In the darkness of the cramped cabin they can hear the distant booms of everything exploding. They lay on a top bunk, wrapped in each others arms with their faces close together. They are not afraid.
They had not lasted for long after Dereghar went dark. There were only a matter of hours (minutes, seconds) before the barriers broke, and then the secondary barriers. It was most likely they would be consumed by fire. Second-most likely: crushed beneath kilometres of metal and rocks.
“I still think it was worth it,” she says to Jimmy. Her voice is a whisper that still fills this place. Jimmy knows she’s not talking about the elliptical experiment.
The sounds are getting louder.
“Yep,” says Jimmy.
A voice crackles on the radio. It’s Puck, alone in the library.
“You guys..?”
“I’m here, Puck.” Says Jimmy.
“Me too,” saysEmile.
Jimmy and Emile squeeze out from the top bunk. Jimmy grabs the radio. The apocalypse echoes weirdly as it is duplicated by the miniscule delay in transmission. Jimmy and Emile sit on the floor with the radio between them.
“I wish I wasn’t alone,” says Puck.
“You’re not,” say Jimmy and Emile.
Explanation:
Dereghar represents a reality-adjacent Earth in the distant future. In it, humans have been tasked (allegedly by a precursor race) to transform the planet into a prison in an attempt to contain volatile elemental forces.
The existence of Dereghar was retro-causally relayed to me as fiction by someone named Emile. This is a rare example of a character in my stories communicating directly with my first tier reality.
Trivia:
Dereghar (third tier reality) mirrors the purpose of the Sphere (second tier reality), which is to moderate the influence of four primal dragons as they circle the monoliths.
Links:
The Shrine of Insanity 