In any city, in any country, go to any mental institution or halfway house you can get yourself to. State at the front desk that you wish to visit someone who calls themselves "The Holder of the End." The worker will freeze. The worker will not look at you. After a moment that will feel much longer than it is, they will stand and beckon you to follow them.
Follow them.
The hallway you walk down will change. This will happen gradually enough that you may not notice at first — the lighting will shift from fluorescent to something dimmer, the floor from linoleum to stone, the walls from painted drywall to something older and less certain. Keep walking. Keep following the worker. Do not look at the doors on either side of the hallway. You will hear things behind those doors: weeping, laughter, the sound of something that is not a human voice attempting to sound like one. Do not stop. Do not look.
If the worker stops walking, do not stop. Continue past them. They have done all they can for you.
You will reach a door at the end of the hallway. It will be wooden. It will have no handle.
Push it open.
The room contains a man. He will be sitting in the center of the room on the floor, cross-legged, with his eyes closed. He is old and he is not old. He has been here longer than the building around him. He has been here longer than the city. He is called the Holder of the End, and he has been waiting, and he will know you are there before you step through the door.
You may ask him one question, and one question only.
Ask him: "What happens when they all come together?"
He will open his eyes.
He will tell you.
I cannot record what he says here. Not because I was told not to — there is no rule against it — but because every time I try, the words will not form. I have tried to write them. I have tried to speak them to a recording device. I have tried to type them. The closest I can come is this: what he describes is not violence. It is not destruction in any conventional sense. It is something that happens to the nature of things — to the rules that make experience possible — and once he has described it, you will not be able to hear thunder or silence or the particular noise a room makes when you've been alone in it too long without understanding exactly what you are hearing.
Do not ask a second question. Do not attempt to leave before he is finished. He will know if you are not listening, and what he does when he knows is worse than what he was describing.
When he is done, he will close his eyes again.
The room will be darker. You will have difficulty finding the door. It is still where it was. Push through it.
The hallway will be as you left it. The sounds behind the doors will have changed to something quieter. The worker will be gone. Follow the hallway back.
The desk worker will not look at you. They will not acknowledge you. Walk out of the building.
On the floor of the room, after you have gone, there will be a small piece of black glass. This is Object 5 of 538. It will remain there until the next Seeker arrives, and the next, and the next, because the Holders are generous and the Objects are meant to be found and the world ends only when they are all found together.
Object 5: a piece of glass that shows you, when you look into it, not your reflection, but the moment you are moving toward.
It must never be taken. It must never come together with the others.
They must never come together.