The edge of the Andromeda spiral arm.
It was the spiral galaxy nearest to the Galaxy, roughly 2.5 million light-years away, appearing as an orange-red glow through telescopes.
But that had been before. Now, it had fallen into utter darkness, no longer emitting any light. Even its shape was incomplete.
This spiral galaxy, only half the size of the Galaxy, looked as though some terrifying existence had passed through it, leaving deep black streaks that ran across the entire galaxy.
As if something had simply devoured it.
Click, click.
An Adeptus Mechanicus deep-space observation platform floated in The Void. It bore a modified mechanical skull insignia, and, unusually, there was no trace of the Imperial Aquila.
The observation platform seemed to have discovered something. Its gears spun madly, belching black smoke as alarms blared without pause.
The Wetware engine operated at a horrifying speed, while the synthetic mucus around it steadily heated up. It had detected something beyond logic and was performing hundreds of millions of calculations per second to determine what it was.
At first, the image it captured was a diffuse dark-purple nebula, with blurry edges and profound darkness at its center, where the energy readings were even stronger.
But soon, it became completely black.
Nor was it a static thing. Its internal structure spun and shifted at high speed, beyond the bounds of normal physics, like an ever-changing vortex formed from countless tangled filaments. Wherever it passed fell into darkness.
It was a moving nebula hundreds of light-years across, hundreds of times the size of the central galaxy, capable of easily swallowing any star sector of the Human Federation.
More terrifyingly, that unknown nebular entity seemed to be curled up. If it stretched out, it might cover an even greater area!
"It's moving. Something deeper than darkness