The End of All Things
As all things surely had to, at some stage or other, the universe was coming to its end. All of the gods across all of the pantheons of all of the civilisations of all of the planets in all the reaches of space had known it wouldn’t last forever; nothing ever was made to last these days. The coming apocalypse implied that the same had been true back when the universe was made, but that didn’t fit their grumpily nostalgic narrative and was therefore overlooked.
There had been many theories bandied around by the non-omniscient deities as to how the end would play out; would it be like harvesting the final scrapings of stubborn peanut butter from a frustratingly shaped jar, or plucking the last, sad apple from the tree, or witnessing a psychedelic burst of colours and sounds beyond comprehension? It would have been ripe ground for debate, if only they’d bothered themselves with that sort of thing. Having literally all-knowing colleagues in the mix, who heard such speculation and gave a weak half-smile that landed anywhere between patronisation and pity by way of reply, made everyone a bit too self-conscious to commit to real conversation on the matter.
Thankfully the point was moot, because the theories were mostly wrong anyway. The end, as two of the last remaining deities could see, was in fact a process of watching the stars all go out, one by one, in an ever-shrinking sphere around themselves. That the sphere was definitely shrinking towards them specifically might be taken personally in some circumstances, but it was understandable enough since these two deities were sitting on a metaphysical approximation of a rock, or something that would have appeared that way to certain observers, at the direct centre of the universe.
Most civilisations who had spent enough time looking at the sky, measuring the motions of the planets, trying to hurl themselves away from where all the food, water and entertainment was, and generally not concentrating on the ground at all, had developed scientific theories which concluded that there was no centre to the universe. Every experiment and every theorem and every test that they could devise indicated clearly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the universe had no centre.
But that was silly.
The gods knew that there was a centre for three reasons. The first reason was that some of them were omniscient, so it was their job to know. This answer had never really satisfied the scientists.
The second reason was a simple application of logic: if there was no centre to something as big as the universe big then how could the whole thing be balanced? It would tip about violently at the slightest perturbation and everyone would fall over all the time. It was easy to think that this obvious contradiction would lead to science abandoning the notion, but no. They had a neat trick for that sort of thing. They dug in their heels, looked reason dead in the eye, and declared their result to be ‘counter-intuitive’. In other words, ‘it sounds wrong but it’s right, so shut up’.
The third reason that the gods knew the universe to have a centre was because a lot them lived there. Being at the centre was a pretty good indication of its existence as far as they were concerned, but the scientists were having none of it and the gods gave up trying to change their minds.
Regardless, a centre there was, and at the close of all things it had two beings of divine power situated there, waiting for the end to claim them.
Many of the other gods had already gone. They’d blinked away alongside their people, or the remains of their people, or the ruins of the remains of their people, or the collection of planet bits and stardust where the ruins of the remains of their people used to be. Some gods were very loyal like that, despite not being loyal enough to stop their planets being blown up in the first place. They were a funny bunch.
Some other deities were, presumably, just holing up in a different part of the centre of the universe and enjoying some final moments of solitude. Beings of limitless and extraordinary power could contrive some pretty nifty hiding places out of nowhere when they put their mind to it. They either wanted to experience it alone, or pretend it wasn't happening, or consult their own scripture to make sure that there hadn't been some ghastly misunderstanding before things really got out of hand.
But these two, Juciner and Killeal, were spending it on their rock or cloud, depending on who was observing them, together.
Death was still out there, both of them knew. Death was the one god who still had a lot of work to do. Arguably this was the most work they’d ever had to do, including the time when all the intergalactic flowers across the universe combusted simultaneously for their own complicated reasons. Occasionally, in the distance of the decreasing universe, another star would whump out of existence and the two deities would know that Death was keeping very busy.
The stars didn't actually make a whump sound, per se. The sound would have had to travel across empty space to reach the gods and the rules of the universe, rules of their very own devising, said it couldn't do that. It might have been the end of all things, and there might not have been anyone around to notice, but they couldn't just give up on the correct processes now, right at the end. It just looked like the stars should make a whump sounds when they went out, so Killeal made it for them. Juciner would be able to hear it that way. Juciner was blind, so hearing it was very helpful. They didn't actually need to see or hear anything to know where, what and how things were at any given point in the universe at any given time, but the sounds were still nice to have.
"Do you have any regrets?" Juciner asked Killeal. Whump. Another star gone.
"I don't think I have any big ones." Killeal replied, kicking her legs as they dangled over the edge. "Not like the type my lot used to talk about, anyway. They used to wish that they'd made better use of their larval stage to really get a grip on burrowing, or invested in better wing enhancements to fly higher or further. Those things don't apply to me so much, you know?"
"Yes, I understand what you mean." replied Juciner. As an omniscient being it was their job to know everything, so replying had therefore been a bit redundant, but that wasn't really in the spirit of Killeal's question. The gods preferred to respect these social conventions whenever possible.
"I suppose I could have done with more oceans. They were pretty great.” ruminated Killeal. “Massive, and full of all the sorts of life that didn't really work anywhere else, for various aesthetic reasons, structural concerns, their propensity to inhale their own bodyweight in other organisms every day, that sort of thing."
"The oceans you did have were excellent, I thought. Nothing wrong with them at all, even after all that unpleasantness with your lot's attempts to get into space."
"Oh, yeah. I don't mean to complain about the ones I had. They're the reason I love oceans as much as I do. I'd just like to have had more of them, if I had to change something." clarified Killeal. It wasn't necessary, again on account of the omniscience of her companion, but conversational decorum mattered now more than ever.
"A reasonable position." Juciner assessed. They didn't really know what would constitute an unreasonable regret for a practically omnipotent being. Even omniscience didn't stretch that far. But they knew that what they'd just heard was reasonable. "I think I would have tried harder to teach my people that it really doesn't matter what colour each bin is, as long as they're all different. Changing it every few years really must have added up in terms of wasted brain cycles. There could have been more art, more progress, more sleep; anything would have been better than worrying about the colour of the bins."
Waste wasn't something that had come up much in Killeal's domain. Her followers had never bought into the notions of consumerism, technology or industry, their troubled space program notwithstanding. In fact, their space program was likely troubled all the more by their relative industrial and technological infancy when they gave interstellar travel a good go. It definitely could have withstood a little more thought, a lot more development, and absolutely any amount of non-faulty logic.
"It's a shame our peoples didn't exist at the same time, or within the same solar system, otherwise they might have got along really well. Yours could have used whatever colour bin they wanted and tipped it all into the waiting, non-judgemental mouths of mine."
Juciner smiled. It was a nice thought, even though in their sometimes boundless and sometimes limited wisdom, depending on the parable being taught, they knew that their Tylophytes probably would have tried to immediately capture and clone Killeal's Failures. That wasn't a disparaging name for them, they just happened to be called Failures, pronounced and spelled in such a way as to preserve the meaning of that word across every known language in the universe. They were quite unique in that regard, as well as in the regard of having vestigial floating elbow joints that connected to nothing else in their bodies.
"Alas, it wasn't to be."
Whump. Another star went out. A big one. The dark sky became noticeably darker.
"And my Tylophytes spent year after year finding the perfect colour to encapsulate 'Ceramics, glass and food waste' instead of writing more operas or resolving gum poverty." sighed Juciner. As an all-knowing super-being they had known all along how to arrange matters so that there were enough gums to go around, but simply telling the Tylophytes the answer would have achieved nothing. For some reason, it was important that millions of them suffered through the ravages of untamed gum poverty over thousands of years, and then worked the solution out for themselves, making use of empathy, charity, intellectual debate and other tedious processes. Quite why the suffering was so vital, so irreplaceable and so non-negotiable had slipped Juciner's infinite and infallible mind, but it was definitely necessary. Otherwise it would have been quite cruel to let there exist a world with gum poverty in the first place.
"I don't think we should be committing any more time to regrets." Juciner decided, in no way to distract their mind from considering whether or not they had been a cruel god. "If this is to be the end of everything, and it is, then we should go out with better things on our minds. The things we are proudest to say we did."
Whump.
Their rock, or cloud, or vast, rolling green hill, depending on who was around to visualise it, turned slowly in the centre of the dying universe. If pressed on the matter, and there wasn't really anyone around to do so, they would have said it was getting slowly colder. This is impressive for a metaphysical vacuum, and a testament to how strikingly peculiar things were becoming at the end of the universe, with only a handful of gods and increasingly few physical laws to keep things like the feasibility of temperature in check.
"Things I'm proud of? There are plenty of those." Killeal replied, thinking back through the course of all history. There was a lot of sifting to do, but thankfully a decent chunk could be ignored, since it was the nothingness before the Failures really got themselves organised enough to invent and worship her. "I very much felt good about my miracle of the thousand star canyon. Really turned things around for the ol' Failures, that one."
"Tell me about it, if you don't mind. Miraculous events are something I'll miss greatly, if indeed we are capable of missing things after Death's finished up here." said Juciner. It was odd not to know exactly what was going to happen, and what had happened, and what could be incorrectly speculated to happen, so a miraculous tale would be a welcome distraction.
"Well! Picture the scene." Killeal began. Juciner was already picturing it in exquisite detail, as if they were actually there. In a sense, thanks to their powers of knowledge and their loose adherence to linear time, they sort of were there. "The year was year of their Lord, so year of me, 607. That probably won't mean a lot on its own, but that's what comparing divine calendars is like, I suppose."
Juciner thought about it for a fraction of a second, for the appearance of the thing. 607 in the Failures' year of their Lord Killeal was just after Wednesday lunch time on standard universal sanctity time. It was a time zone of Juciner's own creation which was able to rectify the idea of simultaneity across the whole universe, no matter the relative speeds, quantities of mass, or whether the observer was watching a one minute countdown on their microwave. They chose not to share the information with Killeal, because her narrative would flow perfectly well without it.
"One of my later prophets, Hustup the Unkempt, was having a crisis of faith on account of how I'd refused to interact with her for the better part of three decades. No prayers answered, no inscrutable wisdom imparted, no messages in breakfast, that sort of thing." A nod from Juciner told of their familiarity with the subject matter. "This silent treatment was starting to get to them a bit, and not only because I’d previously talked her ear off at all hours of the day and night about plans for one thing, intentions for another, who should get what affixed to where on their house with which implement and so forth. No, it was mostly because they were having an absolute mare with some apparent non-believers on the other side of a great, deep, broad chasm at the boundary of her nation.
“Hustup's people knew it as The False Mirror, because they could see more land, other people, buildings and such over there, but anyone who walked down to try to find a way across never returned. They concluded, deeply incorrectly, that what they could see was a dangerous reflection of their own civilisation, showing them a demonic vision of what would happen if they succumbed to the evils of enclosed shoes and flying north on a weekend.
“Some decades prior to manifesting the miracle, I'd had enough of all that False Mirror nonsense because it was just a nice canyon with a kind of dangerous river crossing at the bottom, and what they could see on the other side were just some other Failures. Hustup's people could have met and really got along with them, but instead they’d wasted generations on strangely superstitious fears that they’d picked up from goodness only knew where.”
Juciner knew exactly where the superstitions had come from, but didn’t think that the information would be of any comfort to Killeal. Better that she blinked out of existence without losing any more respect for mortals.
“So, being a god of action, I told both Hustup and a prophet from the other side that the canyon was honestly just a split in the land, and that they could cross it quite easily with climbing gear, tents, a raft and some food. Maybe there could be a bridge if they met the folk across the way, and they could trade goods, medicine, knowledge, sports; all the good stuff. Hustup's counterpart, a woman named Rinell, did a great job. It was absolutely stellar work. She convincing her people that the other side was good, safe and desirable. Hustup was unfortunately having a little more bother, so I convinced Rinell’s followers to stand on their edge of the canyon, give a friendly wave, and let their distant neighbours know that everyone could be friends.”
Killeal sighed heavily. Whump. The two sounds weren’t very different this time.
“Of course, that proved to be naïve. Hustup’s spreading of my message had been spot on as far as the existence of other folk went, but she’d not done such fine work in explaining that they meant no harm. The whole ‘dark copies of us from beyond the end of the world’ misconception only got worse when Hustup told her people, who were already terrified of these supposed dopplegangers, that they were ‘beckoning us over to let go of our lives and become like them’.”
Juciner already knew the story. They’d known it for as long as they’d existed, before the story had been played out and before Killeal had wrapped her head around it enough to tell it. Even so, they let out a gasp. It wasn’t performance or patronisation; it was just the nature of a good story about bad decisions.
“That wasn’t quite the message of unity you were attempting to send, was it?”
“No. If anything it made the situation worse. Thankfully, I was able to get a message to the supposed dopplegangers and stop them crossing over. Goodness only knows what would have happened if they’d gone on a walk to say hello.”
Juciner knew what would have happened. It wasn’t pretty. ‘The demons are marching on us’ is not a cry that incites the kinds of behaviour that ends in anything good.
“Naturally, I decided that Hustup was not to be trusted with my divine word any longer. In hindsight I could have told her that, but it felt like any communication was doomed to make things worse, so I totally ignored her instead. She wandered the deserts for a long time trying to find me again; said prayers anywhere that seemed holy, looked for meaning in coincidence, looked for action in inaction, so and so on. It wasn’t a productive time in her life, and I was worrying about other things like what to do about the mountaintops that always looked snowy despite a total of three cloudy days in the previous four centuries.”
“Managing weather systems and distant aesthetics always was the most underappreciated aspect of our work.” sympathised Juciner. Whump. That was another world which didn’t need its weather worried about any longer.
“So we skip many years ahead, and find ourselves on the anniversary of the harrowing greeting across the canyon. The dopplegangers gather there annually to wave at their prospective friends, in the hope that their friendliness will eventually win them over. Hustup’s Failures gather to scare their children away from making the crossing, showing them the works of devilment that lurk on the other side. Hustup herself has finally returned and, it’s fair to say, isn’t doing well. Having my voice taken away from her so suddenly was on the life-changing side for her.”
“I can see it perfectly clearly in my mind.” said Juciner.
“Hustup decided that the reason I had stopped speaking was because of her failure in uniting the Failures, which was the first correct interpretation of my actions that she’d made since long before I let her go. When she screamed this to the fear-mongers at the edge of the canyon it made me sit up and take notice, and when she said that the light of my wisdom would burn away the shadows surrounding the demons of the mirror in the dark? It gave me a wonderful idea.
“The light that shone from the bottom of the canyon was many, many times brighter than I had intended, but I was overexcited. It blazed upwards like a pillar of pure sunlight, it split the ground, it flayed and ablated the edges of the chasm, and it illuminated the dopplegangers as innocent, friendly Failures like any other. Hustup got her miracle, her people stopped being scared, and the dopplegangers could finally stop waving and start selling their enormously overpriced rocks. Three wins in one!”
Whump. It was closer than the last one. Juciner and Killeal looked up in the direction of the sound for a moment. Both of them tried to pretend they hadn’t.
“That’s definitely something of which to be proud. Was the light coming out of the whole canyon?”
“Oh yeah. That thing ran for hundreds of miles, so it was like a whole wall bursting from the ground and raging into the sky. The light of unity, understanding and friendship, they called it.”
“Pity they couldn’t think of a third “u” word to mean friends.” said Juciner.
“It is. Maybe I should have pushed them towards greater works of literary worship until they’d made enough synonyms. Live and learn.” Whump. The remaining time for living and capacity for learning was rather shorter than the turn of phrase tended to bank on. “They created a whole holiday devoted to lights after that event; candles, torches, mirrors near fire. It was a real success.”
“Good thing they didn’t mistake the light for the fires of antagonism or punishment. I saw that a few times.”
“Failures were predisposed to fear and friendship. Insecurity didn’t pose as much of a problem as you might think, hence why Hustup kept going for thirty years while I blanked her.”
Juciner nodded. Omniscience still left room to learn and be surprised somehow.
"A lesser god would have taken that to be unwavering faith. It's probably good that you can see nuances behind those kinds of behaviours."
"Wouldn't want to flatter myself." Killeal said with a smirk. Whump whump. Death had found a binary system. Time was ticking. “So how about you? What’s something you’re proud to have done?”
The cloud, rock, hillside or icy blue glacial river flowing through an endless meadow, depending on the watcher, drifted downwards a little. Down wasn’t a concept which had held much meaning previously, what with the generally isotropic nature of space and its lack of any consensus on how orbits, galaxies and the like should be aligned, but there was something about this drift, the drift at the end of all things, that was definitely in a downward direction; like the broken end of a biscuit sinking slowly but purposefully to the bottom of a cup of freshly brewed tea. Sodden little fragments of the universe’s impossible centre would soon be floating around in the cosmic soup, but at least it wouldn’t have a chance to last for long.
“Hm.” said Juciner as they thought. They weren’t very much used to thinking about things. Knowledge was at the forefront of their mind, on the tip of their tongue, at their fingertips, and generally at the most distant and extreme point of any body part they cared to mention. Introspection of this kind was a new experience, and they took some limited amount of comfort in having been able to try something unfamiliar, even if there wasn’t much time left to practice it. “I’m very much fond of my work on shaping the colour of the sky and the motions of the heavens. They were very culturally relevant for my Tylophytes. And there’s the time I appeared to a young, downtrodden woman. She’d been exiled from her village for the crime of pointing out that storing meats in salt would stop everyone from getting sick.”
“Oh, did you turn up with an animal’s head or make a frozen hedge speak to her or something? They were some of my favourite methods.” asked Killeal.
“Erm, no. I manifested my face from the air and the sky. The swell of the wind was my voice and the fiery light of the sun was my eyes. Pretty sure I arranged some clouds into a nose.”
Killeal shrugged.
“I guess that works too.”
“It worked better than I had intended. Beyond simply comforting the woman and confirming her suspicions about preventable sicknesses, she carried my words back to the village and demanded that they listen. I had to make a few more sky-based appearances in the hours that followed, mostly to stop the braying mob from burying her alive in salt as some kind of ironic punishment for speaking heresy, but the woman’s message got through in the end. There was a great reformation shortly afterwards, which I orchestrated for reasons that I am sure have become quite clear.”
Whump. There would be no more reformations of note.
“If I’d had prophets as good as that young lady then I’d have been tempted by a reformation too.” confirmed Killeal. “Although I did quite like having schisms to try out different styles of worship, to see which rules could be dropped because the world had moved on, that kind of thing.”
“Schisms were certainly a wonderful tool, yes. Globalised communications made them more difficult. Must have been nice to have people who forewent technology in such a grand way.”
Killeal smiled.
“Yep. The Failures were pretty helpful like that. For all the Hustup nonsense, they did alright by me.”
From all around them came a rumbling. It vibrated their rock or cloud or hillside or river through a meadow or twinkling ball of corporeal light, depending on who was looking, and even seemed to shake the fabric of existence. There was no air there at the centre of the universe, because nothing was sufficiently heavy to hold an atmosphere, nor did the gods need to breathe, but even so it felt like the air was shaking, mostly because that's just what the dying moments of the universe were expected to feel like. It wasn't something that Juciner or Killeal saw fit to question, because neither of them had experienced it before, and even Juciner's knowledge of all things hit something of a brick wall when all things ceased to be. They continued along their established path of ignoring the situation.
“How long do you think it'll be until Death gets here?"
Whump, came the direct reply.
"Hard to say.” Juciner added, finding a whump to be less than illuminating. “There don't seem to be very many stars left though, so it seems probable that their supposedly slow march is, on the contrary, rather expeditious."
Silence. It was hard to know how to follow that kind of statement.
"It's almost tempting to try starting a whole new world. See if we could have a quick run through everything again." Killeal finally said. Whump.
"It's not terribly fair to do that to a whole planet's worth of species. We can hardly say 'Oh hi, we sort of made you as a diversion against the incoming tide of oblivion and you don't have long, but worship us and try to be good please' and expect any respect, can we?" replied Juciner, understandably. They had a fairly firm grasp on ethics, both inherently and from experience.
"Why worry about being respected? It's not like they'd have much time to be cruel to one another, so they don't need fear or respect of us to stop it. We can just have a bit of play."
"Rather a cynical attitude towards divinity, don't you think?"
Killeal shrugged.
Whump whump whump. Death was accelerating, if anything. Maybe he'd got his eye in now. His ruthless efficiency had never bothered Juciner in the past, mostly because it hadn't affected her, but now she was a little irked by it.
"Regardless, we'd have to assign them to heaven and hell, and we'd have so little data on the matter that we could hardly justify it to anyone else."
"There'd be no-one to whom to justify it." replied Killeal, really getting into the swing of nihilistic indifference. "And there might well not be a heaven or hell left in a few minutes."
Juciner racked her brain, or what served as the divine equivalent. No information found. It was worrying in a way, as many new things tend to be, but also exciting to be able to try speculating again.
"Maybe they will. Makes the eternal reward line sound a little dishonest, doesn't it?"
"I'm sure they'd forgive us if they were still around to do any forgiving."
Whump. A new star took on the mantle of brightest in the remaining sky. It was also the only one.
"I think we’re out of time even for a quick world.” surmised Juciner. “Well, Killeal, it's been a pleasure to sit and speak with you. If I could have picked anyone with whom to wait for oblivion, I think it would always have been you." they added, their strange dearth of emotion not entirely undermining the sentiment.
"It's definitely been good to have company, and you've always known what to say." she replied.
Whump.
"By my count that's all of them."
"Yeah. None left." Killeal said, in the newfound darkness. There was a shape, ragged-edged and darker than the dark, like absence in motion, barrelling towards them. It flapped in non-existent wind, and carried a scythe that was both invisible and impossible not to see. It moved with an awful lot of awful purpose.
"Hello, old friend. Our turn then?" greeted Juciner. The remaining universe nodded.
"It won't be so bad. I'll catch up with you both in just a few seconds." intoned Death.
"Looking forward to-" Whump.
There had been many theories bandied around by the non-omniscient deities as to how the end would play out; would it be like harvesting the final scrapings of stubborn peanut butter from a frustratingly shaped jar, or plucking the last, sad apple from the tree, or witnessing a psychedelic burst of colours and sounds beyond comprehension? It would have been ripe ground for debate, if only they’d bothered themselves with that sort of thing. Having literally all-knowing colleagues in the mix, who heard such speculation and gave a weak half-smile that landed anywhere between patronisation and pity by way of reply, made everyone a bit too self-conscious to commit to real conversation on the matter.
Thankfully the point was moot, because the theories were mostly wrong anyway. The end, as two of the last remaining deities could see, was in fact a process of watching the stars all go out, one by one, in an ever-shrinking sphere around themselves. That the sphere was definitely shrinking towards them specifically might be taken personally in some circumstances, but it was understandable enough since these two deities were sitting on a metaphysical approximation of a rock, or something that would have appeared that way to certain observers, at the direct centre of the universe.
Most civilisations who had spent enough time looking at the sky, measuring the motions of the planets, trying to hurl themselves away from where all the food, water and entertainment was, and generally not concentrating on the ground at all, had developed scientific theories which concluded that there was no centre to the universe. Every experiment and every theorem and every test that they could devise indicated clearly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the universe had no centre.
But that was silly.
The gods knew that there was a centre for three reasons. The first reason was that some of them were omniscient, so it was their job to know. This answer had never really satisfied the scientists.
The second reason was a simple application of logic: if there was no centre to something as big as the universe big then how could the whole thing be balanced? It would tip about violently at the slightest perturbation and everyone would fall over all the time. It was easy to think that this obvious contradiction would lead to science abandoning the notion, but no. They had a neat trick for that sort of thing. They dug in their heels, looked reason dead in the eye, and declared their result to be ‘counter-intuitive’. In other words, ‘it sounds wrong but it’s right, so shut up’.
The third reason that the gods knew the universe to have a centre was because a lot them lived there. Being at the centre was a pretty good indication of its existence as far as they were concerned, but the scientists were having none of it and the gods gave up trying to change their minds.
Regardless, a centre there was, and at the close of all things it had two beings of divine power situated there, waiting for the end to claim them.
Many of the other gods had already gone. They’d blinked away alongside their people, or the remains of their people, or the ruins of the remains of their people, or the collection of planet bits and stardust where the ruins of the remains of their people used to be. Some gods were very loyal like that, despite not being loyal enough to stop their planets being blown up in the first place. They were a funny bunch.
Some other deities were, presumably, just holing up in a different part of the centre of the universe and enjoying some final moments of solitude. Beings of limitless and extraordinary power could contrive some pretty nifty hiding places out of nowhere when they put their mind to it. They either wanted to experience it alone, or pretend it wasn't happening, or consult their own scripture to make sure that there hadn't been some ghastly misunderstanding before things really got out of hand.
But these two, Juciner and Killeal, were spending it on their rock or cloud, depending on who was observing them, together.
Death was still out there, both of them knew. Death was the one god who still had a lot of work to do. Arguably this was the most work they’d ever had to do, including the time when all the intergalactic flowers across the universe combusted simultaneously for their own complicated reasons. Occasionally, in the distance of the decreasing universe, another star would whump out of existence and the two deities would know that Death was keeping very busy.
The stars didn't actually make a whump sound, per se. The sound would have had to travel across empty space to reach the gods and the rules of the universe, rules of their very own devising, said it couldn't do that. It might have been the end of all things, and there might not have been anyone around to notice, but they couldn't just give up on the correct processes now, right at the end. It just looked like the stars should make a whump sounds when they went out, so Killeal made it for them. Juciner would be able to hear it that way. Juciner was blind, so hearing it was very helpful. They didn't actually need to see or hear anything to know where, what and how things were at any given point in the universe at any given time, but the sounds were still nice to have.
"Do you have any regrets?" Juciner asked Killeal. Whump. Another star gone.
"I don't think I have any big ones." Killeal replied, kicking her legs as they dangled over the edge. "Not like the type my lot used to talk about, anyway. They used to wish that they'd made better use of their larval stage to really get a grip on burrowing, or invested in better wing enhancements to fly higher or further. Those things don't apply to me so much, you know?"
"Yes, I understand what you mean." replied Juciner. As an omniscient being it was their job to know everything, so replying had therefore been a bit redundant, but that wasn't really in the spirit of Killeal's question. The gods preferred to respect these social conventions whenever possible.
"I suppose I could have done with more oceans. They were pretty great.” ruminated Killeal. “Massive, and full of all the sorts of life that didn't really work anywhere else, for various aesthetic reasons, structural concerns, their propensity to inhale their own bodyweight in other organisms every day, that sort of thing."
"The oceans you did have were excellent, I thought. Nothing wrong with them at all, even after all that unpleasantness with your lot's attempts to get into space."
"Oh, yeah. I don't mean to complain about the ones I had. They're the reason I love oceans as much as I do. I'd just like to have had more of them, if I had to change something." clarified Killeal. It wasn't necessary, again on account of the omniscience of her companion, but conversational decorum mattered now more than ever.
"A reasonable position." Juciner assessed. They didn't really know what would constitute an unreasonable regret for a practically omnipotent being. Even omniscience didn't stretch that far. But they knew that what they'd just heard was reasonable. "I think I would have tried harder to teach my people that it really doesn't matter what colour each bin is, as long as they're all different. Changing it every few years really must have added up in terms of wasted brain cycles. There could have been more art, more progress, more sleep; anything would have been better than worrying about the colour of the bins."
Waste wasn't something that had come up much in Killeal's domain. Her followers had never bought into the notions of consumerism, technology or industry, their troubled space program notwithstanding. In fact, their space program was likely troubled all the more by their relative industrial and technological infancy when they gave interstellar travel a good go. It definitely could have withstood a little more thought, a lot more development, and absolutely any amount of non-faulty logic.
"It's a shame our peoples didn't exist at the same time, or within the same solar system, otherwise they might have got along really well. Yours could have used whatever colour bin they wanted and tipped it all into the waiting, non-judgemental mouths of mine."
Juciner smiled. It was a nice thought, even though in their sometimes boundless and sometimes limited wisdom, depending on the parable being taught, they knew that their Tylophytes probably would have tried to immediately capture and clone Killeal's Failures. That wasn't a disparaging name for them, they just happened to be called Failures, pronounced and spelled in such a way as to preserve the meaning of that word across every known language in the universe. They were quite unique in that regard, as well as in the regard of having vestigial floating elbow joints that connected to nothing else in their bodies.
"Alas, it wasn't to be."
Whump. Another star went out. A big one. The dark sky became noticeably darker.
"And my Tylophytes spent year after year finding the perfect colour to encapsulate 'Ceramics, glass and food waste' instead of writing more operas or resolving gum poverty." sighed Juciner. As an all-knowing super-being they had known all along how to arrange matters so that there were enough gums to go around, but simply telling the Tylophytes the answer would have achieved nothing. For some reason, it was important that millions of them suffered through the ravages of untamed gum poverty over thousands of years, and then worked the solution out for themselves, making use of empathy, charity, intellectual debate and other tedious processes. Quite why the suffering was so vital, so irreplaceable and so non-negotiable had slipped Juciner's infinite and infallible mind, but it was definitely necessary. Otherwise it would have been quite cruel to let there exist a world with gum poverty in the first place.
"I don't think we should be committing any more time to regrets." Juciner decided, in no way to distract their mind from considering whether or not they had been a cruel god. "If this is to be the end of everything, and it is, then we should go out with better things on our minds. The things we are proudest to say we did."
Whump.
Their rock, or cloud, or vast, rolling green hill, depending on who was around to visualise it, turned slowly in the centre of the dying universe. If pressed on the matter, and there wasn't really anyone around to do so, they would have said it was getting slowly colder. This is impressive for a metaphysical vacuum, and a testament to how strikingly peculiar things were becoming at the end of the universe, with only a handful of gods and increasingly few physical laws to keep things like the feasibility of temperature in check.
"Things I'm proud of? There are plenty of those." Killeal replied, thinking back through the course of all history. There was a lot of sifting to do, but thankfully a decent chunk could be ignored, since it was the nothingness before the Failures really got themselves organised enough to invent and worship her. "I very much felt good about my miracle of the thousand star canyon. Really turned things around for the ol' Failures, that one."
"Tell me about it, if you don't mind. Miraculous events are something I'll miss greatly, if indeed we are capable of missing things after Death's finished up here." said Juciner. It was odd not to know exactly what was going to happen, and what had happened, and what could be incorrectly speculated to happen, so a miraculous tale would be a welcome distraction.
"Well! Picture the scene." Killeal began. Juciner was already picturing it in exquisite detail, as if they were actually there. In a sense, thanks to their powers of knowledge and their loose adherence to linear time, they sort of were there. "The year was year of their Lord, so year of me, 607. That probably won't mean a lot on its own, but that's what comparing divine calendars is like, I suppose."
Juciner thought about it for a fraction of a second, for the appearance of the thing. 607 in the Failures' year of their Lord Killeal was just after Wednesday lunch time on standard universal sanctity time. It was a time zone of Juciner's own creation which was able to rectify the idea of simultaneity across the whole universe, no matter the relative speeds, quantities of mass, or whether the observer was watching a one minute countdown on their microwave. They chose not to share the information with Killeal, because her narrative would flow perfectly well without it.
"One of my later prophets, Hustup the Unkempt, was having a crisis of faith on account of how I'd refused to interact with her for the better part of three decades. No prayers answered, no inscrutable wisdom imparted, no messages in breakfast, that sort of thing." A nod from Juciner told of their familiarity with the subject matter. "This silent treatment was starting to get to them a bit, and not only because I’d previously talked her ear off at all hours of the day and night about plans for one thing, intentions for another, who should get what affixed to where on their house with which implement and so forth. No, it was mostly because they were having an absolute mare with some apparent non-believers on the other side of a great, deep, broad chasm at the boundary of her nation.
“Hustup's people knew it as The False Mirror, because they could see more land, other people, buildings and such over there, but anyone who walked down to try to find a way across never returned. They concluded, deeply incorrectly, that what they could see was a dangerous reflection of their own civilisation, showing them a demonic vision of what would happen if they succumbed to the evils of enclosed shoes and flying north on a weekend.
“Some decades prior to manifesting the miracle, I'd had enough of all that False Mirror nonsense because it was just a nice canyon with a kind of dangerous river crossing at the bottom, and what they could see on the other side were just some other Failures. Hustup's people could have met and really got along with them, but instead they’d wasted generations on strangely superstitious fears that they’d picked up from goodness only knew where.”
Juciner knew exactly where the superstitions had come from, but didn’t think that the information would be of any comfort to Killeal. Better that she blinked out of existence without losing any more respect for mortals.
“So, being a god of action, I told both Hustup and a prophet from the other side that the canyon was honestly just a split in the land, and that they could cross it quite easily with climbing gear, tents, a raft and some food. Maybe there could be a bridge if they met the folk across the way, and they could trade goods, medicine, knowledge, sports; all the good stuff. Hustup's counterpart, a woman named Rinell, did a great job. It was absolutely stellar work. She convincing her people that the other side was good, safe and desirable. Hustup was unfortunately having a little more bother, so I convinced Rinell’s followers to stand on their edge of the canyon, give a friendly wave, and let their distant neighbours know that everyone could be friends.”
Killeal sighed heavily. Whump. The two sounds weren’t very different this time.
“Of course, that proved to be naïve. Hustup’s spreading of my message had been spot on as far as the existence of other folk went, but she’d not done such fine work in explaining that they meant no harm. The whole ‘dark copies of us from beyond the end of the world’ misconception only got worse when Hustup told her people, who were already terrified of these supposed dopplegangers, that they were ‘beckoning us over to let go of our lives and become like them’.”
Juciner already knew the story. They’d known it for as long as they’d existed, before the story had been played out and before Killeal had wrapped her head around it enough to tell it. Even so, they let out a gasp. It wasn’t performance or patronisation; it was just the nature of a good story about bad decisions.
“That wasn’t quite the message of unity you were attempting to send, was it?”
“No. If anything it made the situation worse. Thankfully, I was able to get a message to the supposed dopplegangers and stop them crossing over. Goodness only knows what would have happened if they’d gone on a walk to say hello.”
Juciner knew what would have happened. It wasn’t pretty. ‘The demons are marching on us’ is not a cry that incites the kinds of behaviour that ends in anything good.
“Naturally, I decided that Hustup was not to be trusted with my divine word any longer. In hindsight I could have told her that, but it felt like any communication was doomed to make things worse, so I totally ignored her instead. She wandered the deserts for a long time trying to find me again; said prayers anywhere that seemed holy, looked for meaning in coincidence, looked for action in inaction, so and so on. It wasn’t a productive time in her life, and I was worrying about other things like what to do about the mountaintops that always looked snowy despite a total of three cloudy days in the previous four centuries.”
“Managing weather systems and distant aesthetics always was the most underappreciated aspect of our work.” sympathised Juciner. Whump. That was another world which didn’t need its weather worried about any longer.
“So we skip many years ahead, and find ourselves on the anniversary of the harrowing greeting across the canyon. The dopplegangers gather there annually to wave at their prospective friends, in the hope that their friendliness will eventually win them over. Hustup’s Failures gather to scare their children away from making the crossing, showing them the works of devilment that lurk on the other side. Hustup herself has finally returned and, it’s fair to say, isn’t doing well. Having my voice taken away from her so suddenly was on the life-changing side for her.”
“I can see it perfectly clearly in my mind.” said Juciner.
“Hustup decided that the reason I had stopped speaking was because of her failure in uniting the Failures, which was the first correct interpretation of my actions that she’d made since long before I let her go. When she screamed this to the fear-mongers at the edge of the canyon it made me sit up and take notice, and when she said that the light of my wisdom would burn away the shadows surrounding the demons of the mirror in the dark? It gave me a wonderful idea.
“The light that shone from the bottom of the canyon was many, many times brighter than I had intended, but I was overexcited. It blazed upwards like a pillar of pure sunlight, it split the ground, it flayed and ablated the edges of the chasm, and it illuminated the dopplegangers as innocent, friendly Failures like any other. Hustup got her miracle, her people stopped being scared, and the dopplegangers could finally stop waving and start selling their enormously overpriced rocks. Three wins in one!”
Whump. It was closer than the last one. Juciner and Killeal looked up in the direction of the sound for a moment. Both of them tried to pretend they hadn’t.
“That’s definitely something of which to be proud. Was the light coming out of the whole canyon?”
“Oh yeah. That thing ran for hundreds of miles, so it was like a whole wall bursting from the ground and raging into the sky. The light of unity, understanding and friendship, they called it.”
“Pity they couldn’t think of a third “u” word to mean friends.” said Juciner.
“It is. Maybe I should have pushed them towards greater works of literary worship until they’d made enough synonyms. Live and learn.” Whump. The remaining time for living and capacity for learning was rather shorter than the turn of phrase tended to bank on. “They created a whole holiday devoted to lights after that event; candles, torches, mirrors near fire. It was a real success.”
“Good thing they didn’t mistake the light for the fires of antagonism or punishment. I saw that a few times.”
“Failures were predisposed to fear and friendship. Insecurity didn’t pose as much of a problem as you might think, hence why Hustup kept going for thirty years while I blanked her.”
Juciner nodded. Omniscience still left room to learn and be surprised somehow.
"A lesser god would have taken that to be unwavering faith. It's probably good that you can see nuances behind those kinds of behaviours."
"Wouldn't want to flatter myself." Killeal said with a smirk. Whump whump. Death had found a binary system. Time was ticking. “So how about you? What’s something you’re proud to have done?”
The cloud, rock, hillside or icy blue glacial river flowing through an endless meadow, depending on the watcher, drifted downwards a little. Down wasn’t a concept which had held much meaning previously, what with the generally isotropic nature of space and its lack of any consensus on how orbits, galaxies and the like should be aligned, but there was something about this drift, the drift at the end of all things, that was definitely in a downward direction; like the broken end of a biscuit sinking slowly but purposefully to the bottom of a cup of freshly brewed tea. Sodden little fragments of the universe’s impossible centre would soon be floating around in the cosmic soup, but at least it wouldn’t have a chance to last for long.
“Hm.” said Juciner as they thought. They weren’t very much used to thinking about things. Knowledge was at the forefront of their mind, on the tip of their tongue, at their fingertips, and generally at the most distant and extreme point of any body part they cared to mention. Introspection of this kind was a new experience, and they took some limited amount of comfort in having been able to try something unfamiliar, even if there wasn’t much time left to practice it. “I’m very much fond of my work on shaping the colour of the sky and the motions of the heavens. They were very culturally relevant for my Tylophytes. And there’s the time I appeared to a young, downtrodden woman. She’d been exiled from her village for the crime of pointing out that storing meats in salt would stop everyone from getting sick.”
“Oh, did you turn up with an animal’s head or make a frozen hedge speak to her or something? They were some of my favourite methods.” asked Killeal.
“Erm, no. I manifested my face from the air and the sky. The swell of the wind was my voice and the fiery light of the sun was my eyes. Pretty sure I arranged some clouds into a nose.”
Killeal shrugged.
“I guess that works too.”
“It worked better than I had intended. Beyond simply comforting the woman and confirming her suspicions about preventable sicknesses, she carried my words back to the village and demanded that they listen. I had to make a few more sky-based appearances in the hours that followed, mostly to stop the braying mob from burying her alive in salt as some kind of ironic punishment for speaking heresy, but the woman’s message got through in the end. There was a great reformation shortly afterwards, which I orchestrated for reasons that I am sure have become quite clear.”
Whump. There would be no more reformations of note.
“If I’d had prophets as good as that young lady then I’d have been tempted by a reformation too.” confirmed Killeal. “Although I did quite like having schisms to try out different styles of worship, to see which rules could be dropped because the world had moved on, that kind of thing.”
“Schisms were certainly a wonderful tool, yes. Globalised communications made them more difficult. Must have been nice to have people who forewent technology in such a grand way.”
Killeal smiled.
“Yep. The Failures were pretty helpful like that. For all the Hustup nonsense, they did alright by me.”
From all around them came a rumbling. It vibrated their rock or cloud or hillside or river through a meadow or twinkling ball of corporeal light, depending on who was looking, and even seemed to shake the fabric of existence. There was no air there at the centre of the universe, because nothing was sufficiently heavy to hold an atmosphere, nor did the gods need to breathe, but even so it felt like the air was shaking, mostly because that's just what the dying moments of the universe were expected to feel like. It wasn't something that Juciner or Killeal saw fit to question, because neither of them had experienced it before, and even Juciner's knowledge of all things hit something of a brick wall when all things ceased to be. They continued along their established path of ignoring the situation.
“How long do you think it'll be until Death gets here?"
Whump, came the direct reply.
"Hard to say.” Juciner added, finding a whump to be less than illuminating. “There don't seem to be very many stars left though, so it seems probable that their supposedly slow march is, on the contrary, rather expeditious."
Silence. It was hard to know how to follow that kind of statement.
"It's almost tempting to try starting a whole new world. See if we could have a quick run through everything again." Killeal finally said. Whump.
"It's not terribly fair to do that to a whole planet's worth of species. We can hardly say 'Oh hi, we sort of made you as a diversion against the incoming tide of oblivion and you don't have long, but worship us and try to be good please' and expect any respect, can we?" replied Juciner, understandably. They had a fairly firm grasp on ethics, both inherently and from experience.
"Why worry about being respected? It's not like they'd have much time to be cruel to one another, so they don't need fear or respect of us to stop it. We can just have a bit of play."
"Rather a cynical attitude towards divinity, don't you think?"
Killeal shrugged.
Whump whump whump. Death was accelerating, if anything. Maybe he'd got his eye in now. His ruthless efficiency had never bothered Juciner in the past, mostly because it hadn't affected her, but now she was a little irked by it.
"Regardless, we'd have to assign them to heaven and hell, and we'd have so little data on the matter that we could hardly justify it to anyone else."
"There'd be no-one to whom to justify it." replied Killeal, really getting into the swing of nihilistic indifference. "And there might well not be a heaven or hell left in a few minutes."
Juciner racked her brain, or what served as the divine equivalent. No information found. It was worrying in a way, as many new things tend to be, but also exciting to be able to try speculating again.
"Maybe they will. Makes the eternal reward line sound a little dishonest, doesn't it?"
"I'm sure they'd forgive us if they were still around to do any forgiving."
Whump. A new star took on the mantle of brightest in the remaining sky. It was also the only one.
"I think we’re out of time even for a quick world.” surmised Juciner. “Well, Killeal, it's been a pleasure to sit and speak with you. If I could have picked anyone with whom to wait for oblivion, I think it would always have been you." they added, their strange dearth of emotion not entirely undermining the sentiment.
"It's definitely been good to have company, and you've always known what to say." she replied.
Whump.
"By my count that's all of them."
"Yeah. None left." Killeal said, in the newfound darkness. There was a shape, ragged-edged and darker than the dark, like absence in motion, barrelling towards them. It flapped in non-existent wind, and carried a scythe that was both invisible and impossible not to see. It moved with an awful lot of awful purpose.
"Hello, old friend. Our turn then?" greeted Juciner. The remaining universe nodded.
"It won't be so bad. I'll catch up with you both in just a few seconds." intoned Death.
"Looking forward to-" Whump.