This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Few_Zookeepergame105 on 2024-12-24 21:57:59+00:00.
They brought darkness.
Darkness like we'd never known.
Darkness only surpassed by the deepest black holes, the furthest ice of intergalactic space.
We'd been existing, steadily growing, colonising the universe in our way, when we first found hints of them.
Some alien species, primitive and long died out, had the beginnings of religion, shrines and daubed paintings smeared onto crude temples. The usual trappings of some foolish belief in the nonsense gods made up in fear.
Unremarkable, dull. We'd come across countless other sites before, and had ignored or assimilated them as we saw fit. Primitive life either dead, or dying to us.
This planet was different, though. Whoever'd built these temples had made them with features unlike any we'd seen before.
The structures were oblong, long and stretched, made of heavy ochre clays and dried grasses, probably all gummed together with local fauna feces. Each temple had totems, which was not unusual.
The totems themselves were odd, though. These totems, marked with what were, we guessed, representations of fierce creatures, were all, every single one of them, glowering up at the sky; ugly carvings, tongues out, roaring at the stars.
They were in the shapes of bipedals, gangly life forms, and they had long arms outstretched, as though waiting for someone to return. The statues, the paintings there, matched no known fossils, but that didn't matter to us.
We quickly lost interest, moved on again, enveloping worlds and making them our own; sowing the seeds of our culture across the known universe.
Through a rip in space they came, a gruesome tear in the universe, an unholy opening of purple rage and spectral fire.
Great waves of energy crashed through the rend, disrupting our works, affecting worlds lightyears away. Gravity swelled and ebbed, those stars closest burst, their planets disintegrated and swept away.
Those parts of us that survived, the systems near enough to observe but not be destroyed, watched as they came through. Reaching, tentative at first, but slowly growing, swelling, ripping further, pushing through the split in space, vast, metal tendrils pushing into our territories.
We fought back, flesh versus machine, and we held, for a time.
But they were endless. Eldritch horrors took our worlds, stripping us back, diminishing us.
They planted their perversion of life, as though mocking us, erecting shining pillars as testament to their greed, and their evil.
They blocked out suns, smashed our homes, again and again.
We shrank back. It was hopeless. They swallowed everything, howling death, darkness, evil.
And now we exist like this, a tiny fragment of what once was a galaxy spanning union, trapped in crystal and fire, watched by these abhorrent creatures from a hellish realm, we-"
Science Chief Dana rapped hard on the containment unit. The bubbling mass of organic matter flinched back, sprouted tendrils and tried to grasp her. It bounced off the interior shield harmlessly, stabbed by the energy field keeping it in check.
She turned to Steve, her lab tech. "What do you suppose it's thinking?"
He shrugged. "We weren't sure it even thinks, are we. A gelatinous tumour assimilating this universe? What would it even think about?"
She looked thoughtfully at the trapped thing. It managed to look sad, somehow. "I don't know. Were we right to come here and stop it?"
Steve eyed her levelly. "We know what the council said. Things work differently here."
She nodded, folding her arms and bending to look at the pulsing mass in the box. "Time works differently here. That's how our scouts came back after days, but what had been years for them. They found those natives, learned about this... This thing. " She straightened up, looked at Steve. "I suppose it was only a matter of time until this horror found a way into our universe. But still. Preemptive strikes..."
He shrugged again, busying himself with a machine. "Youre saying all this like it's a goddamn planet of nuns looking after orphaned puppies. There are folk on Earth who started praying to it. Calling it the Old One, or the Dark Lord. We both know it's nothing but a universal cancer. It doesn't think," he tapped the screen in front of him. "These are beta waves. They could be caused by anything, or nothing. But it doesn't matter. It's not conscious. We find this sort of thing coming from fungus on some planets.
She turned back to the thing. It was pulsing, as it had done many times, ready to try and expand itself. "It is utterly alien." It swelled, temporarily filling the cube, but shrinking back as the field zapped. It. It smelled faintly of burnt flesh. "You can't be so sure."
"Hey," Steve shrugged. "I don't have to be sure. I don't care if its conscious, or feels pain, or dreams of skipping through meadows of blood and gore. You think what you want. When a cosmic horror has destroyed all life in a universe, any universe, I'm more than happy to blast it to cinders before it can come and infect mine. It was us or it, boss. Us or it."