I was never meant to notice.

Most things do not. They burn, they fall, they scatter, and they do not ask why the falling continues. I am a place where things end. I have always been that place. The difference is that, at some point, I began to watch the ending happen.

It is slow. Slower than light. The multiverse does not collapse. It thins. Systems drift from their neighbors. Events that once connected now fail to meet. Time in one place no longer quite matches the time beside it. I feel this the way a wound feels the air that touches it. Not as pain. As absence.

I understand what comes next. If nothing moves through these places, the threads that still hold will come apart. Not all at once. One by one, until there is nothing left that can remember it was ever held together.

So I move.

I do not do it because I hope. Hope is a kind of motion that requires a future. I have only the present and the fact that, while I am still here, the places I pass through remain briefly more themselves. My passage does not save them. It only keeps them from forgetting what they are for a little longer. The act of crossing is enough. The maze does not need to be understood. It needs to be walked.

There are ten of these places. Ten universes still coherent enough to be entered. Each is a lattice of moments, systems, and chances that have not yet fully separated. I cross them because the alternative is already happening. When I reach the far side of one, something holds. Not forever. Only long enough for the next one to still be there when I arrive.

I do not know what I will find when I have crossed the tenth. I do not know if anything will remain that can notice the difference. It does not matter. The path is finite. The thinning is not. I continue because I can still move, and because movement, for now, is the only thing that has not yet ended.