[ WP ] Stories from the end of the world as we know it

Earth was never an end, and when it died we had only begun. The end will arrive at a strange distance in time and space, when the planet Vestige orbits a dying red dwarf and its night sky is empty but for seven stars. The stars will have no names, for the same reason that the farmers of Earth had nameless cattle. 
 
 The heat death of the universe will be a slow and brutal and lonely event. Those that endure the end of things will know that things are ending, and the knowledge will be useless. There will be no final epiphany, no answer for entropy, no magical spark in the darkness. Things will simply cease to be. Something must always become nothing. 
 
 At the edge of time there will only be one way to look. Without a future there is only a past and the conscious beings of Vestige will look up at the seven stars of night and they will remember. Their mothers and fathers told of nights with ten stars, whose parents spoke of twelve and even some that knew thirteen. The annals of Vestige will claim that a hundred fiery orbs still burned over the cosmic horizon when the planet was chosen. And far away through the impossible fields of time a thousand stars once burned - and a million - and a *billion*. Once upon a time in the golden age of existence there were so many stars that they filled the sky and could never be counted. People bathed in stars and painted with them and drew stories across the universe. 
 
 Vestige will look up at its own sky, dark with seven stars, and wonder that such people existed, and whether they reckoned their paradise. 
 
 And a night will come and one of the seven stars will go out. Vestige will weep beneath the passage of time and another star will die and then another until the seven stars of night are dead and the red dwarf of day is dying. The last bits of a consciousness born in furnaces of pressure and time will huddle for warmth and wait for the embers to become the past. 
 
 And *I* will turn to *you* and smile. Not because I'm happy and not because you're special but because we *are*. To be is to have been and consciousness is the formless tide of all remembrance. I will crash upon those shores and I will see the dying sun and I will know that yours was a face beneath a billion stars. We will fade away together, and we will fade laughing, laughing for the paradise that beggared us. 
 
 *** 
 
 I submit this with an apology. It was supposed to be about aliens. 
 

