The heroes are dead and their capes are burning, and all we can do is watch as they hang her from her own statue. It’s silent. Deathly silent. The world has stopped, but the wind has not. Twelve broken statues, the thirteenth still standing amongst the rubble and the remains. It’s hot, getting hotter. Harder to breathe in the air. The world stands frozen in this moment in time, like countless others, because her feet hang above the smoldering bust of her own head, blood dripping off her toes. I take a picture, hidden in the filth and the rubble. Nobody else is here anymore.

It’s just me and the dead superhero.

And the world she promised to save.

They’ve made a noose from her cape, one that’s twisting and turning, reddening her throat like the hands of the millions that she’s left for dead in her wake, itching to strangle her until she stops moving. But she already has. A long time ago. Otherwise she wouldn’t have let them do this to her. Too proud. Too…too heroic for this.

Yet she’s here like all the rest of them, in this graveyard of superheroes. This isn’t an execution but a statement, because if she’s failed, then what good will fighting do for anyone else? No point in fighting. Not for me. I take another picture, grainy and unfocused. The sound the camera makes is too loud to stay here. I stay hidden and low to the ground, my finger hovering over the digitized files uploading to the network linking everyone still left.

My father loved history, and always said that it’s the ancient who’ve laid the bedrock for the empires that humanity so frequently loves to conjure. The conquests and the genocides and the creations that break the world all come from the people who dwelled in caves and struck stones together to claim they created fire when the gods had taken pity on them and struck the Earth with lightning first. We were arrogant. We had let the gods fight for us, and see where that’s gotten us? Nowhere. More bloodshed. Nothing left. They fight and they trample us, not caring, not knowing—I’m not sure; frankly, I don’t care—about any of us. I swallow, then suckle on the tube snaking into my mouth, filling my throat with warmth and my belly with medicines She would have killed me for ever using. Then I press the button, sending the photos to the network—to the world that’s still here left to watch and see the truth.

She’s dead, and humanity’s newest foundation has been set. The old bedrock has been turned to rubble.

And it’s now time for a new age entirely.

I swallow and stuff the device into my bag and squat, lost in the silence around me, and the host of birds and the flock of ravens that chew through the meat of the corpses that have been left to rot from their obelisks. It stinks. The air here is sickly with rot and disease and the bloody flesh of men and women who stood above the world and demanded our obedience because they are the ones who will save us, and they are Earth’s champions.

I pull off my mask, allowing myself the opportunity to breathe. My shaven scalp now has just enough hair for me to not feel the hot winds skim over it. The scars, though, are still fresh. Disjointed and ugly and ever painful.

I guess now is not the time to speak about pain. We must get ready for the New World.

This Final Frontier in humanity’s final chapter.

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And as if the gods have felt my presence, a sudden silence dawns in the sky above me. The birds do not feed and the fires that crackle and the bodies and buildings and statues that burn no longer make noise. It’s as if something greater has suddenly appeared, and yes, something has. You feel these things in your bones. In your mind and your chest, even your soul. And when I look up through the rubble above me, stitched together by metal rods and rusting rebar, I see her shadow in the sky. The snap of her cape and the billowing length of her hair in the wind. She is watching. Not me. Her back is turned. I do not move, not even risk making a noise. Luckily, my heart has not worked for months now. It will be my smell that alerts her, but with so much death in the wind, I’m safe.

I blend in amongst the corpses. I’m sure that’s all she can smell that’s left of this smoldering country.

The superhero, however, remains in the sky, bringing silence with her as she stares below. At the statues and the newest corpse, and oh, I wish I could see the look on her face—the annoyance, the anger, maybe the sadness that has etched itself into the face of posters that flutter through the winds and fuel the fires burning throughout the city. But I cannot. She doesn’t grant me access to her face. Slowly, she lowers through the sky, and for a moment, I am awestruck, wondering if her feet will touch the ground…but no, she remains above it, now level with the body.

Briefly, her hand grazes a cheek matted in filth and blood, gliding through the corpse’s hair.

It’s then when she pauses, and it’s then when I swallow, that she learns of my existence..

Her head slowly turns, not entirely, but enough for the eyes that millions have come to understand are a sentence that will soon end with nothing but her judgement, no matter your pleas. The glowing blue eyes of a god.

For a moment, I stare into her eye—the one she has granted me to see. She knows I am here.

She is gone before I even register it, a gust of wind and a soft, echoing boom that echoes through the sky. I breathe, watching as the ever-present clouds open in her wake as she vanishes into the distance. I am trembling. I look at my hands, at my rotting fingers, and clench them tightly. Stop it, I command myself, and yet, I do not stop.

The device on my belt crackles softly. “Drone Seventeen, these photos, are you certain that—”

“Yes,” I answer quietly, clutching onto my hands, demanding obedience from my body until my fingers relax and my arm stops shaking so violently that the newest implants within my chest and shoulder and spinal column begin to ache, pushing against the scars. “All-Star is still dead. But, a moment ago, I saw her. Saw Patriot.”

“Ah,” they say, and yes—ah, indeed, because the Age of Capes has come to an end.

And another begins, underneath Her rule, and without our savior.

The world has been saved, She’ll say. Your villains are dead.

As the Old Testament God one said, “Let there be light,” in her stead, her promise will echo throughout the world, resonating through the mass graves that devour continents: “Let there be peace. I demand for nothing less.”

For the first time I can remember, the world is silent, and the torn, bloodied, burnt cloth clutching onto the girl’s throat finally snaps, dropping her body onto the rubble, where she will lie underneath the blistering sunlight.

Waiting, just like any normal human being, to decay into the bloodied soil.

And to think it all began, according to historical records, because of some chewing gum.