Illustration by Romeo Esparrago

The dying star above me is surrounded by luminous, red gas. I sit down and gaze up at it. The star flickers as it spins, and slowly, gradually, the red cloud spreads. Its shades of red deepen and eventually fade into the blackness of empty space.

I lie down and watch. The star throws off another ring of material, creating a wave in the cloud. It ripples through it in slow-motion crests and troughs that take hundreds of years to reach the edge. The star spins and flings another wave of material out in another direction. A new series of slow ripples push through the nebula.

After a few thousand years, the star calms down into a white speck surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud. The nebula sets on the horizon of my moon and the sky momentarily goes dark.

The darkness lasts only a few moments, and then the stars begin passing by. They careen silently over my head, casting me in yellow light. Then blue light. Then red. Orange. White. Dull red. So many are going by right now that their light mixes together.

I’m leaving the galaxy. I’m sure of it. After so long I’ve become able to tell where I’m moving to, and if I’m right I’m just now leaving the edge of this galaxy. This must mean there is something I need to witness from the outside.

The moon turns. I wrap my fingers behind my head and prop it up. A swirling mass of blue and red light with twelve arms spinning around a core of pure white is rising on the horizon. The galaxy I just left. It’s shrinking rapidly as the moon speeds away from it. Another galaxy flies over my head into view. It enters the sky next to the galaxy I just came from. The new galaxy has no arms, but is merely an unformed mass of red and white.

The two galaxies soundlessly swirl closer and closer. I can tell from the star orbits that they are perpendicular to each other, with the blue and white galaxy horizontal and the red blob vertical from my point of view. The two swirl closer and closer. The red galaxy cuts into the blue and white galaxy’s paper-thin edge. Stars are pulled from their fixed orbits and flung above and below the blue galaxy’s disc. Red stars are also ripped from their orbits.

Stars collide and explode. The gases collect, condense, and form new stars. Some of these stars explode and release more gas, which condenses into yet more stars. The galaxies grind and cut into each other. Debris stars curl around both galaxies and fall into wide orbits. The cores just barely miss each other, and as the red galaxy reaches the edge of its victim, it slows down.

The red galaxy is pulled backwards. The blue galaxy pulls toward the red one. The two galaxies orbit each other. Stars flail about, orbiting far and wide. Many collide and explode, giving birth to hundreds of new stars. They gradually settle into new orbits, and form new galactic arms. The two cores orbit each other a few hundred light years apart.

Thousands of years pass. Millions. The galaxy has just settled down again. The two galaxies have formed a single galaxy of dark dust swirling between and around clusters of stars.

Then, the two cores collide. The sudden deepening of the gravity well sends a shockwave across the universe. Stars nearest the new black hole are instantly consumed. The core glows brighter with the sudden surge in feeding. The galaxy’s core changes from bright white to bright yellow. It oscillates from white to yellow to red, then to white over the next few million years.

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