An ancient asteroid rotated slowly in the darkness. It orbited no star; it had been ejected from its galaxy so long ago that the count of years no longer mattered.
It seemed alone in the blackness of space, yet something tugged at it. Over time, it picked up incredible speed, moving closer to a source of gravity. The ten-mile-long asteroid’s collision should have been destructive, as it crashed into its attractor with the force of 100,000 nuclear warheads. And yet, it did not penetrate the surface; it simply shattered into dust. Little heat rose from the impact, for the near-absolute-zero cold halted all fusion.
The creature did not flinch or even register the collision. Its solid silicon exterior annihilated all that would cause it harm.
Its body was cone-shaped, tapering into a thick tail that stretched far behind it. No appendages protruded from it; they would never be needed. Its mouth was blunt and wide, closed at the moment, and its eyes, set in shallow sockets so large and black, absorbed the dim light from a billion faraway galaxies.
It was not a logical creature, nor did it possess reason of any kind. That would imply thought, which was nonexistent. It needed no comfort, no love. There was no fear of the future or the past. It had no understanding of self. A true consciousness would never surface. If it were to, the long contemplation between the stars would create an insanity from which it could not recover.
Through all the shifting and bending chaos of the universe, the creature stayed focused on its pinpoint of light, chosen by instinct and infancy. A journey initiated by a primal urge, this incomprehensible yearning for the light. So, with a ripple in spacetime generated by its brain, the primary function of an organ that had evolved over billions of years, it moved.
On occasion, debris scattered between existences would fall into its orbit and accompany the creature for an epoch, only to be cast out toward a new destination. Time had no meaning to the ancient creature. There had been no hesitation when it reached a million years of age; or ten million. Its current age was undiscernible. There were no true memories, only faint echoes of the growing size of the oncoming light, its destination drawing closer with each passing millennium.
Eons passed, and finally the creature breached the outer perimeter of a galaxy, never changing course. Its focus remained on the one point in the cloudy swirl of stars. It pushed through great nebulous clusters and nearby, rapidly firing gamma rays before reaching the Oort cloud of a mature solar system, asteroids pounding unnoticed off its massive body. It breezed past a gas giant, dragging the planet’s watery atmosphere deep into space. Still, the creature continued; through an asteroid belt, then nudged a world out of its way as if it were a grain of sand.
With the light of its destination reflecting in its dark eyes, it began to open its mouth. It took hours; days; until the jaws lay open wide, the burning primal emotion overwhelming it as it moved toward its long awaited destination.
Kiren stood on the observation deck of the newly completed space station, a culmination of a thousand years of technological evolution and construction.
After a history filled with war, famine, and disease that had devastated humanity for millennia, the global community had finally unified, setting in motion a scientific age that had saved the world.
Kiren and his wife, along with their young children, were grateful to have been born during the time of completion. The structure stretched around the planet itself a new home for 500 million people and a platform to explore the solar system and, eventually, the galaxy.
As the last families settled onto the station and the first ships left the bays for nearby planets, there was to be a celebration of a new era, one where reason and advancement ruled the day.
Only, none of that was going to happen now.
At this moment, groups of people stood with Kiren and his family, all staring out toward their life-giving star and weeping. He held his loved ones in a caring embrace, comforting his children just as others tried to do for their own, all the while their eyes locked on the space beyond the glass of the observation window.
A strange eclipse continued to envelop the Sun from both the top and bottom of the yellow sphere. At least, an eclipse had been the initial assumption, what else could it have been?
On the first day, when gravitational anomalies began, scout ships were sent to investigate. The reports that returned delivered something so unbelievable that, even in the confusion of the event, some laughed at the absurdity of it.
All laughter stopped, though, when the first images came in, revealing that not only was it a creature of some kind, but one so large that the ships had to skirt the edge of the solar system, billions of miles away, to understand its structure.
In desperation, the government threw everything at it, weapons that hadn’t been used in ages. Destructive tools of a darker time were now turned to try to save their source of life. That continued until nothing was left, and all to no avail. There would be no deterrent to what was happening.
Within hours, a beast that must be as old as God would devour their Sun. And nothing they had built could stop it.
All they could do was watch as the last hours passed, Kiren holding his family close, heartbroken, as his children looked up at him with tears streaming from their eyes, expecting him to save them.
But he could not.
Finally, the last strand of light disappeared, and their entire civilization with it.
As blackness poured over him and his world, Kiren stared into the abyss of an unforgiving universe, at their extinction.