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He stares at the wreck of the multiverse before him, and wonders how it came to the choice that he has to make now.
It’s hard to measure time on a multiversal scale, especially having spent most of it in the antivoid, but it has been approximately 333 times the length of a classic true pacifist run if you are tracking through the CENTER, since The Creator left. It has been 33 of those lengths since CORE faded from existence. It has been 3 of those lengths since the Balance of Emotions was forever severed by the death of both brothers.
There is nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide, nothing anyone can do to fix things. Error tried, oh stars how he tried. When things first started to destabilize he treated it like the average Glitch or Virus. He didn’t know better. He thought he could manage. After all, The Creator was only a figurehead, a nuisance, he wasn’t needed... right?
But Error learned, everyone learned. The only one left now is Reaper, and even he is merely a shadow, a glitch, a struggling remnant of shattered code.
The first universe to fall apart was a fringe fellswap universe. Monsters started to fade, their colors there one day and gone the next. Then they started to disappear, code glitching, faded monsters talking in incomprehensible languages and scripts never belonging to them. The first universe was a sign of what was to come, and in its end was the end of everything else.
One by one other fringe universes started to fall, the old, the neglected, the ones only still there by The Creators own will. The things he saw making sure that when those universes Fell they didn’t take down others would haunt him forever. The screams joining the others in the Antivoid in equal and awful anguish.
But here he stands, facing the last of the universes, the CENTER, the Alpha Timeline, the One Before All Others. It too was fading, and soon The Space Where Universes Are Kept would become Empty. Soon it would only be the Void, the Antivoid, and the Nothing.
Error has a choice. He can wait for it to end, standing sentinel over The Last Universe until it too is gone, he can destroy it all now and hope that the shockwave destroys him as well, or The Destroyer can try to follow The Creator outside of the multiverse. He has stood at careful watch at his post for this long, destroying as necessary, keeping the Balance, fighting The Creator for it until he left, but without Ink there is no balance left to keep.
Reaper watches quietly, he is mere fragments of who he used to be, but he still understands the weight of the choice Error has to make. Reaper cannot leave, it’s too late for that, too late for anyone else to be saved at all, but still he watches and waits.
The CENTER shakes.
It’s finally time.
The Destroyer takes one last look around him and casts his magic out, seeking a gap in the code that will reveal the place where his multiverse touches another. Error knows there must be one.
Just as he starts to despair Error feels it. A hairline crack that he can make a portal through. Death nods and leaves him, heading to his final reaping as he opens the portal that will take him from this.
He does not look back.