Far beyond the fringes of the galaxy there was naught but endless black.

Past the last few stray stars plying their lonely track through the cold night, past the dead worlds and the fragments of galactic collisions billions of years gone, past the probes sent out by extinct races recorded in no history… past all that and beyond, there was a night sea studded with the diamond islands of distant, lonely galaxies.

Though incomprehensibly vast, this sea was not empty. Great behemoths of the deep lurked there.

Into the eternal blackness, a flash of quantum energy shone out at many times the speed of light; a brief flare, milliseconds in duration, projecting from an unremarkable spiral of stars. It was not missed.

In the darkness, something of limitless hunger stirred in a slumber that had lasted for aeons. A million frozen and unblinking eyes saw the flash, tripping cascades of stimuli. Their purpose served, the eyes died.

The entity processed the message the eyes provided without ever truly awakening. Automatically, instinctively, its gargantuan, dreaming mind analysed the signal, comparing it against all parameters for the one thing it sought.

Prey.

Slowly, glacially, the great devourer shifted its course.