All things went dark, blinking out for only a moment. The fires of war burned low in the rubble of the battlefields. Smoke obscured the horizon giving no sense of place to the vast multitudes standing in the void at the end of all mortal times. It was the final end of the last fight.

A man at the edge of vision was swearing at the top of his voice, spouting such a string of obscenities that he could only have been making up new words. His voice was the only sound to be heard. Even the crackling fires of the battlefield were hushed into whispers well below the sound of the singular, unkind voice in the shapeless void. The last star had fallen into the dust of the Earth beneath the loud man’s curses.

Another man sat in the gloomy light waiting for something that he did not know. He was not cold in the yellowy fog that covered the whole of the land. Nobody knew how long he had been sitting there without eating, however, he was not hungry. Even thirst dared not touch the man curled up in the dust.

Light was everywhere and came from nowhere. The sun no longer rose, chasing the moon around the world that had died moments before. Darkness and light had ceased to come to men. It had come time for men who had rejected the light to go to the darkness. Time could no longer be measured in the ways of mortal men for no mortal men remained to keep its measure.

No man was alone in his solitude. The air was alive with the endless buzz of a billion and more hushed voices speaking in whispers throughout the fog. All languages were as dead as their speakers. That final wall between the minds of men had fallen and understanding came without the need for mere words. Yet, men used words for they knew no other way.

The man of dust sat puzzled in the desolation for not all who lived in the world past hope lived on in hopelessness. Puzzlement grew to be his only feeling, stronger even that the sound of the curses of the loud man. A man of dust has no problem in the time of desolation for he had lived there even in his mortal life. To this single man of dust, it was no real change and he could live on with it. He who dwells expecting always the worst never knows disappointment.

But the strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs were strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens. to him. In their eyes, there was no misty yellow fog. Black clouds did not blot out the sky on every horizon to them. They seemed to know life in the presence of joy that no living soul had ever known. In a time when men of reality knew only the real end of all things, these people knew something that was as real as it could never be.

It had to be real because of the real effect that it had on the strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs in the mists. They knew no darkness when the man of dust knew only darkness. Whatever light these strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs had was as natural to the strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs as the darkness had always been to the man of dust. The strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs had not cut themselves off from all feeling in an attempt to escape the bad feelings known to the man of dust.

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