Inflation and dark energy share many essential properties. I will show that these two eras can be easily unified into a common framework based on scale invariance. I will present the associated cosmological history and discuss how the inclusion of non-minimally coupled spectator fields may lead to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of internal symmetries and its eventual restoration at the onset of radiation domination. This sequence of events comes together with a rich phenomenology involving the generation of short-lived topological defects that tend to produce gravitational waves. The resulting power spectrum depends on the duration of the heating process and it is potentially detectable, providing a test on the existence of non-minimal couplings to gravity and on the characteristic energy scale of post-inflationary physics.