The End

The antithesis of the multiverse, contained rather than destroyed, and still contained.

What it is

Not a destroyer among others. Where the lesser destroyers shift and writhe, The End moves with purpose, and its form is "a perfect negation of existence, not darkness, which is merely the absence of light, but nothingness, which is the absence of everything" (ch. 1).

What it passes does not simply die. It is retroactively erased, as if it had never been.

What it believes

It states its position rather than arguing it.

• "All resistance ends. All existence ends. This is the immutable truth of the multiverse." (ch. 2)
• "Sentiment, a temporary chemical reaction in finite beings." (ch. 2)

Zero's answer is the thesis of the saga: the strongest force is not destruction but the will to protect what one holds dear (ch. 2).

Where it is

Inside Zero. Zero inverted his own containment and closed it around The End, making a prison that holds "for as long as there is existence" (ch. 2).

It was never killed. It was put somewhere.

Open questions

• Whether the containment can fail. The author's far future notes work from a containment that leaks, though that is a different sealing entirely, of the Ruined God rather than of The End. See ../volumes/far-future.md.
• Whether the world that grew inside Zero's universe is therefore also the cell that holds The End, which no chapter has yet stated either way.