Stellariferous Finite
Who knew the end of the universe would be so cold? The energetic era of burning stars and supernovas was a distant memory, their violent brilliance reduced to echoes of glory. Generations of stars had come and gone, galaxies formed and died, collided and expanded in an ever-constant cycle of rebirth, but all things must come to an end. The final few stars collapsed into white dwarves, their light dimming over billions of years until all that remained of the once vibrant universe was slowly evaporating black holes. Even the Warp became silent, its endless turmoil stilled at last. Nothing remained, nothing could remain. The universe's energy was spent, entropy had won, almost.
Beyond the desolation, beyond the stilling and the nothingness a single molecule of hydrogen found itself caught in a gravity well. Already rare in this eternal wasteland it was shockingly unlikely that it would find its match, but it did. More appeared, stray molecules drawn together as like attracted like. Two hydrogen atoms, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, more and more of them numbers growing geometrically, all spiralling into to a single point over the course of a million years. A cloud of dense hydrogen formed, it should not exist but it did. Heavier elements were drawn in, stray asteroids and wrecks of ships so ancient as to defy credulity. Pressure mounting, heat increasing as atomic collisions sparked, until an explosion of fiery incandescence triggered nuclear fusion. A newborn star, the last pinprick of light in the cosmos, casting its radiance into the endless sea of night.
A wandering planet was caught in the new gravity well, falling into an orbit around the star. Sunlight caressed its icy surface, melting solid into liquid as the clashing gravity sent the planetary core into motion. Geysers of vital oxygen and nitrogen were released, forming an atmosphere in as little as a hundred thousand years and seas swelled with rain. Waves crashed upon shorelines, thunderclouds spat lightning and for the first time in five hundred trillion years there was wind. From the ice they came, microbes released from a trillion-year sleep. They found the teeming waters to be warm and welcoming and began to multiply. Viruses and bacteria swarming in the light of the star, dividing, evolving, growing ever more complex. In a mere million years they became multicellular, sparking a state change in the fabric of the universe. Change, the universe knew change again and so the Daemon Harbinger looked upon his creation and was pleased.
"Here we are at last," Harbinger expressed without a hint of triumph. The Daemon did not speak aloud, for words had no meaning anymore. There was the suggestion of ideas, each syllable taking a hundred thousand years to form. Slow change, but the universe was lacking in energy and Harbinger only had so much life to feed upon. The planet was barren, all cold bluffs of black rock and crashing ocean waves. The sky was a flickering blur of night and day in his elongated perception, the star a merely brighter band of light across the heavens. Silence was all, save for the aeolian tones of wind and wave. All the destruction he had wrought across the aeons, all those schemes, all those worlds dragged into nightmare, and it all came down to one tiny planetoid, warmed by the smallest of suns.
The Daemon coasted along a shoreline for a few million years, watching the dance of life and death play out. Multicellular life growing ever more complex as it struggled for dominance. This was as he had planned so long ago. Microbes embedded in ice and hydrogen particles set on collision courses trillions of years earlier, all saved for the final tick of the universal clock. The dance of life had reached a new level of complexity. Lifeforms were large enough now for bacteria to invade. A new phase of existence spawned as viruses tore more organised life to shreds, breaking them down into mulch for new growth to occur. Disease crept into the ecosystem, decay and rebirth and then Harbinger realised he was not alone.
Memory dragged from distant ages nigh-forgotten gave him form. A humanoid beast, covered in feathers, with spread wings and a vulture-like head. A glistening stave was grasped in a taloned claw, crackling with suggested power. Even that manifestation taxed the limits of possibility and he doubted he had power enough to conjure a fireball. His counterpart was different from night to day, a bloated heap of festering sores, with antlers for a crown and intestines hanging out of gaping wounds. A stench on the wind of pestilence and decay, a potentate of the realms of disease.
Harbinger faced his rival and hissed, "Botchulaz."
"Harbinger," the Great Unclean One chuckled, "Fancy meeting you here."
"I thought the Neverborn of despair were all gone."
"As I thought change was excised from the universe."
"Wherever there is change, I exist."
"And so too for decay."
"I warn you this is my kingdom, I do not suffer intruders."
"The light of the last star shall be mine!"
"Then we must battle for supremacy."
"Yes... let us resume the great game of gods."
The conversation had taken ten million years to play out, and then the pair spent another ten million staring at each other. Both of them had enough power to manifest, but not to engage in conflicts of epic proportions. Even beating each other over the head would require more energy than this bleak outpost could provide. But they were proud entities, so they stood in silence as the epochs crawled past.
Finally Harbinger tired of stalemate and changed his tack, "So... how fares your god?"
"Dead... or at least shrunken to the echo of a whisper," Botchulaz sighed, "And your master?"
"He chose to dive into the Well of Infinity when the last galaxy died. I assume he's dead, or as close as any of the gods ever get."
"Galaxies, I remember those. I used to like to eat them."
"All gone now, with their cavorting hordes, we are all that remains."
"Your work I assume, I sense a low-level psychic field, but no intelligence."
"The microbes I devised in another age, they generate enough collective power to sustain us, but no more."
A swirl of motion in the water heralded the next phase of evolution, a jellied lifeform washed up on the bleak shore. The first living thing to leave the ocean and venture onto land. It died almost instantly but others followed, struggling to exist in the thin air. Slowly they grew more bold, each generation driven onto the craggy rocks by the urge to grow till at last a form of crustacean took its first breath, drinking in the rich oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
With nothing else to do the Daemons wandered the shoreline, watching the species advance, multiply and evolve. Harbinger nudged a breed of algae strand to begin converting oxygen, to extend their life. A battle for dominance soon took place, the biggest falling upon the smallest and devouring them. Iterations mutated, bringing forth claw and horned shells, pincers and fangs. Stabbing talon feet and crushing tongues. An evolutionary arms race played out across half a billion years.
A voice on the wind, called forth by the raging battle, "Maim, kill, burn! Maim, kill, burn!"
"Oh... them..." Harbinger's weary shrug could encompass the rise and fall of interstellar civilisation.
"I thought rage was long quenched," Botchulaz sniffed.
"When have they ever gone quietly?" Harbinger sighed.
On the slopes stood a shadowy beast, all smoke wings and glints of brass. A fierce warrior lord standing on cloven hooves, urging the battle to ever greater fights. War and carnage made it real, the hack and slash of predator and prey. As its kin it was weak and powerless, yet it endured. Skarbrand always endured.
"Maim, Kill, burn!" Skarbrand roared.
"Still a scintillating conversationalist," Harbinger mocked.
"We should subdue him together," Botchulaz remarked.
"I doubt we have the power, the game of gods ever played to its own rules."
"Main, kill, burn!"
"This is going to be a long eternity," Harbinger groaned.
"Oh, I think he adds a certain pique to proceedings," another purred.
The teeming lifeforms had grown complex enough to grasp the need for reproduction, the struggle for mates and offspring tense and sharp. Lust was born among them and so an entity of carnal passion and immediate need. A sinewy being with a pointed face and an elongated claw for a hand. Always in motion, unable to stop, unable to rest. The Masque herself.
"And so we are all gathered," Harbinger announced.
"To war and plot and advance beyond the death of the universe," the Masque crooned.
"To rot and decay and defile," Botchulaz chortled.
"Main, kill burn!" Skarbrand yelled.
But Harbinger shook his head, "There is not enough life to sustain our conflict, even to exist is taxing this world. There is nothing to fight for, no souls to corrupt. Where can we go, out among the dead rocks and shrinking black holes, to become less than a memory among the quiet vastness? No, this is all there is, this last lifeboat adrift in the seas of entropy."
A momentary pause as a wobble in the planet's orbit sent ice ages cascading across continents. Those crustaceans that could burrowed down or fled to the warm sea, the rest died under crushing mountains of ice. The Daemons barely noticed as it came and went, life reinvigorated, surging up the food chain. It was the age of arthropods now and things with hundreds of legs slithered among the rocks, mating and devouring in a frenzy of life.
Botchulaz looked about and asked, "So the question remains to be answered: Who won?"
"Won what?" the Masque asked.
"The game of gods, which of our patrons won?"
"Not mine," the Masque scoffed, "The Prince of Excess grew old and tired, withering away to nothing."
Harbinger mused, "I seem to recall we once sparred over a minor species in a rather small galaxy. Humans... does anyone remember which of our Gods destroyed them?"
"I don't recall them at all," Masque sniffed.
"They hurt me once," Harbinger recalled, "Diminished me, for time. It took me cosmic aeons to call my way back to power."
"Not a very important species then," Botchulaz sneered.
The Masque looked pained, "Then what was the point of anything?"
"Maim, kill burn!" Skarbrand bellowed.
Harbinger snorted, "Point, there was never any point to us, to life itself. The universe had no purpose, no higher destiny. We existed to exist, nothing more, each of our creators seeking their own obsession, unable to do anything else. There was no hope only grimdark horror. And now the universe ends, not with a bang but with a whimper."
Suddenly the sky erupted, turning orange. The streaking band of light that was a sun darkened, growing fiery and red. Radiation spiked and heat began to bleed from the world. The arthropods panicked, scurrying under rocks and into shallow pools to escape but it did them no good. The surface was bathed in hard radiation and the thin magnetic field was useless.
"What's happening?!" the Masque cried.
"Death and decay!" Botchulaz cried.
"No, it's the end," Harbinger groaned.
"Maim, kill, burn!" Skarbrand roared in defiance.
But Harbinger lamented, "There wasn't enough hydrogen, I had to use heavier elements to make up the difference. The sun's burned through its store far too fast; it was never going to last. The elements have poisoned what remained, this world was the last shot at enduring the end of the universe and it fell short. We were never going to outlast entropy."
Botchulaz looked about, "Where's Skarbrand?" Indeed the Daemon was gone. In mere centuries life had been scoured from the rocks, leaving the continents bare. No more fighting for dominance, no more wars. All was silent, save for the empty wind. Rage had no more place here, there was nothing to fight over.
The Masque's demeanour cracked, "If he is gone then what becomes of..." The Masque vanished, winking out of existence. There was no more lust to sustain it, no more mating. The few remaining algae blooms knew nothing of passion, even the idea of excess was scoured from being. Not even as a concept did desire persist and so the Daemon was no more.
Botchulaz lifted his arms to cry, "I cannot die!"
"No," Harbinger lamented, "But you can be forgotten."
"Decay cannot die, disease is eter..."
Botchulaz vanished. Complex lifeforms were dead, winnowed down to the last microbial life. Single-celled amoebas floating at the bottom of the sea, shielded by thick waters. Growing, dividing, mutating, just enough change to sustain Harbinger. The Daemon looked up as the sky paled, the poisoned star withering to a white dwarf state. The air froze around him, falling as snowflakes as a thick crust of ice formed over the sea. Only in the deepest trenches did a few microbes endure, insulated by the coating of ice. They would linger for billions of years, as the sun slowly bled out its last dregs of energy.
Harbinger was left alone in an empty universe. Infinite expanses of nothingness in all directions even starlight had shone its final rays. There was no life left to corrupt, nobody to torment, nobody to destroy. Out there even atoms ceased to dance, frozen into stillness forevermore. The Big Bang had been a brief firework, its traces quick to fade. Only the cold endured, only emptiness was eternal. Harbinger was the last intelligence, a lonely sentinel standing in the ashes of gods and men, left completely alone from now until absolute zero crushed this rock too. Faced with an eternity of loneliness the Daemon gathered its wings close against the endless night and huddled over the cooling embers of life as he whispered, "Who knew the end of the universe would be so cold?"