As the suns sank below the horizon, the Great Oracle Karuno sat at her Divining table with a steaming mug of Chuthra. It was this drink, a concoction of herbs, fruits, and silver shavings, that aided Karuno in her visions. A drink of Chuthra served to provide an illusion of comfort and control. It wasn’t the best tasting but was essential to the task at hand.

Typically, it only takes a few sips of Chuthra after some light chanting to help trigger a vision. For this session Karuno had consumed nearly half of the mug’s worth of Chuthra and spoken several different chants before she began to consider giving up. In all her six thousand years of serving as the Great Oracle to the Augurenians, never had she struggled so much to receive a vision of the future. Not since she began her studies at least. It wasn’t until her eighty third decade serving as priestess to the last Great Oracle that she finally received a prophecy without much aid from the Chuthra or anything else for that matter. This had been quite embarrassing for her, as many began to doubt her abilities.

Karuno was deep in her reminiscing when the vision finally took hold. It came as a shock, causing her to jolt forward in her chair where she froze, mid action, and her eyes rolled back. The mug fell from her loose grip onto the floor where it shattered, with the remaining Chuthra quickly spreading across the floor and seeping into the nearby rug. Perched and unmoving on the edge of her seat, Karuno looked as though she had been petrified. She remained this way for only a few moments before she began to shake rather violently and then slumping back in her chair with her head falling back and her mouth hanging open. This was quite uncommon as far as receiving visions of the future go, and had one of her priestesses been present, they likely would have thought their Great Oracle to be dead.

When Karuno next opened her eyes, she was stunned by the change in what was in front of her. Instead of the makings of her cozy home, she saw the endless depths of space, far beyond any region she had ever known. She could see more galaxies at this one moment that anyone ever could in the entire life span of her people. It would have been quite a breathtaking view had she been in her body. She began to sift through memories in effort to uncover the meaning of deep space in prophecies, perhaps in relation to travel.

While reflecting on the various interpretations of space, Karuno paused to examine the galaxies before her in effort to determine an approximate location. She had learned over the years that location can be a rather important part of imparting the prophecies as the Oracles of old were often criticized for their vagueness. None of the galaxies before her held any familiar feature. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw one changing its shape. Knowing this to be an impossible feat, she shifted her gaze elsewhere when she saw undeniable movement. What had previously been an odd shaped spiral galaxy now resembled a long ribbon with smaller bits branching off in spots. She watched in awe as this particular galaxy continued to transform.

Finally, the galaxy had stopped changing. Now Karuno could see that the galaxy had taken the form of a dragon. Light and space seemed to bend around its edges. Stars of various sizes and colors twinkled and moved across its body in endless directions, captivating the Oracle and Ultimately distracting her from her duties Karuno would have happily spent the next several eons studying this beautiful cosmic entity, but it wasn’t to last. This dragon drifted through space at a seemingly leisurely pace until it was disturbed by an incredible bright light.

Karuno shut her eyes in fear of going blind. When she opened them, she was confused by what she saw before her: two cosmic dragons. The two were exactly alike, with the only visible differences being the direction in which the stars they were made of flowed. She stared at the two beings in front of her speculating to herself as to the identities of these galaxies. None of what she had learned prepared her for any of this. As Karuno watched, the two dragons got closer and closer to each other, neither changed their course and the two forms collided, surprisingly solid. The stars around the dragons trembled, and Karuno was alarmed to see that fewer stars shone before her. The dragons were preparing themselves for another charge with Karuno looking on in helpless terror. They collided again and this time they began to claw and bite at each other. One of the dragons managed to wrap its tail around a small galaxy and flung it at the other. The fast-moving cluster of stars missed its target and instead collided with a lone star, resulting in a fiery explosion. The attacks continued. Each one was more destructive that the last with increasing sections of black emptiness. One collision was so powerful that Karuno was certain that her physical form had felt it, however many light years away it was.

As the two dragons untangled themselves, they retreated some distance as if taking some time to recover. In this brief moment of calm, Karuno took this opportunity to reassess her surroundings. Most of the space that she could see was now empty. The few lone galaxies struggled to hold their form. The only ones unaffected were to ones that comprised the dragons. She began comparing the dragons again, looking for signs of damage. Instead she saw light disappearing with increasing speed into their open jaws. Overcome with a new wave of fear, it didn’t take Karuno long to figure out what was happening: the dragons were creating black holes.

As the black holes continued to grow around her, stars and galaxies that were previously thousands of light years zipped past her and was lost in seconds. It wasn’t long before she noticed galaxies near her own disappear too. This was it. The end of the universe. Soon the two black holes became one and had consumed everything in the universe, including her and the two dragons. All was lost, having gone into oblivion. All that remained was the void.