Also the Breath of the Gods, which is a C'tan stellar engineering device. Some of its feats include:
- Creating a zone of gravity anomalies light-years wide that destroys anything that tries to enter it. This includes gravity fields that could crush a planet into a molecule-sized grain.
- Rewinding time so that stars at the end of their life cycle can be renewed or accelerating it so that they die out or go supernova.
- Harnessing a miniature big bang as a power source, described to pale the gravity storm in terms of energies being thrown around.
- Arranging stars to form geometric shapes.
The Halo Scar. No one knew how it had come into existence, a graveyard of stars aged beyond their time and a region of gravitational hellstorms that bent the local spacetime by orders of magnitude. Navigators who strayed too close to the Scar with their third eye exposed were killed instantly, their hearts stopped dead mid-beat. Astropaths caught in a nuncio trance went mad, screaming and clawing at their skulls as if to expunge horrors they could never put into words.
Even those who looked with mortal eyes began to see things in its tortured depths. Gravitational crush pressures that would compress entire planets to a molecule-sized grain in a heartbeat twisted and distorted the passage of light and time with a reckless and random disregard for causality.
To approach the wound that lapped at the edge of the Imperium a ship had to blind itself to the realities beyond those perceived by mortal senses, and even then it was dangerous to approach too closely. The Speranza had halted three AU from the edge of the Halo Scar, and Saiixek was already having to increase engine output to maintain their position as questing tendrils of gravity sought to pull them into the Scar's embrace.
A maddened froth of relativistically colliding light and time painted a bleak picture across the far wall of the Speranza's command deck. From one side to the other, an entoptic representation of the Halo Scar's immense and impossibly tempestuous depths seemed to mock the gathered magi, as if daring them to explain it or venture a hypothesis as to how it might be navigated. Streams of hyper-dense gaseous matter flailed at the edges, hard enough to cut through a capital ship like a hot wire through thin plastek. Billowing clouds of flexing light reached out like the tendrils of some deep sea cephalopod hunting for prey.
Colours boiled and spontaneously altered their electromagnetic wavelengths with each passing second, and swirling eddies of distorting gravity threw up images of dying stars, cascading streams of debris from the birth of those self-same stars. Light from the same star registered over and over again as it was bent tortuously by the unimaginable gravitational forces, juddering through spacetime in multiple waves. Digital hallucinations of celestial madness flickered in and out of focus as the protesting imaging machines struggled to represent the impossible region of space before them.
Only afterwards would any coherent picture of events surrounding the destruction of Katen Venia emerge, and even that proved to be fragmentary, contradictory and almost unbelievable.
Moments before the rapidly expanding energy shockwave exploded outwards from the doomed world, every square metre of ray shielding and every functional void pylon ignited across the Speranza. Every ship of the Kotov fleet found its shields flare into life and its external augurs shut down at the same moment, each captain at a loss as to the source of the initiating command.
The surging explosion of high energy flux, huge particle densities and pressures slammed past the Kotov fleet, scattering its ships like a spiteful warp fluctuation. Saiixek's work to re-orientate the Speranza did much to mitigate the damage of the blast wave; the sheer mass of the Ark Mechanicus allowed it to ride out the worst of the explosion's force. The very proximity of the fleet to Katen Venia isolated it within the eye of an outward-rushing bow wave of exotic particles, compressed gravity waves and unknowable forces.
Almost as soon as the blast wave passed over the fleet, a phase transition occurred, causing an exponential expansion of remodelled space-time. Passive auspex on the external surfaces of the Speranza registered an ultra-rapid spike in temperature caused by the high-energy photon density. Particle/antiparticle pairs of all descriptions were being instantaneously created and destroyed in violent collisions of sub-atomic matter ― and only one other instant in history had achieved such a violent moment of creation.
But this was no creation of a universe, this was that force harnessed by incomparably ancient technology and bent to another purpose altogether.
Alone and isolated, the ships of the Kotov fleet battened down the hatches and rode out the storm of unleashed energies, fighting to hold their position in a ferocious upheaval of system-wide gravitational fluxions that could tear them apart in a heartbeat.
Compared to the forces of matter transition being wielded in the Arcturus Ultra system, the titanic power of the Halo Scar paled in comparison. Tossed and swatted through space like leaves in a storm and not knowing if any of the other vessels were still alive, each captain fought to keep their ship intact until the fury of this stellar event was spent.
It took a further seven hours before the raging swells of high-energy particles and hyper-charged gravitational wavefronts had dissipated enough for any of the fleet vessels to risk deploying surveyor arrays. Travelling at near light-speed, whatever had exploded from Katen Venia would certainly have reached the star at the heart of the system by now. Having weathered the storm better than most, the Speranza was first to tentatively probe the void in an attempt to learn what had just happened.
Via a series of buffered servitor-proxies, Magos Azuramagelli eased the Ark Mechanicus's senses out into space, sampling the local spatial volume for extreme thermoclines and harmful radiations. Given the existing chaotic nature of the dying system and the violence of the eruption from Katen Venia, he expected to find space lousy with squalling particle storms, volatile neutron flow and a background hash of electromagnetic noise that would render much of surrounding space virtually impenetrable to auspex.
What he found was far stranger, far more unexpected, and utterly unbelievable.
Arcturus Ultra was no longer a dying red giant, a bloated destroyer in its last incarnation before its explosive death as a supernova.
Now it burned as a life-sustaining main sequence star.
Glittering bands of metallic debris, rubble and coalescing gases surrounded the newly rejuvenated sun, the building blocks of planets. Gravity and time would do the rest of the work, and though millions of years might pass before worlds capable of sustaining life could form, such spans were the blink of an eye to a galaxy.
Katen Venia had gone, destroyed in the very act of creation it had propagated.
Only one impossible, yet inescapable conclusion presented itself.
The shock wave of unimaginably vast energies had been the corollary to an immensely powerful stellar engineering event centred upon the Tomioka. The sensory-occluding fields of stellar debris and radiation ejected from the dying star that had hidden what lay beyond the system was gone as though it had never existed, and Azuramagelli's surveyors registered the presence of numerous systems with glowing stars of just the right mass and heat for sustaining life.
All arranged in a celestial alignment that was too perfect and too geometric to be accidental.
Credits to: Blackout
https://forums.spacebattles.com/thr...nvaders-stellaris.525346/page-3#post-36825511