As for how the universe might come to an end or fall into a very different state, the heat "death" of the universe (it could involve the continuation of matter but the extinguishing of starlight) might scare people even though it is supposed to be many billions of years in the future, but it is still a material event, and one that would require the death of life beforehand for maximum entropy to be reached. If the Big Crunch is true, the expansion of the universe comes to an end and is reversed. The Big Rip would entail that the gravitational force holding atoms together is overpowered by the expansion of the universe, and atomic particles drift so far apart that they lose their current structure. The notion of things like these happening might stir up anxiety in someone's mind in spite of the great amount of time between now and then, and yet this, having to do with the cosmos, is not quite what cosmic horror as a whole or at its best is about.
None of this would compare to eldritch beings, if they exist/existed, especially the more malevolent or supernaturally powerful ones, which will always be by far the superior feature of cosmic horror over the mere backdrop of an inanimate, "uncaring," or chaotic material universe. That conscious or seemingly conscious superhuman beings know of humans with cruel intent or regard us as we commonly regard ants or bacteria pertains to a far more existential kind of horror than the vastness, emptiness, or hostility of various aspects of the natural world. While the phrase cosmic horror contains a word that is sometimes used in reference to the literal physical universe, as a genre, it is about far more than a personally unfortunate natural disaster or merely what physics could do to the universe in the distant future.
Cosmic horror in its greatest and purest forms is scarcely about the universe, if it is about them in any direct sense at all. It is about the metaphysical or epistemological nature of reality being worthy of dread in far more foundational ways. Mother of Stephen King's Revival, although elements of the way she and her seeming afterlife realm of the Null are portrayed in the novel are at most illusory [1], is an entity more Lovecraftian than some of Lovecraft's own more mainstream icons, and the sort of cosmic horror explored in the novel--an allegedly eternal afterlife of amoral suffering inflicted by beings more powerful than humans--towers over anything in the natural world. Similarly, a deity that hates but recognizes the intrinsic truth of logical necessities and torments people in an afterlife forever for seeking them would, though not conventionally Lovecraftian, be a source of cosmic horror extinctions and smallness before the universe could never rival.
To really dive into the most significant forms of cosmic horror, a work would not even be about the universe at all. What is or could be beyond the cosmos could always be objectively more severe. Many things about, for instance, an afterlife are logically possible. Even if they turn out to not be true, they could have been because they do not contradict logical axioms. Moreso than the awakening of Cthulhu or even the awakening of Azathoth, which supposedly would end the entire cosmos altogether in Lovecraft's stories, an afterlife has more potential for sheer terror than anything else. The enormous size of the universe in outer space, the overhyped mysteriousness of the quantum scale, the viciousness of miscellaneous non-human animals, the uncontrollable onslaught of meteorological phenomena, and so on might be fear-inducing, but they are nothing compared to other logical possibilities that are supernatural in nature. The universe in its entirety is incapable of rivaling spiritual entities or states of experience that are by necessity either existent or at least logically possible.
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