Velspron was always nine. No one knew how, or why, but the fact never stopped being true. It wasn't that he didn't grow, but rather, that he didn't grow up. His body remained a small, childlike thing, its hair soft and its skin unmarked by the hands of time. His hands, the ones that gripped toys and wrote strange symbols in the dirt, never grew longer, never tightened with age.
But the people around him did.
His parents grew old in front of him, their faces slowly bending into wrinkles, their hair fading until it was nothing more than brittle strands. He had to watch them wither, their bodies giving up and betraying them. He couldn't understand it. They were just as human as he was, weren't they? They should've stayed with him, always. But they didn't. His mother's hands trembled as they held him, too tired to comfort him anymore, her voice breaking every time she spoke his name. His father had become more quiet, staring at him for longer than was comfortable, as if he was trying to figure out something he could never know.
But it didn't stop him from looking. Even as they shriveled and decayed, they looked at Velspron the same way they always had, with care. Yet their eyes, their voices, the slow withdrawal of their presence—it gnawed at him. It made him uncomfortable.
They died when Velspron was still nine, right around the same time the world seemed to be dying too. Their deaths came in a kind of quiet surrender, no big scenes, no cries of help or desperate pleas. They just stopped. Their hearts, their lungs, everything they'd held together, fell apart without a sound. Velspron didn't cry. He had no tears for them. They were part of the world he no longer understood, the world that had moved away from him like a train leaving a station he couldn't catch up to.
It wasn't long before the others started leaving too. His friends, who had been full of life, full of laughter, were slowly replaced with empty chairs and rooms that felt colder as each day passed. The air never felt the same without them. No one would sit beside him anymore, no one would laugh about silly things like they used to. He couldn't feel their warmth anymore. He didn't know if they were ever truly gone, or if he was the one who'd lost touch with reality. Either way, he was alone.
But he was still nine.
By the time the world itself began to give up, when the houses rotted and the streets cracked open like dried skin, Velspron was still sitting there, watching the destruction unfold. The sky, which had once been so full of light, had turned into an empty expanse of gray. The sun hadn't set in years, not that it mattered to him. There was no one left to notice. There was no reason to care.
People were just gone, everything was gone. Time had stopped caring.
He had nowhere to go, nothing to do, just his small form in a house that was slowly being eaten by the earth itself. It felt like something was closing in on him, something big and silent, but there was nothing he could hold onto anymore. No one to ask what to do. No one to tell him why it was happening, or how long it would last.
Every now and then, Velspron would wander through the abandoned streets, the decaying buildings, all the places that had once been alive, now just husks. Sometimes he'd find a skeleton, or the remnants of a house. He didn't know why he kept looking. Maybe he was hoping for something. Maybe he just wanted to feel something again. But there was nothing.
No other child. No voices calling his name. No footsteps trailing behind him.
Just silence.
Years, or maybe centuries, went by. He couldn't really tell. All he knew was that he remained. His body stayed the same, as unmarked as it had always been. But the world around him was dying, piece by piece. There was nothing left. Nothing but him.
He had long stopped expecting to hear anything from the outside world. No radio signals. No calls for help. Just empty wind, dead things scattered at his feet. Sometimes, he'd think back to the days when everything was so easy. But the thoughts felt wrong, as if they were memories of someone else's life.
He started talking to himself. It wasn't anything new. It was something he'd done since his mother died, and since his father's voice faded away. It felt strange at first, then became second nature. But even when he did speak, no one ever responded. He hadn't expected them to.
"Where are they?" he would whisper, more to the walls than to anything else.
"Where'd everyone go?" he asked again, voice faint and without hope.
He'd be gone soon. He could feel it. The earth was slowly crumbling away beneath his feet, the wind had stopped carrying sounds, and the once blue sky was nothing but dust. The universe was holding its breath, waiting for the end. He could feel the pull of the dark, pulling at him, pulling at everything. But no one came to save him. He was just there, alone, the only thing left standing before the end.
Then, after a time—how long? Days? Weeks? Months? It didn't matter—the last of humanity was gone. All that was left was the emptiness. He waited. He waited for the world to finally turn cold and dark. For the universe itself to die. He stood in the center of it all, his heart pounding in his chest like a drum, though his chest felt more like stone than flesh.
But it didn't come. It never came. Instead, time itself just... slowed.
The stars in the sky weren't stars anymore. They were just empty points of light, fading. The earth cracked like an old mirror, and pieces of it began to float away, into the void. Yet nothing was moving. Everything was just frozen, waiting.
And still, Velspron remained nine. He wasn't even human anymore. He wasn't anything. The universe was turning against him, and there was no one to talk to. No one to ask if there was still hope, or if it had all been a joke.
The stars winked out. First one. Then another. Then everything.
It was too much. It had been too much for so long. The silence that had haunted him for so long grew deeper, darker. The emptiness pressed in on him until there was nothing left to think, nothing left to feel.
Except the pain.
His body, so small and frozen in time, began to ache. Not from age, not from time. Just... from being. From the weight of a lifetime that wasn't his. From the broken fragments of a world that had died, leaving him here, to rot in place, as the last thing alive.
And then, as if the universe couldn't bear him anymore, it simply broke, and Velspron was the last thing standing, the last thing alive, in a world that wasn't a world anymore.
Time didn't stop. But it didn't matter. There was no one left to care.