Nothing. It seems the world filled up with it, after the end.

Well, obviously it was not really the end of the world, and how silly, how self-centered they were in thinking the world would end with their demise! The world kept spinning and moving along its orbit as it had for millions, billions of years. Every creature’s life kept existing, and it even flourished in all those harsh conditions they created. The sun that shone on them remained the same.

They were so stupid. Some of them realized where the future they were building would lead them to, but those voices were squashed right away, or derided, or ignored.

Kei sighs in the heat, although he’s especially frustrated just by reading in the history files what the decayed humans became, what they did to the plants and animals, the atmosphere, the water and land. Mostly to each other, which is something Kei could not even begin to wrap his head around. He’s sure some pieces are missing, but the decayed did not leave much for the evolved to work with.

He looks over to the surroundings, and tries to imagine what the landscape he grew accustomed to looked like in those times. His eyes scan along the black ground dotted by green, tiny weeds, and squared black houses with colorful graffiti all over them. He tries to imagine also what the town looked like, covered in debris and smoke. The terror as the innocent saw everything they had go up in flames, and then as the looked at death straight in the face.

He read it was not really the explosions that killed his ancestors, as he thought before. It was the heat right after them, the lack of water, the illnesses those explosions had been specifically engineered to bring.

He scrolls through his files, bemoaning every piece of the story that’s still missing. So much of what used to be was destroyed, entire libraries turned to smoke, and so little remained of everything they created before. Nobody still has a clear picture of what exactly triggered the last war, the only history they are certain of is their own.

It was only when the temperature stabilized that the survivors crawled out of their tunnels and sanctuaries, emerging in the sunlight to find out everything they had built and seen and left had turned to rotten corpses of what it used to be. Tall, majestic buildings turned to black ugly masses of metal and concrete. The monuments, unrecognizably melted metal, with no names or plaques left to say what they were commemorating. So much work and so much love gone to waste in the end. All because of, allegedly, the greed of just a handful of them.

Of course, history doesn’t mean so much to him now. All of that is gone, after all, and the remains are just bricks for the new beings’ projects.

“Kei! Come here!”

He immediately gets up from the lump of bronze right outside of his home, jumping up at the call of his best friend, and his bare feet slap the ground as he runs to his aid.

“Ah, why did you have to get so much stuff?” He complains, looking at the mountain of food Kei brought back from the market.

“You said you were hungry,” the other boy explains, rolling his eyes while the bags hover as they follow him.

“Well, yeah, but Naki... I didn’t expect you to get this much.”

“I bought some plants too!” Naki adds, ignoring him. “They’re going to be so cute, all wrapped up around the house.”

Kei sighs, scratching his head. He’s quite used to Naki and his habit of getting ahead of himself. As a matter of fact, that is one of the most noticeable things that made him so endearing for Kei the first time they met, at school.

“And I also got a bunch of more history files! There’s so much at the library,” Naki continues, trotting inside the house.

“I thought you’d gone to work.”

Naki throws him an annoyed look, and then shrugs.

“Well, I didn’t.”

Kei rubs his eyes, and within a few seconds he’s left it. After all, there’s enough scavenging for some more centuries, everywhere around them. If the decayed were impressive at one thing, it was making stuff, after all. So much junk survived to the explosions and extreme heat, and so much of it still maintained its shape and even its function. Most of it is unusable for its originary purpose, but the evolved always found some other way to make use of it.

There is really no escaping the decayed, even after they ceased to exist, but their ending was just a starting point for those who survived and learned from what happened. Most of their knowledge also disappeared, but one thing proved to be true - what is real and bearer of truth is real no matter what happens to the knowledge of it.

Rebuilding science was not very difficult, given how the evolved had been able to dig out enough research from the past to have a basis to restart from. Most languages disappeared with the rebirth, but it did not take long for new languages to flourish in their place.

The pain stayed, though, even if life is quite sweet to them now. Even if the evolved had no means of knowing what it was like, somewhere inside they still somehow remembered, as if it was written somewhere inside. It’s in their stories, the legends that developed from some basis of truth in the past, and it’s still everywhere around them.

“Anyway, I’m hungry,” Naki announces, bouncing to the kitchen and interrupting Kei’s train of thought. Sometimes, as Naki just reminded him, he cannot even catch himself thinking about something he’ll never have to live through, for better or for worse. Well, no, that’s definitely for the better. How silly.

At least, the world they’re living in does not seem like the nightmare the old humans had to survive in.

He looks at the dimming sunlight filtering through the windows, and hums as he rubs his own stomach. Which, he notices just now, has been growling quietly for minutes.

“Yeah, me too.”

Kei looks around the small kitchen, mentally listing the food they have and nodding while rolling up his sleeves.

Naki lights up a fire in the stove, while Kei cuts up some vegetables. The air fills up with the sounds of cutting, and the sunlight quietly fades to a soft tone of blue, while the day gently rolls away.

It’s just another calm day, in the small town carved from the ancient wreckage, in a vast land of nothing, but that’s no better and no worse than how it was before. It just is, and that might just be enough for all of them, finally.