Long before crawling out of the gravity wells of their home stars, most species of the Galaxy understand what lay above them in the heavens. Before history even began, they named the stars, found patterns and meaning in them, looked at the specks of light in the sky that moved and took pride in being able to predicted them.
The heavens were wild and fantastic, the place where gods battled amongst one another, where the heroes of old were laid to rest, where the young dreamed to travel.
Sailors, merchants, travelers alike would follow the heavens, the farmers and clocks were set to the far-off lights and movements of the celestial.
The curiosity to see more of what the universe had to offer did not die in any species who would one day travel the stars. Those species without would toil in the dirt until their extinction nowhere close enough to sentient to understand what they were missing.
So, armed with the most primitive of lenses the species would look upwards and discover. The moving stars, more distant planets very much like, and very alien to the one they stood on. Seeing they moved on to understanding.
Why did the planets move, why did we not feel it, how did the stars appear, where did they come from?
Just looking up into the sky would not reveal the answers, but even so they wanted to know. So the rules of the universe were written down. Crudely at first, in vague and imprecise tongues. The Universe though has a single universal language she teaches those who are willing to study. The mathematics, formula of everything in existence, written out in dirt, in base five, base thirty, paper, parchment, stone, and metal are all the same.
Soon the work of those looking up into the heavens was not to find the new, but verify that which was written, that which has been discovered whenever some new rule or exception was found in the calculations. To look up where the mathematics of reality clearly showed a hidden planet, to look through the crude instruments and just barely make out that new moving star.
The mathematics of the Universe continued to bless those who find them, giving them energy, understanding, influence. None could break them, but understanding the rules, the why was more than enough for most.
Understanding though, carries it’s own risks.
The Universe is not kind.
Sometimes it was one brilliant mind who first looked at the mathematics and saw the possibility. Sometimes it was a group of the determined working together, on a few terrifying occasions it was a lone student hardly understanding what they are discovering interested only in seeing what the bounds of the rules for reality are.
What happens when gravity the weakest of the forces, is dominant?
Marfuni.
Sig’sa’al.
Vaz.
Ku-tal.
Black Holes.
The point where reality, breaks. Where the Universe is exposed, space bends, time stops, and the mathematics of explaining fail. The monstrous annihilation once seen in the stars, so long ago, was real.
The first vicarial reaction was denial. The genius looking over calculations for the misplaced value. The groups of physicist’s chuckling, looking at one another to blame for the mistake. The board student looks at their work and berates themselves for being so stupid.
The numbers were checked.
The numbers were re-checked.
The equations were rederived.
The equations were wrong, they had to be.
Desperate to be wrong, the telescopes were turned upwards once more. Not towards the stars, or the far off galaxies, or the very echo of reality forming at the edge of all things, but on the darkness between the lights in the dark.
The mathematicians waited, desperately hoping to be proven wrong, to not find any evidence of the places where reality ceased, and the fundamental forces of gravity rendered time and space meaningless.
But they were right. Their figures, the models of reality so meticulously crafted were correct. How could they not be, the minds of generations had conceived them, the labor of a million more minds had checked every facet.
The annihilators were among the stars. Ripping into some, paired to others, drifting across the endless voids, sitting in the hearts of galaxies, combining and propagating across the heavens.
For a moment each of the species driven to understand would hesitate. The dreams of exploring the stars and finding others would fade, replaced by the horrific knowledge of what would happen to anyone, anything, that neared the annihilators.
Not even light could escape. The limit to their expansion, the limit that was so close but impossible to reach bowed to the annihilation.
The fear faded, eventually, but never completely disappeared from the minds of any species that reached out into the stars. As the sailors manning ships made for the slow trips between the stars and relativistic jaunts through time spread their species out amongst the stars the annihilators were avoided at all costs. Some even tried to forget what lay in the darkness.
Every unexplained loss of a million souls on the ships was blamed on them, the monsters in the darkness that hungered for all, devouring light and bending time to their whim.
The galaxy spun. Ships explored. Empires rose, Federations were founded to oppose them, both fell to the slow march of time. Kingdoms of stars, Republics of trillions living only between stars on ancient ships rose, only to disband and fall to rebellions.
The galaxy spun. The annihilators in the dark grew unconcerned.
Ships explored. Empires, federations, confederations, unions, companies, rose and claimed the galaxy, and were forgotten. Only the oldest sailors, spending so much time between the stars and moving with light remembering, and forgetting.
Then galaxy spun.
Time marched on.
An annihilator ignited. It’s darkness replaced by a dim glow.
Then another.
And another.
It had been slow at first, on the outer edge of the galaxy. In only the faintest of reds, heat began to bleed off of one. It was curiosity, but then the old monsters were bound to have a quirk or two.
Another annihilator ignited.
The first ignited annihilators grew brighter, energy pouring out of them. Light visible enough that for the first time the species still crawling up from the dirt of their home worlds could see them, and mistake them for stars.
Humanity.
They had made the same calculations. Came up with the same figures. Recoiled in horror when they had first seen them above. They comprehended the annihilators long before most did, accepting that the time and space which had been so stable throughout the rest of their history were in fact settled upon sand.
Humanity understood that the annihilators were death.
Humanity was not comfortable with death, Humanity did not welcome death, humanity had been far too familiar with death before reaching the stars. So finding it incarnated in the stars did not scare them.
Seeing annihilation in the heavens only spurred them onwards. Like a petulant child, being denied only hardened their resolve.
So humanity did not reach out for the stars, but instead towards the darkness. Not to join it, not to accept it, not to succumb to it, but to replace it.
Around the forces of pure destruction, Humanity alone flourished.
Constructs of brutal efficiency and pragmatic safety, shells of unmatched strength, incomprehensible artistic colonies, heaps of scrap and refuse. Humanity lit the darkest points of the galaxy, living close enough to the event horizons to cement themselves not only in space but time. Humans lived to see the galaxy spin, to watch as decendents settled every other annihilator, lighting them up to mock death in all it’s forms.
Humanity tamed annihilation, for long enough to spare a few species the horror of seeing them in the nigh sky above.
Discontent even with that accomplishment, Humanity wrangled the energy of the black-holes and launched expeditions towards other galaxies, trillions of souls aboard the ships, whole galactic communities with histories as rich as any other developing and falling in the time a Human aboard might grow from a curious child to a determined adult.
Humanity was not immune to the fall of civilization, whole fleets of them would fall prey to the annihilation they harnessed, for millions of years and turns of the galaxy the lights surrounding the segments of annihilation they lit would be extinguished.
Yet, more Humans, a little different than the ones before would arrive and relight the flames of defiance.
Millions of civilizations, trillions of souls, across the entirety of the ever shrinking universe asked Humans why.
The Humans would point to the mathematics, to the equations longer lived than their original star. Humanity was so comfortable around annihilation because it was all around them, eventually all would die, even the black holes.
The universe was heading towards oblivion, destruction far more permanent than anything black holes could inflict. Every planet, star, galaxy, black hole, particle, was doomed to be torn asunder by space and time.
They did not know how to change it, but until they did they would defy every incarnation of death.
At home among the darkness, next to death, unbound from time and space, Humanity would endure.
Humanity will not go silent into the final night.