Your world came to an end. This is indisputable. You might have known it was coming, it may have been a sudden surprise, but you know it's ended and gone. You are, in the here and now, in a quaint office. Shelves to your left and right contain books and strange knick-knacks. Beyond a pane of glass a glassy orb sits in a copper stand and swirls with starry light. Beside it a collection of strange angles and colors refuses to resolve itself into an understandable object. Instead the mass of incoherent light and matter makes you feel a deep ache and nausea.
You are looking across a broad wooden desk with a deep blue blotter at a chair, high backed and leather. Behind that chair is an enormous window, blue curtains shutting out whatever view is beyond. You hear a door behind you open and a person enters the room. You feel a slight touch of surprise to see them. They have long and pointed ears, grey hair and crow's feet at the corners of their bright blue eyes. They are wearing a black suit and you can't decide who they look like. Your mind grasps for categories like male, female, elf, human, and it fails to attach any of these to the stranger. You think for a moment they look like any of a dozen of your world's celebrities, but you cannot attach any of those either. They speak.
"I am ever so sorry for the current situation, but on the scale of the infinite these things are unavoidable." You hear them and try to respond but find you cannot. They seem to be able to recognize this. "Ah, I'm sorry. You will not be able to speak or move because, for the moment, you are disembodied. The machinery was only able to recover your mind and soul from the wreckage of your universe."
You feel a deep pang of sadness and they frown, "I agree. It is tragic. We are still, after uncountable years, trying to understand the system we have inherited. Wrecks like yours are a consequence of a design we don't yet understand." They sigh, "But, at least some of you were preserved and can be introduced into a more stable and central dimension." They move around the table and lean against the chair. "Please, I will try and explain."
"Many eons ago, outside of time, a version of me found The Worlds. It had been abandoned, a beautiful design by some creative being or by chance. Infinite worlds tied together and populated with wondrous beings of infinite variety and creativity. Even with an infinite lifespan, that version of my could not have understood and explored the fullness of these worlds and could not fix the flaws they encountered. So they created an infinite number of themselves, and set them the task of understanding and preserving this piece of cosmic art your world was but a fragment of. Most of these worlds, are aware of the nature of the design and our guidance, are populated by magic and can reach each other. But, in an infinite design, this still leaves an infinite number of worlds which are disconnected from magic, from other worlds, from our guidance. These, fringe worlds sometimes, rarely, crash. But that fraction, of a sliver, of a fragment is still an infinity. And your world was one of those."
"There may have been seemingly rational explanations for the end of your world like war, pestilence, cosmic disaster. But the root of all these failures are flaws in the system we have not been able to fix. So, we rescue who we can. And those infinite rescued souls we send to worlds fitting them, in the stable and well-connected core of the pattern. We will be sending you there, to a world of your choice, to a Peregrine Academy where you will learn to live in an entirely new context, a new universe. You will have a new body, new skills, and a chance to experience the kind of full life that every soul in the Infinite Pattern should receive."
They smile, "So then, I'd ask if you were ready but my experience has taught me that refugees never are. Instead, I need you to relax and allow yourself to be drawn through the window to a world of sympathy with your soul. Good fortune to you, wander. I love you."
You feel a sharp sensation of surprise and then they twitch the curtain behind them for just a moment and...
For just a brief moment, but still somehow infinite in length, you see everything. The entire pattern. You feel like you almost understand it, if you could only just...
But before you can follow that thought your awareness fixes on a single world in the shifting infinite pattern you feel a warmth inside yourself, in your soul, and feel yourself being drawn into the pattern to a world of...