Instantly, a black, star-studded sphere appeared in front of us and swelled to fill the space. In seconds, the two of us were afloat in a starry abyss. Beautiful swaths of colors swirled around in lazy calm; reds, oranges, purples and browns.

"What is this?" I asked. "It's… beautiful."

"It's called a planetary nebula, Genneth." He looked at me. "One of the most poetic facts I ever learned was that all of us are stardust. You, me, everything and everyone, we're all stardust."

Glorious, fiery globes of light appeared overhead, in various sizes and colors. I recognized a golden globe in between a massive blue orb and red one, next to the minuscule white and red spheres. It was a star, and it looked like the Sun.

"Are these… stars?"

"Yes," Suisei nodded, "they are. Stars have lives just like we do. They are born, they live, and they reach old age and fade away and die. Stars are made of gasses and other substances, and the more material they have, the bigger they get and the brighter they burn. They're natural reactors, using nuclear fusion to make their light and heat."

"I know about fusion," I said. "Smaller atoms fuse together to create larger atoms, releasing tremendous energy in the process. The discovery of cheap, reliable cold fusion enabled DAISHU to cut environmental pollution down to almost nothing."

"A star's death is a spectacle to behold," Suisei said. "They explode, and the larger they are, the more powerful the explosion."

The scenery in front of us briefly flickered through a sequence of images displaying the most magnificent assemblages of light and color I'd ever seen.

"Wow…"

We returned back to the slowly moving swirls.

"In those final moments," Suisei said, "stars produce all the chemical elements we find in nature: gold, silver, silicon, and all the rest. The particles float around in the vacuum of space, forming clouds of dust like the ones you see here—a nebula."

The clouds in the middle of the nebula came together, as if being squeezed. Light flared at the core, blowing the particles aside.

"Gravity causes the clouds to condense," Suisei said. "Once enough matter has accrued, the pressure ignites a fusion reaction; a new star is born."

"This is like what I saw in Kléothag's memories," I said.

The clouds of dust settled into orbit around the baby star.

"Over time, the particles condense, forming planets and asteroids."

"Asteroids?"

Suisei looked me in the eye. "Big space rocks."

To emphasize his point, he zoomed in on the fantastic vision, showing boulder-like shapes forming in the thinning chains of orbiting dust.

It was fudging awesome.

A moment of silence passed between us. "You don't know what asteroids are, but the word 'planet' is no trouble?" he asked.

"Planets… those are worlds, right?"

"More or less," Suisei said.

I nodded. "Kléothag mentioned them. I gleaned what they were from His memories."

As we zoomed out, I saw that planets had formed, circling the star.

"Objects crash into one another," Suisei said. "Matter piles up, and things grow."

He pointed out the many asteroids sweeping across the scene. They plunged into the nascent planets, bristling with heat and light.

I gasped softly.

As the smoke and dust cleared, I realized I recognized the shapes left by asteroids' impacts.

"That looks like Cranter Pit."

"Yes," Suisei replied. "When large enough objects crash into even larger ones, they leave impact craters. On a planet like our own, wind, rain, and the shifting continents break down craters over time."

"Yes, that's erosion," I said. "The same thing happens to mountains."

"After several million years," Suisei continued, "the craters begin to fade. I remember my high school physics teacher telling us that twelve million years was the magic number. Past that, craters become more and more difficult to detect."

"So…" I said, "Cranter Pit is a crater," Suddenly, I realized the implication. "Wait…"

Suisei nodded. "You see it, too."

My blood ran cold. "Something crashed into our planet," I said.

Suisei chuckled. "You're worrying for the wrong reason."

"Huh?" I asked. "But… what if it was one of the other Angels? Or worse?"

"It might very well have been," Suisei said. "Or, it could have been a routine meteor impact." He shook his head. "The nature of the impactor isn't what concerns me." He smirked. "Can you figure out what does?"

I opened my mouth, only for Dr. Horosha to interject. "Without plucking it from my mind."

I pursed my lips and spent a moment thinking about it. And then it hit me. I snapped my fingers. "There would be something else in the Night, other than the Moon, wouldn't there."

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"Very good," Suisei said.

"But then… where did it come from?"

"The better question is: where is everything else?" Spreading his arms, Suisei gestured at the glorious mess of debris flitting across the starry night. "If there was one asteroid, surely, there would be others, and you could see them. The largest ones would reflect enough light off the sun that you could see them in the night sky."

"Even if there were no stars?" I asked.

"Especially if there were no stars," he said. "It would be much easier to pick out nearby objects without the backdrop of stars complicating the task of discerning what is moving from what isn't."

I thought back to what Yuta had told me. "But… what does this have to do with space ripping itself apart?"

"Just because your world's human beings knew nothing about stars, that doesn't mean that the Sun was the only star that ever was. Something out in your Night created Cranter Pit, or the craters on the Moon."

"There are craters on the moon?" I asked.

"There are craters on everything," Suisei said. "They're the universe's bullet wounds."

"Hmm… maybe our Night wasn't as empty as it is now?" I asked.

"Yes," Suisei said, though he seemed displeased.

"What's wrong?"

"Though I am by no means an expert, there's one very big, very bad way it could have conceivably happened…"

Suddenly, the celestial wonders swirling around us began to fade. In a couple seconds, all that remained was the core of the newborn star at the center of it all, but even that soon dwindled away, shrinking in size yet increasing in brightness until it and it alone was the only presence in the void: a single point of light twinkling in the dark.

"In the beginning," Suisei said, "or, as close to the beginning as we could get, everything was one. Reality was a single point, impossibly dense, hot, and bright. Then it burst, and matter, energy, space, and time were born—though not in that order."

It was the most magnificent explosion there ever was, or could ever be. Color and light swept out in every direction, inundating everything with their arcing currents.

It made me feel so beautifully small.

"Ever since the Big Bang, space itself seems to have been expanding."

"How is that even possible?" I asked.

"Imagine our three-dimensional reality as the skin of a balloon. Fill the balloon with air, and the surface will stretch. The distance between any two points on the balloon increases as the balloon grows."

The color-filled void changed shape, receding into a spherical surface in an endless white expanse that grew and grew. Swaths of stardust on the sphere condensed into webs and swirls and so much more, until everything became like the starry vistas from Kléothag's memories.

"But… what's making the balloon grow?" I ask.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Suisei said.

I frowned. "How do you know all this stuff?" I asked. "Last I checked, you're not a wyrm."

"I spent a great deal of my teenage years watching all the internet science videos that I could find. The Polovians made damn good science-content. V'kostsé was my favorite."

I snorted in amusement. "That… explains a lot."

"And, with you as the caretaker of my soul," he added, with a smile, "I can recall it all with perfect fidelity."

"So… what does this have to do with my world's starless sky?"

"Assuming your universe's physics are more or less like mine," Suisei said, "space should have continued to expand. Long term, there are three possibilities. In one—the Big Crunch—the expansion of space slows down sufficiently that gravity can eventually overcome it, and pull everything back into a single point. If gravity perfectly cancels out the rate of expansion, the universe will eventually stop growing, and will stay at whatever size it has reached for all time to come."

"And if the expansion doesn't slow down?" I asked, with a gulp.

Suisei, too, swallowed hard. "It… depends on just how fast the expansion gets. But, regardless, one thing is sure to happen—"

"—Let me guess," I said, "the stars vanish?"

"More or less," Suisei said. "Once the expansion passes the speed of light, the light from all sufficiently distant stars will never be able to reach us. Then, with the passage of time, all the nearby stars will fade away and die, leaving us in a post-stelliferous darkness. This is called the heat death of the universe."

To illustrate, Suisei changed our surroundings, showing the distant stars disappearing, one by one. The nearer stars died first. They went off like fireworks, leaving quivering embers that slowly faded as space and time receded into the dark.

"But," Suisei said, "if the expansion is quick enough, something awful happens."

"What? What happens?"

I was hanging off his every word. I imagined this was probably what Andalon felt like when I explained things to her.

"The Big Rip," he said.

Suddenly, we were back to the vista of the yellow star and its cohort of orbiting worlds. The rest of the stars were back in view.

This time, the distant stars simply vanished. It was like a wave of darkness was marching towards us from all sides.

"What's happening?"

"If the expansion is quick enough," Suisei said, "the speed at which any two points of space move away from one another will eventually surpass the speed of light. And once that happens, those two points can never interact with one another ever again. They might as well be in two different universes."

The darkness closed in on us. It was impossibly quick. None of the stars had a chance to burst and fade. They simply vanished.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood stiff.

"Eventually," Suisei said, "every point of the universe moves out of contact with every other point, and the universe…"

The planets ripped apart, scattering into nothingness. There was no debris. Just… nothing.

Waves of silence slammed into us from all sides as everything tore itself apart.

Perfect darkness reigned supreme.

"…ends."

— — —

And then, just like that, we were back in my Main Menu, sitting at opposite sides of the table. I wanted to get a pastry, but I was just too spooked by what I'd seen. I was almost paralyzed with dread.

I could hardly move.

"H-How quickly does this Big Rip thing happen? Did any of your internet videos tell you that?"

"That's the thing…" Suisei said. "Once the stars start disappearing, the end comes within a matter of months."

I chuckled nervously. "Great, so, that… that means Big Rip can't happen to us, right? The starlessness has to be from the other one, when the expansion speeds up, but not too much."

"What makes you say that?" Suisei asked.

"Because if…" I bit my lip, "if it was the Big Rip, we'd all be gone, right? The Night has been starless since I was a kid, and that's a heck of a lot longer than a matter of months!"

Unfortunately, Suisei had a grave look on his face, and it wasn't getting any less serious.

"What's going on?" I asked. "Please… don't tell me that—"

"—Genneth," he said, "by the time the heat death of the universe turned your skies starless, there would be no more stars like your Sun. Everything would be smoldered and dead."

"But we're not smoldered and dead," I said. "Right? Right?"

Suisei shrugged. "As you pointed out, if time is melting, we can no longer assume the present and the future follow as logical consequences of the past. For all we know, the universe might have already ended; it just hasn't caught up to us, yet."

"No wonder Kléothag told us to run…"

Suisei glared at me. "What?"

I let the window into my memory advance, all the way through to the formation of my world and the Hallowed Beast's plea for us to flee.

Suisei made the Bond-sign.

"I'm terrified, Suisei," I said. "It isn't safe here, for any of us. I believe that &alon will come, but I worry: what if she isn't able to run fast enough? She told me that she was already being chased and tormented before she met me. What if the fungus follows us? How are we supposed to evade it? And if you're right about this Big Rip, how are we supposed to do that, Andalon or no? Where do you run when space itself is trying to destroy you, never mind how?"

"Genneth, I think our meeting was fated." Suisei managed a weak smile. "Truly, the Angel works in mysterious ways."

Once again it was my turn to be confused. "What?"

"I have something that can help."

"What? You do?" I asked. "How?"

"Let me show you," he replied.

Then light overtook our surroundings as Suisei's memories came to life.

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