Endling Severin

Where the endling of any species - the last of its kind - represents a hopeless melancholy, the only survivor of a dying universe carries with them an unimaginable grief.

The instinct to explore, to discover and uncover secret places and truths, is a fundamental aspect of human nature which, on occasion, yields results more significant or fantastical than can be fully understood. The unknown is a beacon, a light that cuts through the fog of the everyday complexities of life and, in some instances, we discover that that light has been tended, fanned from a spark into a flame, by the strangest curators. Likely the most unusual of all was discovered in the Congo basin rainforest, in a cave set deep within a swallet, sometime in the early 1830s, when the subtle psychic entreaties of an entity - who would come to name themselves Endling Severin - drew some explorers to them. The last survivor of a dead universe reaching out for contact with any beings that might have the emotional and intellectual capacity to understand, to some extent, their story.

In their presence Endling Severin appears to be broadly human, despite being something like twelve feet tall and constantly blurred by motion within the too-small space they occupy. I suspect that this is an effect of the same psychic field they reached out with, a projection of something approximating a form that we can comprehend without going completely insane. In much the same way while the language they speak can be understood in person, it becomes an incomprehensible and inconsistent glossolalia if recorded; defying attempts to translate the many and varied cadences of tone and the phonemes that we cannot begin to replicate with our human vocal apparatus. Despite this there is something soothing, almost hypnotic, in listening to these recordings. Some, and it is markedly more prevalent in older listeners, even experience a pleasant and trance-like state in which they dream vividly and in colours they find difficult to describe upon waking.

This is in stark relief to the actual sense of being around Endling Severin, from whom a terrible loneliness and grief emanates. Once part of a technologically advanced species of such a gleeful variance in sexes and genders that it become impractical to enumerate and name them all - which led to a shared singular pronoun - they are the sole survivor of not only their kind, or their world, but of their entire universe. As every atom in their reality burned at the touch of a wave they have only referred to as The Grey Tide, Endling Severin was somehow protected, delivered from annihilation. As everything else died screaming they were bodily expelled from their universe and through the veils between their world and the nothingness between worlds. Insensate and uncomprehending, they fell for an eternity through an endless series of parallel universes that they had had no conception of before being cast out into them.

The speed and force of Endling Severin’s eventual collision with our reality, our Earth, was so tremendous that it echoed, unevenly, back and forth through time. The calamity that forced the dinosaurs to near-total extinction, the 1908 incident in Tunguska, even the impact that broke a piece of the planet off and created our moon, are all the result of this one event. What happened broke all our physical laws of time and space; perhaps because Endling Severin was surrounded by and soaked in a miasma of strange and exotic waves and particles not native to our universe. These utterly alien materials from other universes, carrying the remnants of natural laws not compatible with the basic architecture of our reality, created unprecedented and unrepeated reactions and conflicts. The effects even suggest reactions with forces, fields and laws whose presence we have no science or magic to explain or even to begin to explore.

One of these as-yet only theorised fields is an atemporal collective unconsciousness, a faint psychic web that has no truck with the more concrete forces that observe a causal relationship between action and reaction. Throughout history those with a certain sensitivity to this force, a sensitivity that seems to either appear in or drive people towards art and madness, have seen or felt the ripples of the extrusion of another world into ours. Scripture and science fiction, prophecy and apocalypse, all have seen the imagery and intention of falling stars influenced by the traumatic arrival of Endling Severin. Notable examples are often catastrophised, either by the human fear of the unknown and the other or for dramatic purposes, and range from such disparate results as the falling star Wormwood in the Book of Revelations to the cataclysmic arrival of the invading Martians in HG Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Due to the physical and chronological distance between Endling Severin’s arrival in our universe and the observable consequences, precisely when and where they fell to Earth is historically and geographically obfuscated. It is clear that they have been here for so long that the firmament has been shaped and formed around them, trapping them in a cave they are too massive to escape from. Between an isolation that can most accurately be measured in geological terms and the guilt of surviving the deaths of everyone and everything in their own universe, it is hard for us to imagine how it is that Endling Severin has not gone totally and terribly mad. Perhaps they have, perhaps it is only because they are so damaged or so much reduced by their unimaginable ordeal that we are able to comprehend them at all?

Maybe Endling Severin has become as fractured as the effects of their arrival, only a wan aspect of their complete self? If they know, even if they suspect, it is not information that they have been willing - or, potentially, able - to share. The nature of communing with them, in sharing in the aching sadness and vast emptiness of what they have lost, makes protracted or repeated contact emotionally devastating to sustain. Eventually those who are able to bear being around Endling Severin over extended periods of time will find themselves returning, via a winding and circuitous narrative path, to the same stories over and over and over again. Just as the full force of their collision with Earth, built up during the fall through universes beyond counting, could have destroyed not just our planet but obliterated our universe entirely, its possible that Endling Severin’s total physical and psychic presence could have been similarly, albeit accidentally, apocalyptic.

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