Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

Thick vines encircle in an ever upward choke of the huge concrete pillars that support the spine roof of the great cathedral. It is not a cathedral but, rather, a great subterranean chamber in which building supplies were once stored. Though its heavy sad gape does give a certain sense of those ancient halls of empty and pointless worship.

At the base of the walls, thick undergrowth gives way to vast open plains of the most vivid green. If you look closely, there are polar bears and elephants and marmots and kiwis and all manner of other creatures to be found. Lazily, they forage beneath the freshly rendered great orange orb that glimpses through the foliage that creeps and intertwines overhead.

The walls themselves are a crush of great centurion trunks with multitude branches that filter out to the most delicately formed tips. It is beautiful. It is silent. And it is as black and unseen as most deepest and inanimate of dreams.

“It’s nearly here. Do you not hear the crackling roll of its approaching feet?”, says the artist as her lover toys with the holes in the ends of her fingers.

“Are they painful?”, he asks and, then, snorts at the redundant stupidity of his question.

“We did well. Working our fingers to the bone. I think the last details are no more than our flesh and our blood.”

“Do you think it is beautiful? This memory of a world now all but lost.”

“I think it is perfect. Don’t worry, you’ll see. We’ll see it all… Just hold me…”

There is a shudder and a patter of falling cement in the darkness and then, of a sudden, the roof renders apart and a great molten wave surges and crests up above.

The artists, the lovers, the last two beings on Earth lay together and feel the heat grip and contract at the grey sag of their skin. And they look upward with long blinded eyes and they do not see a thing.

In the roar of an instant, a great vast artwork becomes drenched in a ferocious and searing light. The last ever record of the trees and the animals and the grass beneath their feet ignites as the defeated slurry of the poor melted earth crashes down and into the void.