Tears at the Maze's Edge (With Short Story)

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TEARS AT THE MAZE’S EDGE
By P.V. Tims

Even in these latter days of sultry ruination, the Maze was beautiful: each sector illuminated in a specific and lovely hue befitting its essential character; each building a temple to its own exquisite design. And I had been privileged to see so, so much of it, from the Stained Glass Halls of Ether Town to the lusciously appointed villas of the Great Centre. By the Ancestors, the wonders I’d witnessed walking these endless, polychromatic corridors!
But the Maze’s beauty was the beauty of a cemetery; of a polished skull; of clean, long-standing doom. The rivers that once flowed here were dry; the plants that once grew here were dead; the people who once thrived here were reduced to savages or skeletons. Something had killed the Maze and even the High Puzzlemaker, whose magnificent design had wrought it, could not prevent its collapse. So I was leaving. I was solving the Maze backwards: aiming for the edge instead of the Great Centre. The grand experiment in labyrinthine living was over and I would be the one to walk into the outside world and announce its termination.
Oh, the hubris! “What fools these mortals be!” as our old friend Shakespeare would have it! You see, today I reached the end of the Maze, and understood at last what killed it. I stood at its rim and looked out, not to a world beyond, but only on empty, desolate space. The Maze had covered the planet. Our masterminds and architects had built ever outward, enlarging upon utopia until it covered all that was. But nothing can exist in isolation and the Maze had crushed the ecosystems and external forces that had both necessitated and nourished it.
I collapsed, at last, to my knees. I knew I would soon have to turn inwards; to solve the Maze and bring the ill tidings to its capitals and colonies. If we were to survive, as a people, we would first have to confront our terrible crime; our act of planetary vandalism. For now, however, there was time to kneel. To kneel, and to shed tears at the Maze’s edge.

If you liked this short story, you can find longer examples, edited and collected by actual. proper publishers in my first collection, Small Infinities, available at https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/fiction/item/4320-small-infinities
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