They continued to stand across from each other at an impasse.

The wind was still, this far out into the world. Some fracture of his brain was busying itself trying to remember if this was how he had imagined the world when he was a kitten – a flat square with an edge – or if he had imagined it as a sphere, a box, a disc, a ribbon.

Or was this even the end of the world? Was this just the end of traversable terrain for him, and the stripe-beast was free to come and go through the Other-side as it pleased?

All of this walking had expended the very last of his energy, and he was now growing tired. He laid his head by his side and closed his eyes as the wispy hands of the end of days began to pull him, up, up and away.

The lives counter went down to 1.