Have you ever heard of a Black Dwarf? It is what some imagine will be the final fate of stars in the Universe in something close to 1 quadrillion years from now. First stars must go through their ordinary stages of life. Then, when they have no more sources of energy to burn...and an incredible density...they will become a White Dwarf. At this point the star will no longer be undergoing fusion reactions, and will thus have no energy source at all. At first these dying stars will be quite luminous. But over time their light will fade. With enough time they will go dark and become quite cold. Their cores will crystallize first and then all the rest will follow. Now, finally, they will become what is known as a Black Dwarf. An incredibly dense crystallized stellar mass that is colder than anything our own planet can achieve, and is so dark that the only energy that comes from it will be some small amounts of radiation.
But what of this? Why is a Fae blog talking to you about theoretical stellar corpses that may or may not come in trillions of years from now? What has that to do with anything?
Imagine for a moment that you are being who cannot die. Most of the life in our little observable universe, what life we’ve found anyway, is subject to eventual decay and death. If they have propagated themselves the species might live a bit longer. But eventually even this will come to an end. But for a being who experiences neither decay nor death, such things as Black Dwarfs and the eventual Heat Death of the Universe become something that will eventually show up in your rather infinite life.
There is the possibility, of course, that the Faerie Folk will simply leave to their Otherworld or beyond into other planes of being. They could leave our fading Universe behind to the dark and the cold, abandoning the confines of our small section of reality and exploring larger and possibly infinite reaches of existence in all its possible diverse forms of being.
Another possibility is that they do not leave, but remain as our Universe inexorably moves towards the era in which Time will cease to have meaning at all. If they choose to stay, then perhaps they might live upon the surface of a dead star, unaffected by gravity and radiation. They could build palaces and cities there under an endless dark void of a sky. What strange lives they might live, long after humanity has drawn its final breath.
Maybe instead of on the surface of a dead star they could live in ships that sail infinitely through the frozen sky. Or why ships? Maybe they have little need for vessels, prefer to travel as a spirit or even in other forms. They could swim in the ergospheres of spinning black holes, gathering the final sparks of light or even life from the remnants of the Universe in its final moments.
Many of the Folk might not even resemble humans any longer, casting off old forms they had once thought to be lovely and useful. Imagine great Scyphozoa drifting through space, perhaps pulsing with a strange inner light of their own. Or perhaps insectiod monsters the size of planets, gathering what little physical matter remains in the universe to itself and creating superplanets in the darkness where many smaller Folk can linger in the icy blackness.
The possibilities for such an existence are vast and endless. They are also somewhat frightening to ponder. We often think of beings who exist in the space beyond our own little planet as Aliens. It is important to remember that the word “Alien” simply means “Foreign, different, belonging to another place.” In this way we might find that the Fae are as alien as can possibly be imagined.
