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IGNUS NILSEN – “What do you have there?” he asks in the weary voice of the long-suffering schoolteacher, staring in turn at his colleague and at the bored ten-years-old boy clinging to his arm.

THE AUGUR OF ENTROPONETIC NIHILISM – “A smoothie.”

PERCEPTION (Hearing) [Trivial: success] – Their friend’s voice roars from the other room: “IN THIS ECONOMY?”

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The stars shine bright on Revachol, tonight the bay is warm and clear in the tumultuous beginning of spring; in Steban's room, their light's long journey ends through the narrow high window, splattered onto a drawn curtain, blank energy, lifeless, indistinct, and the bust of Mazov with the star and antlers remain shadowed behind it.

In that moment, on his eleventh coffee and shaken by a profound terror, Ulixes is filled with the knowledge that what he sees is a symbol and that it is true: "Before the end of the year," he says to the wall, trembling, reciting words that do not feel his own, "a choice will be made by all of mankind, as they come united in abandoning this world like they never were in loving it... this is the final failure... pale light already fills the sky."

"Uli go to sleep," calls Steban's voice from under the sheets, then adds, with the tenderness of an old lover of defeat, "this battle has been lost since before we were born, we carry the torch for Elysium as it keeps turning, for the future," and he is wrong.

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In a pale-flooded valley deep into the Samaran taiga, hundreds of kilometres away from the world, the last philosopher kicks a rock and states a profound truth: "I am the loneliest fucker in Elysium."

"So am I," echoes the ghost that follows in his steps, proud and wavering, a cutout of a grandiose book now forgotten, his gaze fixed into the distance as if searching for someone across the grey expanse.

The ebbing and flowing of history laps at their feet with the roar of millennia of human kinship and leaves them both discarded by the side.

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An excerpt from the introduction to Ignus Nilsen's guide to homebrewing, aiming to rework of ethos of classic board games toward a newfound outlook: "Rules," writes the great thinker, "are not dogma. They derive from society and share its burdens; in order to envision a different way of living, it behooves the players to observe the board and reconfigure the terms of their coexistence in it.

Some constants, however, need to be observed for the proper cultivation of inframaterialistic consciousness, chief among them: no girls at the gaming table."

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Ion Rodionov casts aside the comfort of his visions, which have remained unchanged throughout the years, sweet embraces filled with the rigorous inevitability of mankind's failure (this world's remaining days are less than three digits squared), and comes back, dizzy and feverish, to the aching confines of his body.

His comrades are looking out of the window, standing side by side, hands interlinked, and upon seeing them like this, looming against Mirova's pale grey skies as if their trust in this world could buy it time (it won't), Rodionov feels a kind of love.

In seven years Mazov will be dead and disgraced, Nilsen a decade later; tonight, a moment which shall remain forever resplendent in the glory of the pale, Rodionov joins them for dinner, shivering, wrapping himself in their warm talks, in the tenderness of their belief, and he wishes he could shield them from even one grain of sand.

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They agree: what a pity, earlier that night, that a string of lucky rolls had cut through so much of the thrill and drama that Uli had planned for the party's infiltration of the church of evil, where poor Nasteb lay all shivering and tied up for the sacrifice at dawn.

So they go through the climactic scene again, just the two of them at two in the morning when everything is forever quiet, and without the pressure of their friends' joking and heckling it is so much easier for Uli to slip into character and stand behind Steban, sliding down to whisper terrible things in his his ear, sharp things, cruel, bloodied – in a fit of inspiration he runs two fingers up his friend's throat, pulling his chin up as if to bare his neck for the blade, and it's the most beautiful thing he has ever seen (his hands are shaking).

Steban leans into his touch, play-acting stock heroic stoicism but always docile as he lets Uli's hands guide him, lips parted in a restrained gasp; as they wrap the scene, they do not meet each other's eyes.