It looked like a wound on the world. Crimson and ragged-edged, like something that once lived but was then torn asunder. I should have stayed away. Had I the senses to taste the air of this planet, I imagine it would have reeked with some kind of alien fetor, but nothing could stall my curiosity.

Was it dead? Where I touched it, the surface was moist and yielding. It seemed to become motile then, crawling on a mat of slow cilia, moving from me. I should have left it alone.

-----

I glimpsed the crimson orb between the clouds. A vast and baleful eye, unblinking and monstrous. Fear turned the blood in my veins to ice. I was so afraid it would see me, but then the clouds moved and it was gone. I was no longer certain if it had ever been real.

Perhaps the fungal deposits from the last world I visited are still clogging my exosuit vents. Affecting my cognition somehow. I have cleaned my filters six times now. But I still feel it inside me.

-----

I found a body. It's unlike anything I have ever seen. If there's a species like it, then I hope they're all dead like this one. At first I thought it some tragic remnant of a matter-transfer tech malfunction: a cage of bones and flesh studded with random patterns of crooked teeth and rheumy, lidless eyes. But no.

Some horror of twisted evolution, warped by cruel nature. I can't help but picture what it would have looked like alive. I cannot help but fear that it will live again.

-----

The oceans here are blood. Nothing lives in them; they are alive themselves. Great protean life forms as large as continents... or perhaps there is only one of them. What does such a thing consume, I ask myself? The answer seems to be everything.

I found evidence of past life here, but no signs of it. Does the native flora and fauna hibernate when it comes to eat them, then return and repopulate once it retreats? I can feel it moving inside my brain whispering. It wants me to discard my suit and swim.

-----

I awoke from a dream where I was drowning in something thick and glutinous. It filled my pores and suffocated me. I want to believe that this is my tired mind playing tricks. I have been so long without deep sleep.

The crimson sphere shimmers at the corner of my eye whenever I try to rest. I cannot comprehend how it tracks my spoor from world to world. Or is it that I am following it? The orb cannot be in all places at once. That cannot be.

-----

Is this what we become? At each turn on my journey I find only more to taint my spirit and my flesh. The fanged maws erupt around me when my back is turned. I hear them chattering and spitting. Sometimes they scream sounds that may be words. Perhaps my name.

I haven't removed my exosuit in many cycles. I'm afraid to look at my own skin. I know it will be seething, pus-wet and pitted. I have become a vector of infection. The corruption of something ruinous lives in my flesh. Don't come looking for me.

What are the Sentinels? They appear on countless worlds without summons or warning, they traverse the galaxy unopposed and enforce their will upon every sentient being they encounter. Who made them? Who gave them the will to police the stars and demand that we bow to their silent rules?

The goal of the experiment was to learn the answers to these questions. It began on an uncharted world beneath a blue-white sun, far from the axis of civilization. The first drone screamed when it was cut open.

-----

Where do the Sentinels come from? No ships are ever seen arriving to deposit them, yet we know they have spatial drives and can appear on any planet. Do they build themselves from resources on the worlds that they infest? Like a mechanoid virus, drawing on the host body to metastasize new matter?

Korvax science speaks of metals in their makeup that should not exist in our age of the universe. No-one has ever seen them built. They are simply here, as if the universe expresses them into existence.

-----

There is a world - turned to dust long before the rise of the Vy'keen - where the natives turned against the Sentinels. They chafed under the omnipresent eyes of the machines. Resentment begat violence. Drones were destroyed.

More natives fought, and so came the bipeds, the quadrupeds, the interceptors in the sky. These and more. Soon there was war; and still the machines came, in exponential growth until at last they ended a species as a punishment. Still, the Galaxy refused to learn from this...'

-----

Is there a connection between the monoliths and the Sentinels? The origins of these ancient structures seem to predate all known civilization, although over time they have become imbued with the beliefs and the histories of the creatures that evolved around them.

What if there was a precursor species that came before us all? Imagine one of such infinite knowledge and interstellar power that even after extinction has erased their traces, their tools remain for us to pore over, like an infant confronted with a fusion reactor.

-----

When there is no explanation for a phenomena, it is a natural progress for intelligent beings to fill in the missing parts of their experience. On some worlds, the Sentinels are still worshipped as avatars of an all-seeing deity. Drones are considered sacred, sent by an unseen God to ensure that they live in enforced harmony with the environment around them.

There is a disturbing commonality to many elements of their theologies; a recurring visual symbol of a crimson sphere and the promise of an end time soon to unfold.

-----

The experiment's final phase emerged from frustration. We wanted to learn something new. We wanted to know how they worked. We wanted to see inside them. An untested dimensional-warping process was used, one we believed would allow us to capture a drone intact. We would cage it, keep it docile. It was our error to believe we could.

The machines co-opted the warp-tech and turned it upon us. In the horror of it all, our flesh was merged with their metal. Our questions were finally answered.

There is a world in the great void where all things are made of razors and glass. Pity anything of simple, soft flesh that goes there. The glass is thirsty. It is brittle and crystalline, and so very beautiful to behold - but it must drink.

You will go there and you will forget my warning. Then it will cut you with an edge so fine that you will feel no pain, and only as your life gushes out to dampen the cracked and broken landscape will this come back to you. Too late. Too late.

-----

Beneath their skin, they had placed tiny seeds of the glass, which took on the appearance of strange, ritualistic scarring. The nubs of the broken crystal were ancient, ground down and polished by generations before them. They fed them their life, and in return the crystals glowed with emerald fires and brought them closer to their fate.

I would listen to them talk of worlds they could never have seen, in alien tongues that their body was not made to utter. The glass made them something more than they were, a vessel for intelligences utterly unlike us.

-----

The orb rests within its cage-cloak of crystal in so many guises. The angles of the shroud are utterly perfect. When measured, no device of known science can determine any flaws, any variation in surface even down to the molecular level.

I have tried time and again to get close enough to touch it, but it retreats from me. I am not worthy to know its secrets yet. My mind must be opened wider. The layers of me revealed and peeled back in sections. There is no other path open. I have already begun to cut upon the skein.

-----

If one can see clearly enough, you will come across a crystal and learn that it is made, not of atoms and molecules, but of thought and gravity and numbers. You must go deep. Come and see, I beseech you. More than I must know of this, if only to spread the word and warn the other species.

Tell it to all. Write it in every language you know, etch it in stone, scream it in song but never be silent. I tel you; I have seen what lies beneath the surface of everything. The brittle grid of reality crumbles.

-----

It is here and not here. We reach for the mastery of the galaxy but we do not understand the truth. What if I told you that time is the drug that keeps us docile and unquestioning? There is no now and then, there is no today or yesterday. This is an illusion reflected in glass, patterns of untruth that the universe uses to laugh at us.

We are not meant to see such things. Our smaller minds rebel at concepts so unimaginably vast that they cannot be held in a single thought. It is how it controls us.

I will cut open space. My Heart is filled with regret, but there is nothing else to be done. I find only darker roads and glassy, endless chasms ranged before me. It is for the best. The lacerated, blade-filled path is the truth and I am unable to deny it. In time, there will come daring souls far cleverer than I who will learn from my errors.

I forge the way for the ones to come after. I walk barefoot on shards of broken reality, into the infinite and shattering forever. At the heart of it, the secret awaits me.

-----

My comms hub detected a garbled message sent with strange resonance qualities. Not unusual, given the atypical qualities of local space-time in this quadrant.

Systems spent several cycles attempting to reconstruct the missing elements of the message to no avail. Analysis indicates that the signal shows signs of degradation corresponding to initial transmission occurring before the planet I orbit was even formed. And yet my name is spoken clearly amid the static and distortion.

-----

I traded with a Korvax Entity I met on Ikdlak. The sentient offered refined rods of Chrysonite as part-payment for various star-mapping datums recorded by my ship's sensor modules. In the process it encountered the anomalous message I detected several cycles ago.

I dismissed the signal as a chance event, a random coalescence of interference that happened to resemble a spoken voice. In truth, it had disturbed me. The Entity analysed the message in its own curiosity and revealed another layer beneath the audio component. A visual of a world with green skies and an obsidian moon.

-----

The mysterious message continues to prey upon my mind. With the aid of the Entity, I have learned that its temporal origin is approximately two to five thousand solar cycles from the now. I have narrowed down a point of transmission to a sector of space in the haze zone, close to the galactic anterior.

I realize now that to ignore the signal would be an error. It is incumbent upon me to trace it. In my more fanciful moments, I wonder if it might be a warning or a revelation. I have set a course.

-----

This will be my last recording for quite some time. I have refitted my vessel with a powerful Odvinsko hyperdrive and a cryogenic suspensor pod. It is my intention to enter a dormancy state in order to survive the journey to the distant source of the anomalous message.

I have nothing to hold me here. I have committed myself. While I sleep, I will listen to the signal. My resting mind may be able to parse yet more meaning from it.

-----

I awaken to discover that the planet from the image is gone. Only a belt of rubble surrounding a red giant star in the final stages of collapse remains. Whatever cataclysm killed this world took place before my species could walk upright.

But it is undeniable. The signal came from here. It carried my name amid its atonal song. I have crossed unimaginable distances to seek out the origin pointn. Sensors have detected a metallic mass embedded in one of the largest of the planet's fragments. It will take time, but I will be able to dig it out.

-----

The red giant consumes itself. The interactions between spatial shearing zones in the system are causing the formation of a singularity. Space-time is becoming malleable. I am unable to depart.

In the ashes of a dead world, I exhumed the corpse of the ship that had sent a message to me across the millennia, the ship that knew my name. Crushed and warped by unimaginable forces, I could barely recognize it. But I see a corroded Odvinsko hyperdrive, a cryo-pod. The same as my ship's.

My vessel is buried here. The voice is mine. I am warning myself.