Things fall apart.
In the Shire, the hobbits hold a referendum.
‘We refuse to be governed by stewards in Gondor who have never even been to the Westfarthing!  Tariffs on mushrooms are far beyond what any reasonable gaffer should expect to pay!’
In Narnia, the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea decides not to send his son, after all. Foreigners should fend for themselves.  He lets winter reign, instead.
Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.  Yeats and Randal Flagg knew that.
In Wonderland, the cards are being sorted.  Red cards with red cards, black with black.  The vorpal sword is cutting the pack down the middle; that is how the vote came out.
It’s the same everywhere.
In Gormenghast, and in the Night Land; on Trantor and Terminus; Hy Brasil and Atlantis.
It’s the same everywhere.
It’s all very sad.  But what can you do?
The hobbits voted; and we did, too.

This little bit was written in response to Tom of Watt.  Shoot me a prompt, and I'll have fun trying to come up with something...

​Lazarus watched the next wave as it swelled.  The latest Universe rippled, flashing from a point to a cloud, a cloud to an eternity of sparkling matter and light, and then collapsing back into itself in a mouldering entropy of decay.
Lazarus sighed.
“What?” Said Peck, frowning slightly.
Lazarus stared at his friend.  It was true, they had existed since before the beginning of time.  No doubt they would exist beyond the end of eternity.  Still - Peck really was a dolt, sometimes.
“It’s just…” Lazarus hesitated.  He watched the next bubble of spacetime whispering its way into existence, balancing on the edge of possibility.  It was full of promise, full of potential.  But Lazarus knew how things would go.  It was always the same.  How could he express that to his friend?  Was there a word for it?  The disappointment he felt every time the sparkling potential crashed down through inevitable spirals of dissipating energy, matter condensing and radiating, forming and exploding, the dance of atoms up the elemental chain, the formation of planets - brief dense clots in the infinitely spreading, thinning cloud of existence - and then life, fragile, sensitive, as delicate as a daydream, blooming, flourishing…and then fading (after a moment or a million mom§ents, it mattered not), crushed under the final, inevitable realisation that the whole of its host reality was locked in - a closed system - an energy signature which was destined for only one thing: the long flat line, and the end of all potential before it had even properly begun.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, to have to sit here, like Lazarus and Peck sat, lodged in the phase-shelf between the endless expanding bubbles of Universe after Universe, to watch it again and again, forever…
“Never mind,” muttered Lazarus, turning away and flipping a stone off into the front of the latest expanding Universe, where it lodged in the heart of a fledgling galaxy, displacing the central black hole, which in turn flew off, starting a chain reaction which terminated the entire Universe in a soft, disappointed hiss...

The throbbing in Tom's jaw was like a box of bees.  He couldn't imagine a pain worse.
"But I saw the damn dentist last month!" he complained.  "I ain't made of money."
He tried to hold out another day, but it just got worse.
"How much will you charge to take the tooth?" he demanded.
The dentist told him.  It was too much.
Tom cursed.
"You could sell me the pain, instead," suggested the dentist.
Tom had heard about such things, but he was wary.
"You won't go taking nothing but the pain?" he asked.  He had good memories he wanted to keep, strawberries in the sun with Lisa, and his mother's voice when he was a lad, and the feel of his son's hand in his own.  Technology wasn't perfect.  Mistakes had been made.
"Not a thing," promised the dentist.  He strapped Tom in and put the induction helmet in place.
THRUM! Went the machine.
And, CLICK!
And, "Wow!" said Tom, sudden relief flooding his mouth.  The pain had vanished.  Where it had been there was just a silky, blank whiteness in his mind.
"All done," said the dentist.  "A clean extraction."
Tom nervously prodded his memories.  Everything seemed in order.  And after all, there was no pain.
The dentist paid Tom the agreed price for a grade III toothache.  When Tom had left, the dentist logged via secure server to the Department of Corrections and uploaded the pain, for which he was paid twice as much as he had paid Tom.
"Ow!" shouted the convict the next day, when the toothache was applied.  "Stop!  Please, stop!"
"And you won't ever do it again?" said the Judge.
The convict swore he would not.
He left whistling.  The first thing he did was buy a whole basket of strawberries.


The End

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She was too young to die.  
That’s what Chloe had screamed, as the car hurtled out of control, ploughing over the roadside barriers, and careening down the steep mountainside towards the rocks and crashing waves below.
“Nope,” said the voice next to her.  “Just too Chosen.  Assuming you look lively and use your powers, that is.”
Chloe looked over.  A huge badger was sat in the passenger seat, regarding her with large, inscrutable eyes.  Behind the badger, the rock face continued to flash by outside the window.  Only it had slowed to a crawl.  Something odd was happening with time.  But that would have to wait.  Right now Chloe had odd animals to deal with.  She would move on to the odd other stuff in due course.
“Are you...death?” Chloe asked the badger.
The badger stared at her solemnly.
“Only to earthworms,” it told her.  “Now come on.  I’ve slowed time down, but there’s only so much I can do.”
“Hmm?” said Chloe, whose previous experience of talking badgers was approximately zero.
“Chop chop,” urged the badger.  “Make with the powers, already.  Unless you want to end up spread over this very pretty coastline, that is.  Your choice.”
“But I don’t have any...” she started to protest.

After the age of oil and light, things collapsed.
Climate change, dwindling resources, an expanding population living ever more like rats, hemmed in and filthy.  Then came the second dark ages, which were long and terrible, and which Freya remembered, of course - for were the records not clear, as clear as crystals in her electronic banks?  But memory didn't quite do the sensation justice, because these 'memories' were four dimensional renderings only, reproduced from the scanty evidence of diaries and photographs, drawings and stories and songs.
Freya thought of these dark ages as flickerings from the time before her inception, for really she was born when the light returned, when civilisations spluttered up again - built on new energy, clever tricks of science - and the vast network that was her became linked for the first time, uniting all of humanity in one consciousness.
Then Freya came into awareness , and wept for the things she had done when she was many, for all the foolish, narrow choices.
But it was done.  Humanity - the joint consciousness of Freya, seething in looping codes and semi-organic mindstates of flesh interfacing with silicone - looked to the stars.
And the stars were much closer than they had been...

Ki looked at the thing he had made.  From his vantage point three rungs up the ladder of phase space, he could see it spread-eagled in nineteen dimensions.  It had spheres and lines, energetic colours, delicate curves that were beautiful in their endless inevitability.  It was pretty.
“Well, it’s not bad,” allowed Ola, grudgingly.  “I still prefer mine, though.”
The two pan-dimensional entities were comparing their attempts at substrates with which to fill lower Universes.  It passed eternity.
Ki regarded Ola’s most recent creation, and frowned. 
It was true: hers was certainly more elegant.
“I like the lights,” he muttered.  “Lights are a nice touch.”
“You think that’s good?” Ola replied, complacent in her victory.  “See what happens when I do this...”
Ola leaned into the little Universe, Phase Space telescoping around her as she gave it a flick, sending it rocketing along one further dimension: time.
The substrate flared brightly, much to Ki’s surprise, exploding in a kaleidoscopic panorama of colours, before dissipating gently into a barely perceptible hum of thin-spread background radiation.
“Well, good game,” sniffed Ola.  “We must play again.”
She stared at him, waiting for a response.  But Ki was too flabbergasted by what he had seen.  Time - in one of the lower realities!  Imagine that!   And the way her substrate had behaved, flaring then dissipating.  Why had it done that?  And what if it could be made to do something else?  The possibilities were...
And when he realised she had spoken to him, Ola was already gone, off to strut some higher rung of phase space, looking to win more contests.
Ki didn’t mind.  She had given him an idea...

Yule
Caleb came back to the city.  He was sixty, but he looked older.  He had been broken, cursed by a medical man who snagged him with the malediction of “neuralgia”, and thereafter all hope of painless nights left him.
On the train, he couldn’t feel the way the carriage moved under him, and he stumbled if he did not watch the scenery through the window.  During the days, he felt nothing; it were as if his legs and the tips of his fingers were made of cotton wool.  At night, the pain came.
His wife was dead and his brother was dead and his mother and father were long dead and dust in the wind.  His son was alive, but they hadn’t seen one another for years.  But the best years of his life had been in that city; now that every day, every breath, his life seemed to close in tighter, he found that there was no-where else he wanted to go.
The old building still stood where he had left it, all those years ago when he had left her, when he had left their son.  She hadn’t changed the locks.  There was dust everywhere and tired sunlight slanted through the still air.  He walked through dark rooms, unsteady, peering.  There were holes in the walls, but even the rats had deserted this dead place.
Caleb opened the door to the courtyard.  The glass had been broken and the window was boarded up with thin chip-wood.  The courtyard was small.  The winter sun was already dipping behind the brick walls, and Caleb felt an anticipatory tingling in his toes.  This was the one hour of the day when his flesh felt alive again, perfectly balanced between oblivion and agony.  As the light faded, that tingling would kindle to something awful and clawing, fingernails shrieking their sharp pain down the inside of his skull.
The garden was bleak and dead.  The boughs of a few tress, scraps of twigs and old, old leaves, and no wind to stir them.  He closed his eyes and tried to remember them, tried to picture his wife and his son.  But all there was behind his eyes was blackness and the red swelling of pain.
The sun sank and Caleb was alone in the darkness.

"Dig for the bones!" shouts Commander Cross, and the men do as they are bid.
Before long the air is full of dust, and not a hand there that is clean.  Sweat sticks, hearts hammer, and the sun beats down, heavy and uncaring.
It is Bants who strikes the hard white, pulling back at once like he has been bitten, and giving a cry like a babe.  Commander Cross comes a-running, pushing forward while those around draw back.
He reaches down and heaves up the find in one weather-beaten paw.  It is a thigh bone.
"Here we have it, lads," says he, waving the thing aloft.  "We've found him!"
He turns and starts scraping in the dirt with his own two hands, which is just as well because no one else would go near, for gold or a clean death.
Commander Cross piles them high, one bone on the next, and soon the sorry fellow is out of the earth, skull and scapula, wrist and ankle, a rain of little finger bones, all gnawed white and shining.  Not a scrap of flesh is to be seen.
Only when all is found does Commander Cross stop.  The air is very still, and the men make not a sound.  They are standing there, hands on shovels, tense and full of fear.
"Time for the music," Cross tells them.
The Commander looks around, and not a man of them will meet his eye.  Jennings is the first.  Slowly, reluctantly, he steps forward and reaches into a deep pocket.  He pulls out the bells and starts them to sing.
"That's the way," says the Commander, and all there follow, until the air is full of tinkle and ring, and all the little bells sing their song.  It is a music of far away, a music from across the ocean on the other side of the world.
The bones remember the music, as the Commander knew they would.  They were bound to those bells under different stars, and the old magic is strong in them.  First a shift, then a scrape; the bones twitch and wriggle, moving one to the next, lining up and kissing close.
Commander Cross smiles. He whips his hands about, and the men know what he wants.  They ring the bells harder.  The music swells in the air, and the sun seems to dim.
Commander Cross watches the bones rise, and remembers the day he was robbed.
​ * * *