She was beautiful, but nobody saw her

She should have been the belle of the ball

Yet none of the men ever looked her way

As if she meant nothing to them at all

She was the shallowest girl in the land

Her mean streak a mile or so wide

Still if they could have seen her looks

Any man would have made her his bride

In the end she became a bitter old maid

She'd lost out to the girls who were kind

Cursing her fate she died alone and unloved

In the land where the men were all blind

There's always that one friend who sticks to the group like a discount sticker on a used book, and who is tolerated by necessity because any removal might leave behind a sticky residue. Among Skye, Keith, and Kim, this was Lames, whose Mom had long admitted to being high when she tried to write "James" on his birth certificate. When Skye, Keith, and Kim came upon the Cube, without hesitation they excluded Lames from the Pact. And they didn't care years later when, at Lames's 89th birthday, he glared bitterly at their youthful bodies. They could wait a little longer.

None admired her soft curves or the thin layer or powder that clung to her face. Always shadowed by her her sister, her light and bright twin. She was all anybody ever saw. Iridescent and radiant, men sang to her and wrote poems of her beauty. Her aloofness, her subtlety. None spared thought for the dark twin. Left in the hollowness of isolation, she had beauty to match but she could not turn to see the rays that shone from the sun. Trapped in a world in which all she felt was the dark. Jeered at as inaccessible and cold none cared to make a light big enough to illuminate her, to let her radiance shine as full as her sisters did. And so invisible she would stay. The dark side of the moon. 

Darkness is descending; red lightning flickers across the sky as if it is bleeding from a million wounds. Boiling ocean waves crash against the jagged, obsidian stone shore. A single figure stands there, mourning the fall of this once beautiful world. Rain starts to fall, and the ground is beginning to tremble as fires rage on the horizon. The fall of Fortran will be quick as the Legions of Blood's dreadnaughts pound the surface of the planet, reducing it to a pockmarked crater. The dark waves are now strangely tinted red.

I jerk awake. This dream means someone survived. Who?