Travelling by the right route, through the emptiest spaces, you can go for days without seeing anything amiss in the world. Anything of a fine enough weave to unravel, anything you would recognize going wrong. Maybe the world is still ending on some microscopic level even there, in the soil, but it takes the weight of your boots just the same. And the river wasn’t safe to drink from even before, so unless you’re a real fool, you’re not going to find out whether it’s even less so now.

Days and nights still tick along the way they’re supposed to. There are fewer birds, the distances they migrate must be full of strange currents and faults, but if you learn to ignore the silence, you could almost believe that nothing at all has changed.

Of course, all it takes is a step down the wrong path, or even what used to be the right one, to crush that daydream. All it takes is some microscopic error for the silence to solidify, trapping your breath and unwary steps in what still looks like ordinary air, but suffocates you like petrified sap. All it takes is a spark, and the doddering, decaying old world might forget that fire is ever supposed to go out. A lurching step too loud, and something might burst onto the path that you could almost recognize as an animal if it didn’t move or scream that way or have so many limbs.

Better to stay where you are. The world will fall apart everywhere eventually, so why go looking for the places where it’s doing so the fastest?