In the void beneath the world, the dead god Ophireon’s corpse drifted between the emptiness that existed in the spaces between the stars.

At the beginning of all things, Ophireon had torn out his own eyes, turning them into the sun and the moon to give light to a lightless world. Then he had torn out his own stomach so that the churning magma within his gut could burrow beneath the ground and give fire and fertility to the earth. Then he had torn out his own feet, the stomps of which had once fueled thunder and storms, to give lightning and vibrancy to a barren sky. And then with all the pieces in place, Ophireon tore out his own soul and infused it into every crack of the world that he had fashioned in order to jolt the universe to life.

And so Ophireon died, sacrificing everything he had so that the world might exist.

But Ophireon was the supreme lord of the cosmos, god of gods. Even among the other divine creatures, his godly existence was special. Ophireon’s divinity was beyond immortality or mortality, beyond life and death. Ophireon existed long before the universe did, and he would outlast it by an endless eternity.

Ophireon closed his eyelids over his empty eye sockets. Just as he did not need life to live, he did not need his eyes to see. Such was the power of his existence. When Ophireon saw, he truly saw. The entire universe opened itself beneath his gaze, albeit in cryptic symbolism.

Ophireon turned his eyeless sight to the future. Lately, he had been receiving images of doom. He had seen vague premonitions: a sword hanging precariously above the head of a king, writing scribbled on palace walls warning of imminent disaster, clocks ticking down, hourglasses running out, and the inexorable march of prisoners on death row walking to their own executions.

Ophireon spoke to himself in his voice that rumbled with the infinite wisdom of the cosmos and said: “The Dragon is upon us.”

For years now, Ophireon had seen the distant edges of the universe slowly being devoured by the Dragon. He lay, trapped in the void, sifting through his visions of the future to find a solution. Ophireon dove once more into his future sight, into the endless string of things yet to come, into the ocean of swirling, twisting, tangling lines of time.

In his perfect crystalline vision, Ophireon saw a girl digging with a shovel to the bottom of the world. She had dug a messy hole into the ground, just wide enough for her to comfortably stand and continue digging. Her hair and eyes were black. Her shovel glowed with a faint purple hue.

What did the vision mean? His premonitions were always metaphorical. Every detail mattered when interpreting the secret language of the universe. Was the earth itself crumbling? The earth represented the bedrock upon which the structure of the world was built. The girl was digging with a shovel deep into the bowels of the world. Did that indicate that the foundations of the universe were toppling?

Or was it rather a warning about over-industrialization? The girl with her shovel, a tool that humans had invented to help tame and conquer nature, digging and overturning the soil upon which all life depended. Or was it—

Ophireon’s train of thought was halted when a shaft of sunlight hit him square in his eyeless, noseless, earless, and mouthless face. Ophireon angled his head upwards and saw a hole in the ceiling of the void.

Impossible, Ophireon thought. His home was beneath the bottom of the world. Sunlight had never once breached the void under the universe. No natural force could possibly open a hole to the surface, and no human was powerful and foolish enough to try to come to the void either.

“Whoa!” A girl tumbled out of the hole. In her left hand, she gripped a shovel, crackling with purple lightning. She whirled her arms around, first grasping for a handhold. Finding none, she slipped and began falling into the endless chasm of the void, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Someone help! I’m falling!”

Ophireon reached out with his fingers thicker than the trunks of the tallest trees and plucked the girl from the air. He opened up his hand and the girl rolled unceremoniously into the palm of his hand.

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Ophireon had no mouth and no tongue and no voice and yet he spoke with the authority of the cosmos in every word that echoed within the void. His words were an impossibility, sounding with no air and no vibrations and no speech at all. And Ophireon spoke in his voice that was older than any living thing and said: “Who are you?”

The girl looked at him, shivered with the chill of the void, and sneezed. Then she smiled and said, “My name’s Anesidora, but you can just call me Annie for short. Thanks for saving me!” Annie beamed, grinning so widely with so much childish joy that her eyes just about squinted shut. Her smile took up all of her face.

And Ophireon spoke in his voice that had once commanded the greatest monsters of the earth and sea and said: “What are you doing here?”

Annie pointed her shovel at Ophireon, “Mom says you need to help me save the world.”

“Huh?” spoke Ophireon in his voice that had parted the heavens. And Ophireon spoke once more in his voice which brought kings to their knees and said: “What?”

“Mom said the world was gonna end real soon if we didn’t do something about it,” Annie said, “And then she got this magic shovel for me and told me to dig until I got to the void beneath and world. And then I was supposed to find the great dead god Ophireon and ask him to help us save the world. Which I just did! Will you help us save the world?”

“Who is your mother?” Ophireon’s speech shook the stars from their orbits, “I believe I must have a word with her.”

“Her name’s Sibyl. And I think you might have a hard time talking to her. Mom’s been dead for a few years now.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“But she’s only kind of dead? Like, she’s dead the same way you’re dead, I think. So like, not really quite dead. Sometimes she still comes to me in my dreams. Talks to me about the future and my destiny and teaches me all about the world and magic and stuff.”

“Wait, is your mother that Sibyl?”

“Which Sibyl?” Annie asked, confused.

“The one who sees with eyes that cannot see. The one who speaks with crows. The one who dreams without sleeping.”

“Uh… I dunno? Mom’s the only one I know named Sibyl, anyway.”

“Oh,” Ophireon said. Ophireon turned his great sightless eye sockets up towards the ceiling of the void at the hole which Annie had dug through the entire universe. With a shovel, no less. He turned back to her then he quickly spoke, “Did your mother have a plan for saving the world?”

“Mm,” Annie fidgeted, “She told me to ask you that. She thought you might have a better idea of how to save the world?”

“Um,” Ophireon considered lying and saying that he actually had a brilliant plan to stop the Dragon from eating the universe, but finally he shrugged, the small movement of his shoulders redirecting the trajectories of comets. Idly, he reached out with his other hand and replaced them on their respective paths.

“Oh.”

The two of them looked at each other for a very long moment.

“Okay wait, how exactly is the world gonna end?” Annie asked, “I was gonna ask mom, but all she did was hand me the magic shovel and tell me to start digging. And then she died, so I never got a chance.”

Rather than speaking, Ophireon pointed over Annie’s shoulder. Annie followed Ophireon’s finger, watching the western part of the heavens. The farthest, smallest, dimmest star in the western sky flickered. Its brightness struggled against the encroaching dark. And then, without much more of a fuss, it winked out. A dim rumble rippled through the space in the void, announcing the death of a star.

Annie squinted.

She saw a dragon. A great beast with skin as black as night, invisible against the inky skyline. Its wings were taller than the distance between the void and heaven. Its singular eye leaked with a river of liquid fire. It came from the west, tugging a miasma of foul apocalypse with it. It was busy devouring the star, which screamed in pain as the dragon chewed on flaming stellar flesh. The star let out one last pulse of light as the dragon belched with stardust-laced fire and then disappeared into the dragon’s stomach.

This was not just a dragon. This was the Dragon. Capital D. Eschaton incarnate. It took no pleasure in its existence. It simply was. The engine of the end times unceasingly crawling through the void.

“Okay, good news, you now know how the world is going to end.”

“Ophireon, that’s terrible! That monster’s eating all the stars!”

“My calculations say we have about five years, three months, and seventeen days until it reaches the world.”

The time limit didn’t seem to put a damper on Annie’s determination. Instead, she put her hands on her hips and looked Ophireon right in his sockets and said, “Well, we better get working then, huh?”

Time until the world ends: 5 years, 3 months, 17 days