Your world is over.

The sun had just gone away, on vacation. The moons had followed it. The oceans stopped moving. The stars stopped turning, until they went out, one by one. Gravity sometimes forgot to work right. Light was slowing down. The roads in your neighborhood stopped leading anywhere. The gas lamps were well fed, and their fires burned, but they stopped lighting anything, and darkness filled the town.

Everyone was freaking out, of course. You were, too. No one knew what was happening, even though it was pretty clear. The world was ending.

Then she showed up.

A creature you'd never seen before, dressed all in yellow, this tall, talking animal. She'd shown up with all the air of a tourist stopping in. Go figure, you know? Life, other intelligent life, life that wasn't of your own kind, finally revealed, and it comes here, when everything's just at its end. You talked to her. Why wouldn't you? What else was there to do as the world ended? Pray? Scream? Run around, headless, panicking, like everyone else? You talked to her.

She didn't seem worried, and that made you less worried.

She asked you about your world as she sat with you. You told her what you could remember. She listened, asked questions, teased out everything about your people, your culture, everything that had been your whole life--everything that was ending. You told her. You tried to ask her about herself, and she gave you simple answers. She was a drifter. She liked spicy food, liked beaches. She said who she was wasn't important. She wanted to learn, she said, while there was still time. To learn all of your stories that she could.

You told her.

Books. History. Legends. Your childhood. Whatever you could think of she consumed with equal relish. You and her hid from the end of the world as you told her what you could, digging up books, recalling old school lessons. Sharing your dwindling food supply. Counting the few remaining stars as you fell asleep together.

That last night--long after nights had stopped meaning anything under the dead, black sky--you and her sat on the hard tiles of the roof, as the town around you burned, as people sacrificed one another, desperate to stave off the end. Chanting, shouting, prayers, crying. You sat with her up there, and watched as the fires darkened, as the screams went out, and you had nothing more to say. You had told her everything you could, and now, now it was too hard to even remember. You watched as familiar streets disappeared, swallowed whole. As landmarks faded away into nothing. As reality erased itself around you, replaced with a dizzy, markless nothing.

Just your street remained when you said it.

"So are we going to die?" you asked.

"Well, death is its own thing," she. She never gave you full answers. She was only interested in yours. You didn't mind, at this point. She wasn't mad with fear. She was calm. It kept you calm. You appreciated it, appreciated her, even if you didn't understand her.

How much longer did you have left? That house. When you were little, you had a crush on the girl there. She had never known. You had grown up together, and she had never known. You had found that waterbloat together, named it, raised it, kept it in her backyard. A crajit ate it when you were both asleep. You and her had cried in that yard, just there, just over there. It was disappearing. Sinking. Fading out of your sight, like an afterimage left by a fire, so quickly forgotten. How much more time did you have?

Minutes. Just minutes.

"I'm really not ready," you said.

"It won't be painful," she said. "You won't notice it, when it reaches you." It comforted you, in its own way, at least.

"You know what's the worst?" you told her.

"Hm?" she said.

"I never got to finish the book I was reading."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," you said. The street below you was gone. There was a quiet, rushing sound overhead, something horrible, heavy, falling, reaching, filling in, about to claim you, that made your spine tingle, made your stomach flutter, made your eyes water. It was here. "I just, I wanted to see where it was going to go. And now I won't? It's a frustrating last thought."

Your last words.

The darkness reached you. The house beneath you disappeared, the tiles, the gravity, the air, everything, everything you had ever known--except you. You and her remained, sitting in the nothing. You couldn't feel anything--wind, direction--what were you even sitting on? You tried to feel panic but it was just so--calm--

"Well," she said. "I can appreciate someone who cares to see a story through."

She took your hand in her weird animal paw, and she lead you--somewhere--in--some direction. You felt movement, a sick vertigo, and felt yourself pass though--something.

That had been two days ago.

Two days you've spent in this--place. She called it the voidwastes--the remains of the countless worlds that had already been destroyed, linked together in a flat plane of ruin. Around you is nothing--gray, gray endlessly, for miles, tens of miles, hundreds of miles--you may have never seen this far before in your entire life and there is nothing to see at all. Above you is nothing--black, bending, twisting, bowing low, always threatening to crush you both. It lowers like thick wax and then flows away, oozing, always just out of reach.

She lives out here, she told you. In this place between worlds. In a ratty camper the two of you barely managed to fit in. Eating the same sandwiches, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that she pulled endlessly out of a bindle. She told you now, about herself, about her world, born from another's end. Its great spires, cities with walls hundreds of feet tall, spiraling towers that reached the limit of the sky, endless fields of gold and deep forests of green, sparkling green waters. A sun and moon, spiraling around one another in a dance overhead, eclipsing one another, their shadows day and night. Stories of people, important, unimportant, who had fought, struggled, and died, in her world. Sometimes you asked her, what now, what was happening now, but she shushed you, and continued to tell you stories. You shushed, and you listened. What else was there to do?

She took you outside again, just a few minutes ago.

She's standing in front of you now, gesturing at the nothing before you.

"I'm sick of sandwiches. Wanna go somewhere and get a bite to eat?"

"Uh," you say, gesturing at the empty world around you.

"Well," she says. "I mean, your story is strong enough we can go somewhere else now."

"My--" you begin to say.

"I mean if you want something fried I know this one world where these dog people make some wonderful street food, fried and sweet. If you want something more serious, well, there's this one city in this one world that has basically anything you can think of--it's expensive but, I mean, that doesn't matter to us, so. Where do you want to go?"