A creature that moved like Cradle’s agent had, slithering in and out of space, parts of it distorting and seeming to exist apart from the broader entity, until it slithered further in our world. Like a great snake crossed with a whale, crossed with an optical illusion, writ in black crystal, and shedding a constant trail of dust behind it. It was only visible as it passed by a sun, and the edges of it caught the light of that sun.

“Hi there,” I said, my heart pounding. “You weren’t in the pictures people drew.”

“There’s more?” Chris asked, rising from his seat. “What the shit?”

“Can we go back?” I asked. I made it declarative. “Go back. Uh… earlier in this thing’s history.”

“It’s a life cycle,” Five said.

“Previous life in the cycle,” I said.

The image changed.

What I saw was chaos. A dense world, where everything was moving and alive. There were things that resembled spiders, there were things that looked like slugs. Some were small, some were as big as buildings.

And they were using what looked like built-in spears to puncture one another, fluids pouring out.

“I’ve seen some of that before,” Number Five said.

“What the hell kind of messed up Case Fifty-Three porn are you watching? At your age?” Chris asked.

Sveta unfurled her arm, reaching toward Chris with tendrils. Alarmed, he backed away several steps, until he was at the edge of the island.

“Was it a Case Fifty-Three?” Sveta asked, quiet.

“No. A cape,” Number Five said. “Traumatic insemination. Traumatic egg-laying. It looks like natural trait across this species.”

“They’re different species,” Chris said. “A planet where every species can breed with every species. It looks like a good number are intelligent.”

“In what way does it look that way?” Rain asked. “Christ.”

“They’re communicating,” Chris said, with quiet confidence.

“What is the species of this life cycle fighting, near the end? Ten rotations around their sun prior to the world ending,” I asked.

It was a similar scene.

But they were fighting something that looked like a conch shell, with holes running through it. Tentacles flowed out and through the massed ‘warriors’, that I would have likened to animal predators on our earth. Spider-like, wolf-like, cat-like, but streamlined down, sleek, without the key traits I would point to in a spider, wolf, or cat. Incredibly varied, from one to the next.

“Endbringer equivalent or Titan equivalent?” Byron asked.

“Looks like,” I said. “Show us the end. Last significant fight of that particular life cycle.”

The scene changed, and it was chaos. The world was cracked open, and the cracks glowed. The massed things were interconnected, webbed together, so that one mob of creatures fighting were extensions of one another. Some or all had powers.

“Previous cycle,” I said. “Tenth-to-last rotation of their planet around their sun, a fight.”