The end.
It was something that had to come eventually, wasn't it? Even after all the joy and suffering, war and peace, trials and tribulations, there still had to be a point where it all stopped. Everything was finite, or so it seemed. All the talk of endless spirals and surpassing infinity - he had never paid too much attention anyway, but it seemed they might be empty words after all.
And for him, the end couldn't come quickly enough.
For untold billions of years he had watched, unable to put a stop to anything, even his own torment. But even as humanity went through its turbulent societal cycles, he managed to find a little peace. Time passed quickly in a universe full of excitement and expansion. From golden age to crumbling ruin, he had been one of the few to see it all, and he could not deny that he had found every moment fascinating. He had traveled far and wide, seeking every novelty he could. From four-dimensional battlegrounds to amethyst rainforests; from palaces the size of continents to worlds of ice and desert, he had traveled and eased the boredom of eternity.
But then, one by one, the stars began to fade.
It was gradual at first. A few worlds cut off from salvation. A sun would burn out here and there. These events went unheeded even by the species they affected. After all, the universe was a very big place.
Soon, entire galaxies were starved of heat and light. The rate of heat death only accelerated. Fear and despair seized the hearts of the masses as their leaders struggled to find a way, a shining path to restoration. But there was none. The achievements of ages were abandoned as civilization descended into panic and barbarism, and the major Spiral realms shrunk, their power stuttering, their systems splintering and shattering.
Unity was abandoned. Lonely planets struggled to survive the decay, isolated from any allies by countless lightyears of growing emptiness. By the present day, humankind itself had been whittled down to a collection of scavenger bands, doing their best to live on by scrabbling for lost technology and supplies. Through the forlorn ruins of their former domain, they hunted, competing for resources like packs of animals.
The great collapse neared its conclusion. A few dim lanterns still hung from the sky, but the Spiral races were all but extinct, and their old glories reduced to crumbling rocks drifting through the quiet end times.
And so it was, that at long last, Viral's death was in sight.
Just like the lost worlds, he remained still, letting fate pull him wherever it would until the final hour. He cast a few thoughts back to his early life. The creator who doomed him to this hell, the man who reforged it into a paradise, and the children of the bright future; their faces came to him one by one. How sad it was that their time had gone, and the time of their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and every generation after, until their perfect world was reduced to this greying corpse.
Viral was suspended in an endless night, an abyss without borders filled with nothing but a few specks of ash. His last act would be to count down until the moment he could finally be released from it all.
But even as hope was eclipsed once and for all, the last stars let out their feeble light, calling him across the all-consuming graveyard.
The universe was not quite dead.