Jellyfish - Chapter 1 The End

This is the end of the universe.

As you can see, all the planets are cold and dead. The black holes you’ve heard so much of rolled over and kicked the bucket just like everyone else. It turned out that binge eating couldn’t save them from entropy. The stars might have gotten it the worst since they lived a lot longer than most others, and they died in so many ways as well. Some stars died might have gotten lucky and died alone. Others would be cursed to watch their solar friends wither and pass. The red giants grew and burned alive the planets around them, some dwarfs managed to crash into each other and commit murder/suicide, and a few turned into zombies that devoured all matter and died anyway.

Many other deaths are happening in the universe at the moment, but they’re not worth mentioning in this paragraph. It’s not because I feel lazy to describe the morbid procedures of a dying universe, but because I would have to write a bloody textbook and several volumes after.

Either way, in the middle of it all a girl somehow stayed alive while everyone else was succumbing to their mortality. She was without an expiration date, and therefore the last thing left of a universe gone supermarket lettuce levels of bad. Immortality aside, she seemed so very tiny. So minuscule in fact that she could’ve been a grain of sand observed from the other side of the universe. Her white hair, white dress, and slightly less than white skin were the things that made up her ghostly figure. However, even while going for the albino look, none of her features mattered since there was no more light in the universe. For the girl, the fact that no one could see her was something that gave her comfort.

Not that it mattered since there would be no one left to see her.

Floating through the void, sleeping, dying, and living at the same time, the girl just continued her existence. Every time she died, she always came back to life as the same little girl. Her bodies grew stiff in a millisecond from the lack of heat; ice frosted over them and turned corpses into popsicles. Trailing behind her or floating around where they could, her multiple lives and deaths followed along the cosmic journey like shed skins.

Sometimes, there were brief moments where she wasn’t continually dying, and her body could regenerate fast enough to stay as one. But other times it seemed that her body got torn to shreds by debris, and it would be irreparable. In those cases, her body just popped into existence once more while the old shell floated away. For brief milliseconds, she was awake long enough to feel discomfort but never any pain.

More than centuries passed, perhaps another billion years of this continuous existence. The universe began to fall apart, but only the girl remained as she always would. At this point, her life became the only life, and the void had indeed become void. In the darkness, a sphere created by the mass of corpses came together, and gravity began to bind them. In time, the collection grew until it rivaled the size of the most massive stars that once lived in the universe.

At its core, the girl slumbered as she lived and created more bodies around her. A few more uncountable amounts of time passed, and the bodies shifted suddenly and violently. The mass had become unstable, and soon the ball began to collapse upon itself. At first, fragments of bones impaled the immortal and blood covered every inch of her. The weight of the corpses easily turned her current body to jelly, and the revival process recycled the girl into the same fate. Sharing the burden, her nearby bodies were crushed by the forces acting upon them. Gravity swirled and pushed, it shoved and smashed heads, compacted the matter all into a single point smaller than descriptions could go.

They formed a singularity. One with infinite mass and density that became incredibly hot.

Then suddenly, the mass exploded.

Matter flung across the corners of all space and continued to expand. Gases came forth and elements of all sorts that had come out from the furnace. Racing each other, running to the ends they had yet to meet, the universe formed. It was beautiful, beyond description, grander than any god or form of magic. The birth of all things was bigger, better, and far more brilliant than those that came after it happened. Soon, shapes in the light began to form, and things would start to cool down, and life would continue. Life would begin, life would end, life just happened.

This is the start of the universe.