Ina the depths of the void, you are nothing.

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All life in the universe begins like this; like you, small, insignificant. Casting your wide gazes upward and beholding the infinite dark maw above you, the ground of your planet solid under your trembling feet.

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Some of you evolve to sentience. Some of you die out, your ashes melding into millennia of dust and rock. Through it all, you don’t stop looking up. You make stories about what’s hanging above your heads behind that thick black curtain. You mistake the rocks in the sky for gods and spirits and deities. Some of these tales are reverent. Some are terrifying.

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None of them come close.

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You all figure it out, someday, that your planet is a speck of dust in the universe, hurtling through space around a burning, collapsing star. You learn your time is limited, and eventually you all find your way up here.

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Now, this is the fun part. The roar of your spaceship, deafening against the silence of the void. You all think it your right to shatter the peace, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes your engines are made of steel, sometimes of mithril, sometimes orichalcum. The first prototypes are always so, so loud.

But we are louder.

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You’ll hear a melody, sweeter than you’ve ever heard before. Sometimes you’ll hear whispers, telling you a story, painting the pictures of that which you yearn for the most. Fame. Wealth. Prestige. Love. But always, of happiness. That's the one thing that never fails in getting you to stop your rumbling little starships. Your friends might ask you what's wrong. My song drowns them out, at least until you wrap your shaking fingers around the pressure-lock and pull— 

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And you finally find out what’s up there, in the nothingness, lying in wait and crackling with ancient magic. Slithering between the jagged edges of darkness, laying between the stars. Hungry, so hungry, waiting to feed. And with your last breath, you'll realize that your legends were wrong about the gods in the sky.

 

There’s only us.

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In the depths of the void, you are nothing.

 

But we will make something out of you.