Here’s a little existential horror story to tell an elf:

When you stand in that presentation hall alongside the galaxy’s greatest scientists as they unveil the discovery of the first Black Dwarf Star, you will feel that existential dread begin to mount in your soul. The universe’s first gray hair signals what you already know, but up until now, have done your best to ignore: you will outlive everything.

Aeons will pass, and you will watch as humanity stretches thin and wide across an evaporating cosmos. In those final moments aboard the station orbiting the last known black hole, as the Habitat Control System’s voice coldly announces that the relativistic generators have run low on fuel, the mortals around you will accept their end with heartfelt, tearful goodbyes. That is their way. There once was a time you would have pitied them. Now, you envy them.

You envy them, even as the gravitational suspension array fails, and the sudden change in pressure from the ruptured hull of the last colony, buckling under its own gravity, ejects you and your crew into the faint glow of a faded accretion disc. The ethereal fire of matter and energy scorches your very being, as you spiral into the abyss.

You lose track of time as you sink into the singularity, somehow still alive. After what could just as easily have been an instant as an eternity, the heat returns in a final burst of Hawking Radiation, before you are exiled into the void of Heat Death, for the rest of eternity.

“…439059104575727262464195387 bottles of beer on the wall, (Graham’s Number) bottles of beer…”

You can’t remember what any of those words mean any more.