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And listen.

This is a story of Gotterdammerung. So I have to tell you up front that by the time it’s over there won’t be all that much left. No summoners and no Slurpee Sages. No robots, no alchemists, and no toads.

No more oceans. No more bears and no more Brentwood.

I mean, there won’t be hardly anything left at all.

There’ll be Emily, of course.

She survives it.

There’ll be some cling wrap. And there’s a wolf and a wooden boy.

But there isn’t hardly anything else.

If you go out too far past the cling wrap, you’ll find yourself amidst the howling chaos that is dissolving and devouring the last remaining work of Hans. It is rendering the world that we used to know back down to the seething void.

Take one or two steps from there, if you like, but don’t you go three steps out.

If you do that you’ll be lost.

Now listen.

This isn’t the end of the world. Not the final end, anyway. This isn’t the blank and endless emptiness that we almost had.

Now and then new things come out of the chaos, I mean. Like, there’s that cow. That cow! It’s a new cow. That proves that new things can still be born.

Its horns are sharp, that cow. It sits on a throne of skulls. It’s . . . probably not a very good cow, really, but it’s also the only cow, and maybe it’s even the first cow, so we all try to get along.

And then there’s those snakes. Those silver snakes.

Their tongues are made of paper. I don’t know how they can smell anything. I mean, seriously. That’s pretty flip.

And there’s the trees. They’re pretty sticky. And that staring skull. And maybe —

Just maybe —

There’s still something up there, up there somewhere, in the sky. Maybe there’s still jaguars and the scissors, up there, jaguars and scissors and the Fan Hoeng. Maybe there’s still all the worlds of the endless cosmos, out there, and bits of old light and older dreams. There was a great infinity of space and time once, before the coming of the cleaning man. There could be yet.

It could all still be somewhere out there. It might not have been lost completely.

I . . . just can’t really make any promises.

I just don’t completely know.

<< Prophecy 3: Emily

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