The dragon's scoff was almost indistinguishable from a solar flare. “Why are you here, dust mite? None of your ilk have dared talk to me since there were stars still forming in the clouds.”

“I'm an astronaut. A Star sailor. Comes from the same language spoken by the people who told the story of Atlas, actually.” She continued her survey. To… confirm her findings. Triple-check, or however many she was on right now.

“You are a dust mite and a trespasser upon my hoard,” the dragon growled, “I have eaten planets in my time. Not the little dust-specks your kind calls planets, but planets. Swirling spheres of gas and ice larger than you could even fathom. Do not think I can't do the same to you.”

“Your hoard happens to be the one remaining Star in the universe.” The Astronaut breathed in deep and kept her eyes on the surveyor instrument to calm herself down. It wasn't wise to antagonize reptiles so large that not even the word “colossal” does them justice.

“Do not attempt to belittle me, little less-than-nothing!” Continent-spanning lightning shot through the dragon's iris, “my hoard is every star that crosses your pathetic little sky, and every star beyond!”

“Yes,” the Astronaut agreed, “And every Star in the universe is This Star, right here.”

The dragon tightened their life-giving coil around The Star, but otherwise refused to dignify her truth with a response.

“…Which, apparently, is more than what could be said if you weren't here.”

The Astronaut floated there, against the infinite expanse of sheer unfathomable void, lit only by a single red Star. The Dragon coiled around it, tight as a snake around its prey.

Gentle as a snake around its eggs.

She wondered if The Star felt as heavy to The Dragon as the sky did to Atlas.

“…Perhaps you're more than nothing, little dust mite,” the dragon's eye moved to look at the infinite nothing behind her. “I haven't heard from my fellow Dragons since I came to save this star. There were twenty of us last I knew. Floating from dust speck to dust speck as your kind does, you may have seen them.”

The Astronaut looked up from the stream of data that she probably knew by heart by now and laughed.

“Imagine that.”

“I have imagined things your mind can barely comprehend, speck-hopper, what makes my request seem amusing?”

“No, it's just… You're a colossal planet-eating reptile who's been coiled around The Star for generations, and the first time in eons you talk to another person you ask the most human question imaginable.”

“We are incomparable, dust-hopper,” the Dragon growled. “I could send you across the galaxy with a single twist of my tail.”

The Astronaut almost let go of her surveyor, “the galaxy was real?”

The dragon laughed, finally causing a variation in her Solar Surveyor’s data and shaking the Astronaut's bones.

“Galaxies, little dust-hopper. Plural. As many galaxies as there were stars dancing inside them. Whirling through the void like accretion disks. Can you imagine that?”

“I can barely imagine one star in the sky other than this one.” She breathed, barely a whisper.

Galaxies. Plural. What would that even look like? Could the sky even get so bright? Surely there wasn't enough room in the sky for…

Focus.

She had to focus on her self-assigned task.

It was far from what her real assigned mission was. The opposite, actually. But the mission was based on false data. Maybe. Incomplete at the very least. She needed to get a more thorough view of the situation. To figure out what to do next, to…

“Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“So soon you are to forget, little dust-hopper. I suppose I cannot fault you for that. You are so small I'm surprised you can remember anything at all! Dragons. Do you know of any others?”

“Oh. Yes.” and oh the way their eye dilated just the slightest bit reminded her of the children back home when she surprised them with secret chocolates and cookies from her rations. She wished she didn't have to kill that light. “They died.”

The dragon moved its head just the barest twitch towards her and The entire Star flashed brighter. “What?”

“They died. Generations ago. I don't… really know how, exactly. We still tell stories about them, back home. How they used to fly across nebulae and play among comets. How they used to eat stars…”

How knights in pale white spacesuits and helmets with opaque visors used to kill them because of it.

Lightning flashed once more in the Dragon’s one visible eye.

“We do not eat stars. The rest of what you said is true, but we do not eat stars. The stars are mine and we do not infringe on one another's hoards. We eat planets, little dust-mite. Nothing more. I will not tolerate lies about my dead race.”

There was fluid visible in the dragon's eye. Pooling atop it as the vastest ocean in the universe. Not that that was saying much, now.

A third semi-transparent eyelid blinked the ocean away, rippling spheres floating across the empty sky. They watched it slowly boil away to nothing in the heat of The Star.

“I'm sorry you had to find out this way.”

“…I was the youngest of my kind, I was always bound to be the last one to die. I only hoped… Well… That I would be there when they did. But really, I suppose I lost them long ago.”

“…May I ask how?”

“When I came to guard this star. Hoards-Black-Holes was insistent that I let entropy take its course, even when I asked them what they would do when their hoard slowly decays into nothing. Hoards-The-Clouds knew what it was like to lose everything, and still they--” The Dragon closed their eyes. “I died to all of them before my scales even touched the surface of this star, I'm sure. They certainly died to me.”

The Astronaut let her surveyor tool float freely beside her. “That seems cruel of them, to not let you keep what's yours.

The Dragon… smiled, almost. It was too sad to be a real smile, but it played the part well enough.

“It was not their place to stop me. My hold on this star is only prolonging the inevitable, but it is prolonging it. When I grow too old and tired to continue living, my grip will loosen, and The Star will die with me. It's only right for a dragon to die with their hoard.”

A neutron-star weight settled in the bottom of the Astronaut's stomach. She didn't know dragons could die of old age. How long had this one been alive?

How long did everything have left?

If it was long enough than maybe, just maybe…

“When… How long will it be? Until you die?”

Heracles built two pillars to hold the sky up for Atlas. Maybe Humanity could do the same, with enough time and Materials.

Materials.

Was there enough matter left in the universe to build something as ambitious as that?

She knew the findings of the latest Matter and Energy Census as well as she knew her surveyor’s readings. There wasn't.

The dragon laughed now, a full-body chuckle that could probably be felt all the way at The Planet.

The way The star flickered, it most certainly could be seen.

“Oh, little dust-hopper, do you think time matters to me anymore? There's nothing left to measure it. The last black hole dissipated before you dust-hoppers hopped to the little dust speck surrounding this star.”

The Dragon's eye moved past the Astronaut to look into the emptiness beyond. “I wonder… did Hoards-Black-Holes die before or after their hoard?”

The Astronaut knew the answer to their question.

She wished she didn't.

“…Before.”

The dragon's eye focused on her and she suddenly remembered just what exactly she was talking to.

“You know more than you are telling me, little dust-mite. Perhaps you would do well to consider who could swallow whom and not even notice it.”

She swallowed thickly. The saliva felt like gruel going down her throat, and not because of the threat they both knew was empty.

“Humanity, we… Generations ago, we found a way to siphon energy out of black holes on a massive scale. Truly massive. From what I'm told, it was almost like there were stars in the sky all over again. Hundreds of billions of souls all over the universe, forcing light from out of the darkness, there are still pictures in some of the older model spaceships. It was beautiful.”

The dragon's eye narrowed as the Astronaut continued on.

“I don't remember the story, exactly,” she lied. She could recite the tale by heart, backwards and forwards. Humanity as Sisyphus, cheating death once again. “But… The legend says that seven humans killed the dragon on a ship called the St George, because they were keeping humanity from rekindling the stars. Once we took all there was to take from the black holes, their corpse fueled our ship for twelve generations. Enough for us to find this star, five generations ago.”

Humanity as Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill to unfathomable prosperity before it inevitably rolled back down.

Hills erode over time. The peak of prosperity shrinking lower and lower until there is no longer a hill to climb up.

Her own ship was called the Beowulf.

She tried not to think about that.

Or the five hundred thermonuclear harpoons in the weapons hold.

It took five generations to build them all.

They could have been used as fuel rods.

Five hundred terajoules of energy that could have been used for growing food. For communicating. For trying to stall the ever-taking hands of entropy. For pretending that any of this actually mattered and that the Universe wasn’t about to end cold and miserable and empty and so, so dark.

The dragon blinked.

For the first time since their conversation started, the eye moved to look at the Beowulf, at the red-blue dot of the planet. Back at her.

“So that is why you're here, star sailor.”

“…Yes.”

“I find it hard to believe that you can.”

The Astronaut said nothing.

“How did your kind kill Hoards-black-holes, exactly?”

She opened her mouth and spoke through the neutron star in her chest. “Enough thermonuclear harpoons that they say it looked like a real star was burning in the universe again. The same amount as is on my ship, according to the legend. They say the hole in their head was half the size of The Star.”

After all, there was no room for lies at the end of the universe.

The dragon smiled, “and yet, you're talking to me.”

The Astronaut's laugh was more like a huff.

The Universe wouldn’t end just yet. Maybe in a few generations. Maybe as soon as the Astronaut stepped back onto the planet with five hundred more thermonuclear harpoons than expected and a well-crafted argument as to why that she’d have to write on her way back. It didn’t really matter in what little of a grand scheme of things there was left.

For now, the Astronaut and the Dragon floated side-by side in an infinite expanse of sheer unfathomable void, lit only by a single red Star, staring at a pale red-blue dot.