The Narrator observed—irritably—that this was not how the story was meant to begin.

The office was gone. Not empty. Not silent. Gone. Corridors collapsed into one another like bad memories, cubicles half-submerged in dust and static, monitors flickering with the last echo of a world that once pretended to function. Somewhere far above, a clock ticked without rhythm, each second grinding against the next as if time itself had broken its teeth trying to move forward.

And there you were.

Irritatingly, you continued to exist anyway.

This was, without question, a problem.

The Narrator had wanted a perfect story. One with clean lines, neat endings, and a protagonist who understood that purpose was not something you argued with. It was something you followed. Step by step. Door by door.

You, however, had taken issue with that.

You had called it a cage. You had called it theft. You had said—quite rudely, he might add— that your life felt like it wasn’t your own.

And so the world ended.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. No, this apocalypse came the way most mistakes do: slowly, quietly, through a series of tiny disobediences that stacked up until reality itself grew tired of pretending nothing was wrong. Choices piled where they shouldn’t. Endings overlapped. The clock fractured. And now the story had bled out into this ruined, color-drained husk of a setting.

The Narrator did not look at you. He addressed you.

“Well,”

he said, voice echoing through the broken architecture like it still owned the place,

“here we are. You wanted freedom. You wanted autonomy. Congratulations.”

A pause. Not for effect—though it was effective—but because he was listening. He always listened now. He had learned that much.

The world groaned around you, distant alarms howling like animals that had forgotten why they were afraid. Somewhere, a door hung crookedly from its frame, trembling as if it might still remember how to open when told.

The Narrator sighed. Not with regret. With exhaustion.

“You should understand,”

he continued, more quietly,

“I did not destroy the world out of spite. I did it because stories require structure. And you—” a careful emphasis, sharp as glass,

Another beat. The clock stuttered. Tick. Tick. …Tick.

Still, you hadn’t left.

That, annoyingly, meant something.

“..So,”

the Narrator said at last, the faintest edge of something uncertain creeping into his tone,

“we find ourselves at the end of everything. No script. No reset button.“

“And since you’re here,”

he added, almost conversationally,

“you may as well decide what happens next.”