We are living in the timeline where Ralph is an immortal and he just keeps spiraling downwards whenever you expect him to die
Mark my words. There will come a time countless eons from now, when the last shreds of civilization in our Universe cling to the dying warmth of the accretion disks around starving black holes, and when the Biblically-accurate Angelic throng of our final descendants will host the lonesome latter years galla night that Poe spoke of. It's actually in one of the many poems that every normal person on Earth quietly forgot about well over a hundred years ago, once they realized that this one had exactly 0 birds harassing old men who have symptoms of complicated grief, but this one got a Rob Zombie shout out and I'm calling it out as prophecy.
On that night, if night is even a meaningful concept for those creatures molded from living light and shadow, they will watch the timeless play of their ancestors. In a single moment that stretches on eternally in the single perception of that unspeakable multitude, the tragic, Absurdist comedy of man will play out from its beginning on the forever-lost highland plains of East Africa, to its inevitable, dreaded end in the darkness of a space-time expanse stretched taught enough to snap.
In that last, age-enduring instant before the consciousness of whatever passes for the last man goes dark, the audience will hear a rustling sound. A shrill little chirping song. In that darkness beyond darkness, where instantaneous photons born from the mathematical equations governing the vacuum bring the only sparks of effectively non-existent light, he cannot be seen. Really, he should not be heard either, not here in this place where only a few true atoms float through each cubic mile of that sea of frothing nothing, but the Angels born from the children of men can hear. The modern Tithonus, Ethan Ralph, waits somewhere out there in this void that was once a place, turned by the endless march of time into eternity's only drug-addled, lard-ass cricket.
Someday, the Uncertainty Principle suggests that a pair of particles will form that lack any net energy and can therefore exist for a length of time that can fairly be called time, and in another brief, eternal moment, their existence will cascade into the birth of a new world. Even with their million-billion eyes glowing in colors ever changing, the Angels born from bittersweet melancholy and desperate longing for a time forever gone cannot see past the veil into that brilliant world of light and life. They cannot see because they, creatures of longing and hopeless immortality, have no place there. Their physical being may never be extinguished, but their single soul is still no god. They can survive in perfect isolation and sensory deprivation for far longer than simple eons, but eventually there comes a point where any thinking creature will find itself too far gone from the world's shores, forget all that separates it from the undifferentiated here and now, and descend into the torpor of the Second Death, where the loss of memory leads to the loss of all hopes no matter how forlorn. The extremity of near-perfect vacuum falls, extinguishing the last embers of intellect first, then closing once and for all the doors of perception.
The Ethan cricket sees, however. He sees into the only true forever, the endless span of his own life. Already without thought, he cannot die in that soul-rending night.
In the last moment of the play, the Angels catch what might not be a true glimpse of that shadowy, diminutive form. They lean in closer, curious now, chasing away their fear of the fate they have chosen in order to feel some hope that they are wrong. Alas, they are not. The shadow has features now that they're closer. It is standing on two legs, a stance unknown to the natural orthopterans whose shape draws from its ethereal form. Low down, the bulge can be seen, a tiny wasteland of dangling, insectoid fat stretching from the abdomen and masking entirely the place where the beast's singing legs should be seen to meet its body.
The tragedy of both man and Tithonus is over now, but its inspiration still drifts between the corpses of the stars, and will forever do so. In a world no longer a world, where the gnawing worm of the grave has been swallowed up whole and alive by the march of something that can only be called "technology" by frail analogy, something else must burn the cities of the future, tear down its kingdoms, and show the Angels the true face of the divine.
All hail the Conqueror Gunt, who is also a cricket now because the Tithonus myth makes me feel a certain way, and I like that.