The Billowing

By far, the leading cause of death among Rodinians is other Rodinians, followed by the occasional Nadrakian.   Murder, in other words.   However, beyond the typical mortal proclivity for violence betraying their intricately crafted narrative of transcending such things, you’d need to get creative. Death’s a hypothetical concept for a Rodinian. Something theoretically possible, but only in extreme circumstances outside their ordinarily overwhelming control.   How extreme the circumstances must be remains a stratospherically high bar, and millions of hours' worth of thought were spent by those they’d conquered in pursuit of an answer to the question of “How, in the name of all, do we kill these supercilious bastards?”. And all for nothing. By the time you’re crafting intricate traps to fool them into falling into a Black Hole, or building ever bigger planet-busting weaponry that’s more dangerous to the people using it than the Rodinian on the receiving end, one must concede that non-fratricidal deaths among Rodinians are the result of something quite extreme – and are most unlikely.   The universe is a padded playpen for them, filled with plushie planets, cosy lukewarm stars, and paper civilisations with their tiny water pistol weapons. So long as they keep away from the odd Black Hole poison pill, the ravenous depths of intergalactic voids where nameless terrors reside, or exotic forms of matter and space-time, they’ll be fine. And as they never age and seldom get sick, most Rodinians view their lives with perpetual open-endedness that many of us felt during our childhood but lost as we got older: that they will never die. Given many of them are tens of millions of years old, you could forgive them for thinking that. But the universe, it turns out, has other plans.      

The Billowing

  When the first hints became observable to Rodinia that something was dreadfully wrong with the expansion of the universe, it was initially suppressed by those who made the discovery, in concert with the Rodinian Imperial Government. The idea they’d discovered something that would kill the cosmos terrified these Rodinian astronomers, and they ran to the Imperial Government asking it to find the flaw in their discovery using its vast resources.   They found no flaw. Instead, they more accurately verified the findings.   But the thing is, even though the date of the final moment was 21 million years in the future, this wasn’t that long for those who knew. It was within their life. It was going to happen. They were going to die, and Rodinian immortality would reach its end. There’d be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, as the enemy was space itself expanding exponentially until no two particles could interact anymore. All structure would be destroyed.   The process would begin with the largest scale structures in the universe – the great galaxy walls and filaments, the complexes, superclusters and clusters. These structures, so weakly bound together by gravity operating over hundreds of millions of light years, would become gravitationally unbound and fly away beyond the cosmological event horizon never to be seen again. So much new space will be created between us and them, that no contact or signal will ever be made again. This’ll mark the end for intergalactic travel, astronomy, civilisation, and contact, with the last galaxies going dark 14.3 million years from now.   Galaxies themselves will persist for another 6.3 million years until the cosmological horizon reaches their shores. They’ll begin to fly apart as the gravitational force binding them together is overwhelmed by space-time's expansion, their constituent stars flying away from each other at relative speeds greater than the speed of light. This resultingly is the end of all interstellar civilisation, travel, astronomy, and contact. The night sky darkens as all the stars in the sky disappear forever, isolating solar systems in an endless, empty black void after another 407’000 years.   This is the Final Dark, and from here events proceed with a swift, terrifying brutality as the universe reaches into the crib to smother its own lifeforms. Solar systems shall persist for another fifteen hours until finally the gravity binding planetary systems together is overwhelmed by the expansion. Planets will be torn from their orbits and flung out into the void, their inhabitants powerless as they watch the day turn to night, the last remaining star in their local universe flying away to infinity.   When this happens, it’s the last goodbye. Twelve seconds later, all stars, planets, moons, asteroids, space stations, people, and any macro-scale objects explode as the electromagnetic interaction is overwhelmed across distances beyond atomic orbitals. All life in the universe dies in this moment, and there are no observers left to document the universe’s final instants.   All atoms are destroyed 67 zeptoseconds (6.7x10^-21s) before the end as electrons are ripped from their atomic orbitals, signalling the end of the electromagnetic interaction anywhere but within the remnant nuclei. At this moment, there’s so little time left for the universe that a photon of light wouldn’t be able to cross from one side of a hydrogen atom to the other. It would never make it.   Atomic nuclei are ripped apart shortly thereafter as the nuclear force succumbs, protons and neutrons ripped away from each other and flung into isolation. A last “gasp” for quantum physics occurs close to the final plank second as the strong interaction’s flux tubes are stretched by the movement of colour confined quarks away from each other towards infinity. The strong interaction generates enormous quantities of new quark-antiquark pairs from the conversation of energy in the inflaton field into particles via potential energy in the strong interaction’s flux tubes. However, this is unable to generate sufficient mass-energy to counteract the expansion (via additional gravity) as the inflaton field’s energy density grows quicker than the rate of particle production. At the final instant all distances become infinite, and the universe functionally ceases to exist in any meaningful capacity.    

Political Upheaval

  The tampering Rodinians perform with quantum fields and coupling constants to make their bodies invulnerable would be of no use when the virtual gauge bosons underpinning the fundamental interactions of nature could never travel between real particles to mediate the electromagnetic and chromodynamic forces. Nor could they move the atoms in their bodies towards each other faster than the speed of light to counteract the exponential generation of new space between them. Their bodies would be torn apart just the same as everyone else's.   This discovery had a profound effect on the minds of people who never worried or even thought about death before. Rodinians were unprepared for it, and ironically rather lacking in wisdom or emotional resilience to the concept compared to the mortal civilisations of the cosmos they’d for so long held beneath them.   There was no hiding something like this for long, not in a society of super savant geniuses where everyone knew the laws of physics like their own reflection and could spot the strange redshift in a distant galaxy themselves; a redshift exceeding the predictions of Rodinia’s unified physical theory of the universe.   People turned to the Timestreaming Guild of farseers and precognates, those Rodinians born with spiritual Auras and powers allowing them to see the future, and demanded; “Where did this come from? What changed? What’s causing it?”.   The Guild had nothing. The carefully managed future they’d planned for 100 trillion years of Rodinian supremacy had evaporated overnight, now replaced with a future where all hypothetical timelines converged upon the Billowing. Whatever changed in the fundamental fabric of the universe was obscured from the Guild, and they could fathom no change they could make to the past, present or future that stopped or even delayed the Billowing.   It leaked first as a conspiracy, then became a crisis as people verified it for themselves. For the first time ever, Rodinians were as mortal as everyone else, and they were terrified. Even the final harbour of leaving behind a legacy and a memory in the form of children, accomplishments, and others that go on after you, would all be destroyed. Everything would end, including four and half billion years of Earth’s evolutionary history and that of her life.   This terror birthed its own terrors, such as Nyza Thezumai, who was vile enough to propose a way out that no one else wanted to enunciate.      

The (re)Rise of Rodinian Supremacy

  The ensuing political crisis turned Rodinian politics inside out overnight. Political coalitions that ruled for hundreds of thousands of years crumbled as new ones emerged. Ancient political norms came under increasing strain as the foundations of the universe’s longest running democracy started to disintegrate, and polarisation and extremism arose almost as quickly as the coming deadly expansion of the cosmos. Caught in the middle was an Emperor who couldn’t provide a palatable answer to this crisis, diminishing his power under the relentless assault of Nyza Thezumai who accused him of not simply being the emperor who presided over the end of the Rodinian Empire, but as the emperor who’ll preside over the death of Rodinia and all life of Mother Earth through his inaction.   But what possible action could he take? For reasons not known, the universe had decided to end. All that could be done was to study and search for a cause, such that a remedy could become possible. And towards this effort was bent almost every ounce of resource at the Imperial Government’s disposal. For some, this wasn’t enough.   Nyza and her acolytes pushed for the use of Soul Siphoning, as a method to increase the spiritual power of Mother Earth’s soul such that she could ascend herself and all Rodinians to a higher plane of existence and thereby escape the Billowing.   The problem however, and one which no ethical Rodinian like Emperor Barden would entertain, was that Soul Siphoning was a dark form of magic originally used as a form of punishment, now long outlawed based on its lavish and perpetual cruelty. This magic, developed from the Iconoclastic ousia, dissolved the barriers between Souls and extracted spiritual dyne from the interior of the soul. It then allowed this dyne to be converted into a neutral form that could be grafted onto any other soul.   This caused irreparable harm to the soul targeted by the siphon magic. Many have used the analogy of sticking a straw in a person’s head and extracting their brain matter via suction. Pieces of the soul are torn off in ragged chunks leaving behind irregular scarring cutting deep into memory, knowledge, cognition and personality. It lobotomises the entity being siphoned, slashing away at any spiritually enhanced intellect, and permanently maiming their psikinetic and/or other spiritual talents. If subjected to siphoning to a great enough extent, then death can very easily occur. It was very briefly used by the Rodinians to permanently lower the psikinetics and spiritual power of their most dangerous criminals, but was outlawed over three million years ago even in this case due to its savagery.   Nyza’s plan was to use Soul Siphoning on what she referred to as “useless species” throughout the universe, collecting their spiritual dyne and processing it into additional spiritual power for the Earth. This wasn’t a new idea however, and had been floating around the circles of Rodinian supremacists for millions of years since its discovery. It was as unpalatable then as it was now, and even in the face of absolute and certain obliteration in the Billowing, Emperor Barden categorically refused to even entertain the idea. He was joined by nearly half of all Rodinians in that sentiment by many estimates, but unfortunately only half.   Nyza found purchase within a large enough chunk of the populace by exploiting and worsening their fears and anxieties, whipping them into a panic and despair great enough for her to then capitalise on politically. Another large chunk fell into nihilism and became politically disconnected and apathetic; too appalled by Nyza but too depressed to back Barden. This latter group grew over time, eating away at Barden’s overt support until it cost him the throne, plunging Rodinia into a political crisis.