He stood on a cliff edge in a utopia.

He stood on a large, foreboding castle in an utterly decimated world.

He stood and stared, expression blank, soul withered.

Thousands of corpses littered the ground. And that was just this field.

The hounds of assassins who had brought them down lay here as well, the light in their eyes dying as the sun turned the sky a deep orange, a feeling never expressed in words.

He took a step and slipped off his robe.

His hands started undoing the buttons on his shirt.

As his hands worked, he thought desperately,'Maybe there was a glitch in the programming. Maybe some survived.' But he knew the odds were too small, one in a number too large to even attempt comprehending.

His shirt was off.

If the world ever moved on and life came back, the new inhabitants would see the remnants as an ugly mystery of the past, a scar on their earth.

HIs shoes.

He began shivering and thought of his mother. Who was killed by the government, which was killed by religion, on and on. How did it begin? This was the inevitable ending, with no reason to it. If he had not been one of the killers, he would have been one of the killed.

His pants were gone, dropped in a neat pile by his feet.

Was either one better than the other in the beginning?

He knew who it was in the end.

He felt the bitter cold gnawing at him, saw the immense drop looming in front of him.

He stepped forward, he fell.

The ground rose to catch him. But it was too late, or maybe too soon.

And as he flailed, withered, and died, the earth beneath him seemed to rise and fall, breathing its last breath.

….

It wasn't him.