeleton exchanged a nervous glance with the painter. "Which is not necessarily a good thing."
"Isn't being alive a good thing?" You hissed.
"If the shadows are acting the way that they are and not by their own random will, it means that they're being given orders, that someone higher up is controlling them. There was only one person in the entire multiverse with the strength and power to do such a thing, a person that we thought had died a long time ago. But perhaps evil can never truly be purged from the face of the planet," the skeleton muttered, leaning alongside his bow.
You couldn't help but wonder what maniacal and sadistic bastard had the power to control such daemons that were constructed of evil and hate, but then thought back to the cold and sinister entity that had invaded your mind, numbed your senses and reeked of everything wrong and foul in all of existence. Surely that was not a coincidence.
"It's over now," the painter spat and flicked his wrist, bringing forth an orange button into view. You failed to catch a glimpse of what was written on the device as he slammed his fist onto the damned thing without the slightest moment of hesitation.
"Ink - " The skeleton with the bow approached his friend cautiously. You did not pay attention to what the two skeletons began to discuss under their breath as you watched in transfixed horror as the universe around you began to glitch and fade from existence, the fires from the house in the distance flickering and fading like it had never been there at all before the house, too, began to fade from view, leaving behind only white and empty space that eerily reminded you of the white hell of the Void that you had awoken inside of.
"We best be on our way," Ink muttered, adjusting the brown scarf around his neck. The skeleton with the bow opened his mouth to protest but was again cut off by the painter. "I don't want to hear it Dream," Ink snapped and stabbed a bony thumb into the air before pulling it down in a fluid motion, creating a rift in the middle of the air. "If we stay here for much longer, we'll end up fading just like the rest of this damned place. And we still have work to do, and by work, I mean deleting the tens of hundreds of other universes that are just like this one."
As Ink and Dream began to step out of the portal and back into the Void, you felt a sudden spark of resilience flicker inside of you. "Maybe I'll just stay here then," you snapped, allowing your sudden hatred for the painter break forth. "I mean, it's pretty obvious just by how you look at me that my very existence is obviously a thorn in your side, which is saying a lot since I've only been conscious for a day."
"You can't - " Dream took a step closer to you but Ink pushed the skeleton aside.
He stared at you for a moment, his multi-coloured pupils shifting from red diamonds to purple question marks, windows into the torrent of emotion running inside his mind. You were convinced that he was going to leave you here in this dying universe, which was perfectly fine with you. You had nothing to live for after all, you had only been alive for about a day.
Just as you thought that the painter was going to close the portal and leave you to die, a sudden snarl broke through his features and he wrapped a bony hand around your wrist and pulled you through as the rift closed behind on the decaying universe forever, leaving the ghosts and ruins of a forgotten world to forever cease to exist.