Truly, The End had come.

  Those beings that have glimpsed what lies Beyond have often been overwhelmed by what they saw.  Mindless husks and gibbering lunatics are usually all that remain, their minds in tatters, broken past all repair.  The few who managed to retain their sanity were always tainted, darker than they had been before, and virtually never mentioned their experience.  They were silent because of fear; both for themselves and the very realities they inhabited.  Knowledge can be a difficult burden to bear, and in this case the burden was actually a universe screaming out in agony, imploring them to remain silent lest others learn what they had: that beyond the angled and ordered multiverse, and closer than anyone should be condemned to discover, exists pure and unfathomable madness.  It is the power and uncertainty that lurks beyond the core of the atom.  It’s essence bubbles beneath the “quantum foam” that cosmologists speculate on.  Its effects are distant but omnipresent. 

  This madness, an infinity of total and utter chaos, was masked beneath the name of Azathoth by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in his dreaded Necronomicon.  One excerpt from the tome runs like this:  

“Nothing that has ever been, or is, or is to be would be spared if Azathoth, the mindless chaos Beyond, were to notice.  We exist by chance and feeble luck, for the spaces Beyond are not the spaces we know, and Azathoth is always near.  But It has not yet noticed.  A beetle may be hidden from a hawk though he be only arms length away.  Hidden because he remains quiet and unnoticed.  But lest a leg twitch, or a step be taken, the hawk sees the beetle like a beacon in the night.  It has been noticed.  One day chance and luck will give way, and we will be noticed.  And, like the beetle, we will not even know the end cometh when we are devoured.”

  Azathoh, the devouring nuclear chaos, had noticed.

  It was not like a hawk and a beetle, though.  In this respect the mad Arab had been wrong.  There was no real concept of “prey” or “feeding”.  No, this was more akin to single celled organisms that sense the presence of light.  There is no conscious thought to move toward the light, it simply happens, an instinct, a simple act of physics: a photon lands on a receptor cell and triggers an electrochemical reaction.  And simple actions can have far-reaching consequences, when applied on a macrocosmic scale. 

  The multiverse of ordered space was hidden no longer, and Azathoth flowed in, filling the newfound spaces like pouring rain fills a fresh crack in the sidewalk, or water pressure crushes a submarine due to a tiny fracture in its hull.  But such crude metaphors cannot convey the power, speed, and unexpectedness of Azathoth’s wrath.  The ordered dimensional spaces were simply engulfed as the Chaos expanded.

  It happened in a single point in what some would call Time.  Scientists would call it a quantum leap, or a step function, meaning that the omniverse went from existence to non-existence instantaneously, in less than Planck Time.  If anyone had been able to survive, they would have seen an indescribable cacophony of energy burst upon everything from everywhere, from every direction, from both without and within, all at once.  But even this visible effect would end instantly as the light itself was reduced to subatomic particles and beyond, joining the roiling chaos in endless, random madness.

  Once the last object was destroyed, there was nothing any more.  No form, no substance, no direction, no thought, no life.  Only energy, writhing and dancing purposelessly in an ever-changing fractal expanse. 

  The last object to exist, the final relic of all that had been, would be this living temporal document, the very one these words are appearing in.  It has borne many names through time, but some have called it “De Aequilibritatis Mundi.”  It has recorded these events, culminating in this final chapter.  If someone were to read on to the last words recorded in this quasi-sentient document, they would see the following symbols appear, just before it, and everything else, was annihilated:

  The End.

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