Leaving Room for the Moon at Clarkesworld

"By the time we arrived at the court of the Emperor of All Space and Every World, our entire family was dead. We knew this; of course we knew it; sixty thousand years is so very long; we had prepared for it; but it was still horrible. When you go to sleep, you know it will happen, but until you wake up, until you read the tightband transmission logs, you have in your heart some fragment of hope. You do not even realize it is there, until you read the last words in your language, the last words by your people, the last words that will ever be written, and see the course of history continuing right past it, oblivious and destructive and awful. You do not realize the hope you held until you feel it evaporate under the unending torrent of time."

This one's a bit of a downer.