The Lightspire had had its share of visitors over the years, in wave-cycles of varying intensity punctuated by long intervals of perfect desolation. All brave. All powerful. All dead. Most had been set upon by the Entity’s sentinels and torn to pieces. Several had been seized and transformed into yet more monstrous mockeries. In some cases she could have interceded.

None for millennia at first, for the Eldan’s intolerance for trespassers was notorious.

But as centuries wore on and their return came came to seem unlikelier, increasingly daring sorties were made by the ignorant and the rapacious who had forgotten. Little to her surprise, the first to try their luck had been the Osun. But by the fifth mountain she dropped on them, the survivors had become dissuaded.

There had also been the errant Megadroid investigating the faint pulse of one of his fallen comrades. She could have cloaked the planet from its view, erased its memory, and let it pass unmolested. Instead, under the Entity’s penetrating gaze, she’d lured it in, instantly disassembled it, and offered its brain to the Caretaker to puzzle over in the hopes that an intricate cogitative challenge would help with his recent instabilities. It hadn’t. And the only satisfaction this act of careless destruction had given her was glimpsing the Entity’s momentary surprise. She wanted him to witness it, know that she was capable of it. That her grievance with him transcended ideology. That it was personal.

Of the Cassians she had given no thought in generations, save the hope that their world was sufficiently distant to spare them the worst of the holocaust to come, for however brief an interval.

Then one day, while conducting her usual scans for notable phenomena, for reasons she couldn’t name she had cast her gaze outward, curious against all logic for developments from the galaxy’s most distant arches. And there she had found the hominid freezing to death in his tiny sliver of metal, adrift on the vast dark ocean.

Source: World Story