The Dark and the Dust
If it has intelligence, it is malignant. If it has compassion, it does not show it. If it has a name, it is known as oblivion.
Many beings of many worlds gave it names. It was uncaring to all of them.
All Creation falls to it. "Creation," if such a name can be applied to the moment of beginning, or whether "beginning" is truly the right word at all. Some of those in the worlds understood the beginning. Some did not. Some, as the end neared, perhaps understood how the end could not be averted. If they did, it did not care. If it was intelligent, it would have understood that Creation was on borrowed time. It was here to end its life. To tear it apart bit by bit. To, if intelligence existed, laugh. Laugh, in vacuum. Laugh, and still hear an echo.
Intelligence does not seem possible. There was a means of granting consciousness – yet another accident in a multiverse full of little accidents. There was no way to come into contact with it. It, as it was called, was everywhere. It, as it might have called itself, spread. It was anathema to everything those of spirit clamoured for. And It, as the nature of things dictated, went by its existence uncaring.
It did not matter as every universe met the same fate. It did not matter as galaxies drifted further apart, so that those of the worlds would see nothing but darkness in the night. It did not matter as those galaxies themselves began to fall apart, the force of gravity no match for its might. It did not matter how, as the universes approached heat death, that basic particles began to disintegrate, as the gravitational and electromagnetic bonds that bound them collapsed. It did not matter that life and intelligence died long before the multiverse did. None of it mattered at all. It simply was. It simply did. It simply existed. Existed since the beginning, to the end of time, to the point where time itself ran out.
It didn't matter to it at all. But if uncaring of names applied to Creation, of names long forgotten in a history spaning 100 trillion years, perhaps it was still aware.
Perhaps it was aware of the other force of darkness. Dark matter. Dust. Shadows. Sraf. Perhaps it was aware of all those names and more. Perhaps it was aware of the war the Dust fought, as species were elevated to serve them. Perhaps it was aware of many things.
Dark matter was the hidden source of gravity in the universe. It was the hidden knife. It was the greatest destroyer of all. It was the force that some called dark energy.
And it would only be it. Uncaring. Indifferent. Beyond the scope or capacity to possess thought at all.
Long live the Dark.
A/N
...am I a philistine for reading His Dark Materials and asking "okay, if dark matter is the cause of sapient thought in the multiverse, does that mean dark energy has similar magic behind it? 0_0