Endgame
Endgame
--he felt wretched; no sleep for days, no food, not enough, nothing left...but he kept going, desperate now, delirious and terrified. Was this the end of the world? This was the end of time itself, not just the world...
It occurred to him that he might be walking in circles. It occurred to him that this, this was infinitely worse than any of the horrors he'd imagined would end his life; worse than the promise of hell, worse than the fear of a sudden stop-- worse than that haunting question, but what will happen to me, when I die, when there's no consciousness in my mind anymore? What will happen to me?
This was knowing you were lost, knowing that you'd not only never wake up again, you'd never gone to sleep, you'd never been born in the first place, so you hadn't even died. Simply ripped out of existence, no longer real, no longer part of anyone's memories, of time itself.
You had no history.
You were an impossibility.
You were utterly, utterly alone.
What of the others? Had they made it out okay? Had there ever been others? Had there ever been a him? Who was he?
Who was I?
And why had he been brought here? The circles got smaller and smaller as he walked, stumbling, weary, weakening, going from one end of this 'place' to another and back, circling the perimeter as it grew smaller. It was all, he knew, he knew somewhere deep in a terrible, bitter, insane corner of his mind, just a metaphor for the inescapable conclusion building, burning in his brain, starting to take hold of him no matter how his heart broke to deny it.
Concentric spirals, coming to one single point; he shuddered, tried to walk faster, wished desperately for some vague clue, some reminder of what he had been, who he had been, who had been with him in those days.
Who could save him? Could he be saved? He didn't know anymore.
Did time pass here? Was time real? Linear? He wondered about it all in short moments, brief spurts of semi-coherent thought, before the panic would invariably set in again, driving him onward again, making him shiver at the very core of his being as he was reminded that there was something greater at work here, something he was not going to like when he figured it out...
He might once have said, 'whatever'. It would have been far too careless of an answer now.
Stumbling, exhausted, spent-beat-broken, he dropped to his knees in the dust and threw back his head to the sky, eyes wide, unseeing. He knew it. He knew. There was no him. There had never been a him. There was nothing. There was only the all-encompassing nothing that she had brought about by destroying his existence, and by destroying them all.
And the worst part was it was his fault that everyone was gone.
His fault.
It seemed that he might have cried. If he had ever been. If time have ever passed. If anything had ever once begun, that it might end.