[looking for evil, thinking they could trace it; but evil don't look like anything]

“I believe we are lost here. This city, this crumbling world, is everly changing.” She stopped, unable to continue, her friends words made her realize she thought she would feel different upon such an archival moment. “This city is dying!” her friend urges, tugging on her wrists and she turns and grins through ruined teeth. “I want to show you something,” she says and leads her doomed friend into the ruins around them.

They continued onward over landscapes that fought against their feet; above them, what was left of the great sun melted into the atmosphere, the cloud-induced sky. The friends walked for hours, moving deeper into the old land. There was no trace of any others, there were only statues and graves and signs that read, “we are the loyal people;” and after soundless hours, the friend finally stopped walking and sat on the unforgiving ground. Not long after she is joined by the girl and says to her, “this land reminds me of a place I once read about; about and boy and a girl who hopped worlds with an unfortunate guest to witness the timely death of a sick, smart man. And after he was gone, they took his books from his study and believed everything printed. I used to be afraid of the sick man more than the stories in his bindings.” And in her rambling explanation they noticed the rubble beneath them trembling, sending violent shake-waves through their backs and arms and feet.

“Stay with me,” said the girl to her friend, extending her hand, “this is the best part, see, this is the part that sends your brain into a kind of over-work - if you let it. I’ll be here, so let it, ok?” And her friend felt brave and terrified all at once.

The ground trembled, the old and dying earth beneath them crumbled away in a wild frenzy. The air was flooded, overtaken by sounds so loud the friend buried her face in her palms. She wanted to scream and run and die and sing all at once; in a single perilous moment.

"Stay with me,” she heard the girl call out and she does. She took her hand between her own two and began to cry; the dirt kicked up in the air stuck to her cheeks. “Here, we are never alone,” she tells the girl in the dark, her voice suddenly brave and right, “here we can never be left.” And they truly believed in this nonsense remark for the rest of the time it took for them to discover there was no exit in their empty town; no exit from their shaking world in its last hour.