The Dawn's Death

	The fateful day.

	Interactions had been quiet for a few days, uncharacteristically so. The Argent had built up snowballing momentum that brought them barreling towards the last remnants of society, the last few stragglers that managed to survive pinned to the edges of the galaxy, who spent weeks glancing at the almost infinite sea of void beyond the galaxy's boundaries. Some had already begun to prepare for this eventuality, but the sudden and mysterious halting of the Argent—one which would later be explained by the implosion of the Thread’s network and the massive damage this caused to the Null—gave some pause.

	Just as the Argent war machine rattled and whirred back to life, just as the rising sun had begun to surge over the horizon and burn all that fell under its glow as ever before, something strange happened.

	Those deep in the Argent territory felt it the most. In burrows and bunkers, the surge was strong and dazzling; many exposed to it simply came to a halt, staring emptily into space and absorbing a presence they’d often felt, but never so strongly. Some reported strange visions, especially those outside—all those gazing upon a sun saw as if tendrils of shifting blue and black reached from below the skyline and tore the light violently from the sky.

	Some say that the entire galaxy fell under that trance, even the machines, staring at empty skies and experiencing a new and strange silence that had replaced the overwhelming psionic emissions the Argent produced. Others, though, described it as the breaking of a trance, the waking from a nightmare, as the dread was torn out of them by force and replaced by a sudden and acute awareness of their newfound loneliness in the galaxy.

	Though the suns rose again when the strange hallucinations faded, the feeling of loneliness and sharp awareness had not. Hundreds of vessels set out to tentatively root through the ruins of the Argent, searching for any trace of them; though their buildings stood proudly, shimmering silver and baleful dawn, they were empty and dead.

	There was no sign of a struggle, nothing except strange, dark marks inside each building. The chambers in which the Central Cores resided were consumed with depthless roiling black and blue, but tests proved futile as it was quickly discovered to be ethereal and perhaps spatial in nature. Some of what would have once been the more populated buildings had tendrils, scratches, fractures of blue and black energy.

	The Sixth’s chamber was the worst. It shared its base with the nearby Null, and where they once existed, the walls had become pitch black and unnavigable. No light reflected off of any surface in any of the buildings even adjacent to those in which both were kept, and even massive swathes of the barren, rocky world on which they had been hidden were marred by this same spatial scarring. Any such surface subjected to any kind of force could not be moved or changed, and tools simply seeped into the darkness as though being driven into immensely viscous material.

	To this day, no one is truly sure what force is responsible for consuming so thoroughly the Argent that even the concept of the Dawn seemed to die with them for a day or two, but many theories exist. The strange phenomena that marked Argent bases were unprecedented and difficult to test or identify, being little more than a unique form of spatial scarring.

	Is there something worse than the Argent out there, whose baleful and jagged teeth, sharp enough to cut holes into space itself, rest at the galaxy’s throat, ready to clamp down at any moment?