This month's U3A creative writing challenge. Strangely it is also about event horizons.
I put it into this blog for safe keeping.
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Keira and I often visited a pub in Camden called The World’s End. It truly suited us—a chaotic sanctuary where we immersed ourselves in rich, bitter ale, struggling to be heard above the overwhelming clamour. We both knew things were ending; our conversation was not merely challenging; it felt futile, so we treated those moments as sultry therapy.
Shrouded in half-light and neon slime at one end of the bar, a strobed doorway yawned open. It led to a staircase spiralling down into a place people whispered about with nervous grins. Some claimed it was the Gates of Hell, but we all knew it as the Underworld.
This twilight pulsed beneath the pub’s floorboards, where a growling bass shook ancient London ancestors’ dust loose. Metallic shrieks and overdriven wails seeped up the stairs like smoke, bleeding into the pub above. Below, the air was slick with heat and latex, bodies glistening as they writhed and preened under sickly light. The smell of sweat and solvent clung to every surface.
This wasn’t a club; it was a crucible. The stage—a sacrificial altar—hosted Rammsteinian bands wielding chainsaws, hammers, and scorched welding torches. Tools of construction became instruments of destruction, blasting their frequencies through towering Marshall stacks that could split the earth apart.
I don’t recall how Keira and I first found this. I’m not sure anyone did. One night, a band called The Ten Inch Screws took the stage, their sound so oppressive it felt like drowning in molten steel. Their lyrics—half-snarled, half-screamed—burned into my memory. They sang of a corrupted Earth’s slow demise, the death of reason, and humanity consuming itself in a blind frenzy until only ash remained.
Here’s what I can still recall:
“When logic rots and reason dies,
The earth will choke beneath black skies.
No gods to weep, no saviours born,
Just silence remains when the world is torn.”
Even now, I can hear the echoes from that night. The Underworld wasn’t just a club—it was a warning, a glimpse into the abyss. And we laughed as we danced ever closer to the edge.
And now, the unravelling free verse:
The sky splinters in muted chaos,
light bleeding softly into the void.
Certainty crumbles—
mountains bow, cities sigh,
oceans whisper secrets to ash-laden sky.
Beside you, Keira, this world feels less fragile.
Your hand in mine steadies the tremor
of earth’s final breath.
We stand at the edge of everything,
watching it dissolve,
a quiet defiance against the inevitable.
The end hums softly,
not in fury but in quiet surrender.
Your voice, steady in the fading glow,
anchors me—
a tether on this unravelling ride.
Your warmth burns brighter
than the dimming horizon.
In this twilight, we do not grieve;
we stand still together,
wrapped in the weight of what is and what was.
It is not an end but a becoming,
the last breath of a universe folding into itself.
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