Stolen Drum at the End of the World

The house stood like a monument of ancient memory. It had been used as a convenience store for many years and now, however, it was chattered, and the empty wooden chairs were untidy, the storage room was dark and smoky. The noise of the night wind grew more distantly, the crests of the hills and droughts of the river were more pronounced.

The great doors of the inn opened. The Stolen Drum paused and watched the faces of the man who had been in the chair above him. The large man with a long, thick black beard was on the floor beside the chair and the others were on the grass near the river. The young man was in the chair, and there was nothing on his face.

“My name,” said the young man, trying to see his name. “It’s the one I was speaking about, the one you weren’t able to remember. The one who was there at the time when they got him out.”

“That’s exactly the one,” said the elderly man, his voice heavy with the sound of the distant battle of the riders. “He was there, and he was there. He was there, too. He was there. I know.”

He stared at them, flicking his gloved fingers around the area where he sat. “I’m the only one,” he mumbled. “The only one who remembers. The only one who could remember.”

A door opened and, with a clink, the old man’s voice came. “A-a-all right, then,” he muttered, and a little man in the chair above him shivered. “And a word of advice,” he said. “Please don’t mention anything about our past history.” He added, “Be quiet.”

He turned, a bit gingerly, into a small man, and laughed, a little nervously, and then a little again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t understand. But I don’t know. I don’t know what the future is like. I don’t know whether we are going to stay here and wait for the end of the earth, or do we need to go out into the world and find some new place to live?”

He looked at them with eyes deep dark and deep-black. “And I don’t know either. I don’t know what the world meant, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I don’t know anything.”

He said that he would be back in a few hours, that he would be waiting for them in a few days. He looked up at them, the crumpled cloak on his face, and then turned back to the chair and sat up, rubbing his shoulders.

There was a little man in the chair opposite him, and a little girl. She sat up, clinging to him, her mouth dry with her tears.

“It’s the end of the world,” he said. “The end of the world all of us. The end of everything. Just a few days and we should be out of here. The world will end.”

He walked to her, holding her by the sleeve, and paused. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you didn’t understand me.”

[END TRANSMISSION]

Editor’s Notes

Written by AI, using a fiction novels model I trained

Edits

Just paragraph formatting added.

GPT-2 Settings

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