While Bath was staring into the depths of the gate, Lisa was in a coma-like stasis, Lepochim was focusing his attentions on Bath, and the many Ritus mind-manipulators—kursi—were frantically fleeing their former headquarters, a far off entity sighed gently into the cosmos.

The stars were a vast and impenetrable barrier for the entity, and yet...it could feel the tuggings of itself far off into the distance. It sensed itself, and yet this self wasn’t fully its own. Little pieces of it were spinning about, moving haphazardly through the vast beyond, distances too far to travel, unless you had trillions of years...unless you had unlimited time to watch as fragments of self rode the expansion of the universe like a giant, cresting wave.

This entity thought of time in terms of cycles, and thought of different places as epicenters of unique cyclical activity. The entity had grown bored after its billionth year watching its nuclear world cycle over and over again. Cycles were, after all, quite predictable. So, the entity spread itself out, expanding its reach far past its small, local sphere of influence. Curiosity was the impetus for this expansion, but inertia was all that drove the entity’s small selves into motion after their initial launch. Every day, for million of billions of years...the entity sent flakes of itself rocketing off into the distance at every minute angle.

In the beginning, for the first few thousand or million years—the entity lacked an accurate comprehension of time—the entity found little of interest in the void beyond. Some of its particles dove into stars and black holes, to be incinerated or devoured. Other particles crashed onto asteroids and planets. Most places had cycles that lasted billions of years: to the entity, these places held no interest. They were dead, without self-assembling autonomous constructs.

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The entity did, however, find a few worlds that resembled its own. These had cycles that twisted in and out like a giant spiral of time, a vast, uncoiled circle. The circles differed in diameter, with some cycles stretching millions of years, other billions...there were even a few volatile worlds that seemed to rapidly change every few thousand years, though these also bored the entity because the volatility kept the autonomous constructs fairly...undeveloped.

Over time, the entity’s particles found constructs that had the capacity to function as an extension of the entity’s self. In general, it used these particle connections as a way to perceive the new worlds and their cycles in new and exciting ways.

After a trillion years, the entity was discovering new worlds every day, many of them with developed life. It felt like all its time was devoted to the exploration of differentiated development across the stars. The entity’s heart swelled with the beauty of this world, at the forces that controlled the birth of the many worlds it now touched.

The entity looked over all of creation—at least all that it had yet discovered—and was content to watch and wander.