As the [LORD|COMMANDER|CAPTAIN] of the Ark looked up, into the seemingly infinite spread of soft, white skin, he couldn't help but feel that very peculiar relief usually reserved for long overdue deaths and disasters.
Oh, they had known indeed this moment would come. After all, they had seen such moments before, trillions of times during their undeservedly long existence as a species. At first it had been curious wise men and philosophers, jotting down the disappearance of stars in the night sky, sometimes with explosions that rivaled the Sun in the morning sky; then, as time passed, it had been scientists detecting rapid spikes of mass and heat around dying exoplanets. Eventually, they would receive and decode the abrupt end of extraterrestrial signals, weakening and sputtering out in no more than a day or two.
More time would need to pass before they finally had visual confirmation of what they had not even imagined: planet after planet after planet eaten, destroyed, consumed by hordes of invaders able to overcome any defense through sheer size and overwhelming power. They watched as entire civilizations were disintegrated by creatures who didn't even seem to recognize their victims, their planets mauled beyond any recovery, their stars going nova as the largest of the Swarm bathed into them, destabilizing the celestial bodies like one would disturb a pool of water. The first of the personalities inside of the [LORD|COMMANDER|CAPTAIN] came from here, a scientist looking into this terrifying phenomenon. It was then that he saw Her, and She saw him. He looked enraptured as Her continental form sauntered over shattering tectonic plates, whole countries disappearing under each of Her steps; Her enormous tails slowly swept away any space-based structure the dying civilization had built in low orbit. She had her eyes closed in blissful concentration as She danced away billions over billions of defenseless creatures; everything their civilization had built, but also everything they had laid their eyes on on their own planet - mountain ranges, forests, seas, glaciers - disappeared as Her soles rendered all that wonder and artifice and dreaming potential into mud and grime.
And then, beyond the thousand light years separating them, She opened Her eyes, and looked into him, and smiled. And that smile delivered an unbreakable promise:
Your day will also come. Wait for me.
And he did! And he did. Partially, at least - minds would be congregated into neural masses within his lifetime, and with as brilliant a man he was, he received one of the first tickets into immortality. From there, his job would continue, as would his devotion. He gazed upon Her handiwork: he saw almost-primitive planets be devoured by the Winged Beast, and capitals of galactic empires be razed by orgies where the smallest creature would get clouds no higher than her ankles. He saw how dense wormhole apparatuses would get destroyed, and then the weaknesses in space-time they had torn would get exploited by those same creatures. Polities occupying a noticeable percentage of galaxies would thus be destroyed in days, perhaps weeks at best, though occasionally this or that colony would survive.
For a time, that is; eventually one of them would come, and finish the job. And finish the job they would: he noticed, in fact, how no civilization was left to die on their own. Devastating civil wars on the brink of exploding would be interrupted, and then ended in the most definitive way, as the conflicting powers were greedily absorbed by a girl's nethers, and planet-killing meteorites would be swatted aside before planet-killing breasts completed the job instead. Before a star could die, condemning the people who had relied on it to disappear all the same, enormous swarms of the smaller creatures would appear, leaving behind nothing but a dead wasteland the dying sun could only cook further, robbed of the chance to take that civilization with it as it went.
Again, and again, and again, the fate of intelligent life was proven to be immortality, bar being crushed into paste by those jovial, unaware titans.
An ungodly amount of time passed, as the light of sentience sputtered and died aeon after aeon: even into the infinite width of the universe, inhabited planets were wiped out by the thousands with every breath. New ones appeared, new ones were choked, as their own fading sun forced them into a frenzy, looking for a way to survive. The Arks (well, the first ones) would be constructed then, the planet abandoned, though a minor percentage of the original people decided to remain. The entire celestial body would be grasped by the Winged Beast's toes not three months after their departure, everything they had wanted to leave behind, unspoiled, reduced to nothing but dirt in a matter of seconds through the egotism of a few.
Still, they survived. They survived as the stars themselves started blinking out, one after another; their energy sources became more and more esoteric, and of course they kept gazing at the sky. He never saw Her smile again, though she appeared here and there a few times still. Had he still dreamt, that smile and those eyes would have been everything he could see for every single night in existence.
The moment came about so long after they had stopped even counting time in a significant way, distantly orbiting an elderly black hole, consuming its tidal energy. The Ark was ancient, its hyperdense and hyper-resistant structural material literally starting to fade away; but still they observed, with increasing difficulty, as the last few beacons of life sputtered out, billions of years between one another now. They watched as one last structure, some sort of old biomechanical apparatus, was eaten like they would have consumed a fruit, one day, when they still did eat. And after that, it was nothing but silence. Silence and the wait.
And said wait, in fact, was not peculiarly long - even when a heart did beat in harrowingly short lifetimes, they could have looked forward to it within the time it took for leaves to grow, fall, and grow again. They had seen that scene an uncountable amount of trillions of times, and yet for the first time - and last time - they were the protagonists. As the black, dead sky cracked and shattered, the [LORD|COMMANDER|CAPTAIN] watched that body appear - almost the size of the Ark, white skin and red eyes and an all-consuming array of tails behind her. And as he looked up, into the seemingly infinite spread of soft, white skin, he couldn't help but feel that very peculiar relief usually reserved for long overdue deaths and disasters.
She had kept Her promise, and he had kept his. Did She even care? Did She even know?
As her soft red lips the size of islands gently lowered on the bridge, its metal instantly vaporized, the hyperdense material exploding into atoms, and as his central core was rendered into a cloud of mist, he hoped She did.