They say that the world ends not with a bang but a whimper, ese.

We often imagine that the end of our world, our life, will come as some big dramatic event. Something loud, catastrophic and explosive. That when our time is up, we will go out with a bang, as they say.

We imagine that something catastrophic will cut our song short. But more often than not, the bang is survivable, it is not the end. We pick up the broken pieces of disaster and start anew.

Societies, relationships, civilizations – they often don’t die in dramatic, cinematic moments. Instead, they erode slowly, quietly, almost unnoticed.

The quiet whimper at the end of the road of a long standing illness. The final small cough of a last breath on a battered old body.

A soul’s song drifting off into the abyss to be forgotten. That is what we truly fear.

You were that BANG in Arcadia, mi amiga Gemini. But as much destruction and devastation you unwittingly caused, Arcadia has kept turning.

We picked ourselves up, dusted off the debris and continued to pave our way.

The tragedy lies in the victims, caught in that explosion. If you listen carefully in the quiet after the explosion, you can still hear them. Calling out, voices crying.

But your bang, Gemini, did not end our world.

It left a survivor, and one voice is enough to sing the song of a thousand who perished. As Night turns his eyes towards you, he ensures that the bang you created will not signal our end.

Only in the silence will that happen.

When the dust settles, and Night exacts his vengeance upon you… and you are left with a choice.

To whimper, or to rise.

I faced my own bang. But where yours was an explosion, mine was an implosion. Not of my own creation, but one that I should have seen coming.

El Mariachi Grande was the bomb to my Red Light District.

He tried to silence me. He tried to implode my world. He took my livelihood, my title, my guitar… my voice. He imploded my life just like you exploded Night’s.

But he did not kill me. He did not kill my spirit.

And that which you don’t kill only comes back stronger.

It rises like a phoenix from the ashes, pissed off and thirsty for vengeance. Your past actions have led you here, staring at your own mortality in the hands of someone that wants to end your world.

You have to choose if you let him.

I have a choice, just like you do. To die as a whimper in the ashes of my past, or to find my voice, rise up and live again.

I choose not to die.

I choose to rise, to fight, to become the bang and not the whimper.

At Ascension, I will become exactly that. Loud, catastrophic and explosive. You will simply be caught in the blast radius, amiga.

And when the dust settles, I will hear your song. Not as a bang, but as a whimper.