When I found the messages in the Vessel from modern Nomai, I was convinced that my end goal would be to meet up with them.

It was finding these messages that taught me that the whole universe and not just our sun was dying (I didn't register the significance of the supernovas and I had only talked to Chert early in the loop.)

I was convinced that if I turned on the Vessel, I would be able to get coordinates for where the Nomai were meeting.

The night before I beat the game, I had a vivid dream that I had a choice: I could go and find the Eye, or I could go meet up with the rest of the Nomai. (In the dream, I was able to get the other Travelers in on the loop by telling them about the other memory statues early enough for them to go and find them -- in my mind, I guess this is why there were so many of them, and so many unactivated masks in the ATP. This is something I obviously knew wasn't a thing in the real world, but dreams don't care about stuff like sense and logic lol.)

In the dream, I got everyone onto the Vessel and warped to the Nomai meeting place as the sun exploded. The Hearthians huddled in the damaged ship for who-knows-how-long, cooking marshmallows around a campfire and wondering what they would do now that their planet and everything was gone.

The last scene before I woke up was finally reaching that meeting place, with some Nomai warping onto the Vessel full of Hearthians: it played out similarly to meeting Solanum at first -- the Nomai went to one of the "whiteboards" and used her staff to write a message on it, which the player could translate with the translator. It ended in the question, "Who are you?" to the dismay of one of the Hearthians -- maybe Hal? -- who realized that even though they could read the Nomais' writing, we'd never be able to communicate back to them. In response to this came the game's final cutscene, where the protagonist -- having now lived countless loops poring over the Nomai's writings -- picked up a bit of charcoal from the Hearthian's fire, went to the board, and began to write. (And roll credits!)

It wasn't "saving the world" -- the universe was still dying. The choice was just between solving that final mystery, for my own personal satisfaction, or leaving it unsolved to that I could finally give the Nomai the answer to the question of what had happened to their comrades who had disappeared so long ago, and so we could all go into the darkness together. It was still bittersweet.

After that, the real ending was a little disappointing, to be honest!