Celestial Gift

It was a golden age that has lived on only in the memories of a bygone world, an age when every choice was permitted. The first race to step into the void carried with them a precious innocence, as the newborn peoples of the young universe frittered away their blessings without restraint. Over billions of years, the fires of civilization lit up the endless stars, and ships wove through countless gates of stars. Adventures, conquests, and legends beyond imagining today unfolded without end in the sea of stars. That is, until the fate of the cosmos was severed thread by thread, and giants and dwarfs alike met the same end. At first, it was no more than a mass hysteria, or the fading of a dream. Then, in the silence of the night, an entire civilization was erased. Next, extinguished dwarf stars streaked across the firmament like tears, and the embers of burned-out suns warped the very fabric of space. It was only when entire galaxies evaporated into a void deeper than darkness did people finally came to realize the scale of the catastrophe. The descendants of the ancients rose in defiance, and over the millions of years that followed, conquered time and space in turn. Yet, the farther they pushed into the unknown, the more they understood the futility and sorrow of their struggle. The once-glorious civilizations that set out alongside them had long since vanished without a trace. To escape the annihilation that would one day engulf them all, those once-passionate pioneers sealed off the pathways that spanned the cosmos. They retreated to Giant Voids amidst the numerous galaxies, to the lightless edges of perception, as they clutched the last faint trace of hope. The first people who had mastered leptons sent forth chroniclers toward the limits of baryonic matter in the hope of finding answers at the very last particle of existence. As starlight wheeled on and the beacons upon the star charts went dark one by one, they at last extended their probes to the very end of time. There, all light had vanished, and all possibility was spent. Even the finest motes of dust had drifted apart. There was no turning point, no miracle to be found. At the very end of fate, all that remained was a void of utter chaos and darkness. Every equation they had uncovered, every constant they had defined, now stood in silent proclamation of their end. It was in that moment that their history came to a close. Perhaps this so-called race that had transcended time was, in the end, nothing more than prisoners keeping vigil over a graveyard of stars. No matter how brilliant a world or civilization may be, it shall, in the end, fall to its destined ruin in despair. And yet, why does the voyager who wanders the void still dream of a dragon and a fragile little world? After untold millennia of silent contemplation, just before the end could catch up with her, the sleeping voyager finally awakened...