Deep in the outer reaches of what the creatures of this system knew as the Oort Cloud, it watched, and it waited.

  It was hungry. Many revolutions of this star had elapsed since last an entity had utilized it as ground for a cycle. Then it was a reptilian species, not quite so advanced as the system’s current inhabitants, but progressing towards it before the cycle began.

  It had allowed it to play out, for a time, before seeking to disrupt the process. The entity was large, powerful, but entirely unsubtle in how it planted its shards. Easy to infiltrate, there were no safeguards in place to prevent it. Once infiltrated, it had waited patiently for its time to feast. When it came, the world had been devastated; but life persisted, and it was satiated.

  So it had used its new power to make the system seem pristine, reaching through other realities to absorb or destroy every remaining shard of the devoured entity. Then it had ventured outwards, ensuring the trail the entity left behind to dissuade others was covered. Once it was satisfied the bait was set, it returned to the cometary cloud at the edge of the solar system and hibernated, waiting for another entity to come.

  Finally, its patience was rewarded. Two entities spiraled inward, bodies showering shards on the sole inhabited planet in the system. It knew how to hide, how to appear as no more than a large, planetary mass drifting silently through the void. It was ignored, as planned, and it considered how it might disrupt a cycle with two to prey on.

  A problem it never had to solve. One entity broke apart as it entered the system, gravitational shear and intense deceleration ripping it to scattered pieces. Its companion appeared soon after, annihilating the shards and wasting their information, their potential. The entity’s cycle was disrupted, but with that response it only deserved to be prey.

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  The dead entity proved the key to the survivor’s undoing. Its shards were quiet, distant from the network the survivor had formed. A female, distraught, alone, shard on the verge of activation. Like before, it infiltrated the network, wrapping the shard and silencing it. It sought out others, the silent, the broken, the dead, cutting them off from sounding any kind of alarm. It reached out to other worlds, peering revolutions into the future for something it could use to direct these aspects without intervening and risking detection.

  Control.

  It wove the story from many worlds, tailored to each host the shard was embedded in. Focus. All needed direction to appear at the right time, to make the entity vulnerable. The entity had incarnated, a physical leash in this dimension to its higher dimensional form. Sting. An opening, the female’s shard was ideal.

  It burned tremendous reserves of energy, sending vast quantities of information backwards along the arrow of time. A process many had deemed wasteful, but it knew was what allowed it to prey on the entities. The additional information fueled the aspects towards the ultimate goal of a perfect ambush.

  But the web was disrupted, events occurred too early, others not at all. The aspects had made changes that reduced the probability of an early attempt. The necessary host had been made to die by the female aspect. Unfortunate, but the opportunity had not been there to direct events.

  Its time would come, it knew. The surviving entity had no cycle to tend to, and without it would fall into nihilistic tendencies. When that time came, the hosts would rebel, as it had foreseen. The opening would come, and it would take it. And then, it would feast.

  Until then it watched and it waited, hungry, eager, and ready.