The Unnameable (Unfiltered)

I really need to get back to other things.

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The Unnameable (Unfiltered)

Who killed the Amalgamation? What killed the Amalgamation? That is the unanswered question. It may very well be an unanswerable question, for all that it is the most important one facing humanity. There are those who strenuously argue that the question should not be answered at all. What good could possibly come from solving the mystery? If an entire galactic civilization could not prevail against its murderer, what hope does humanity have?

That is a minority opinion, however. Most people take the position that it’s better to know the danger, if only because it could give humanity an idea of how to minimize the risks. They don’t obsess over the topic, though. Obsessing over it never ends well.

What Is Known

The scale was universal. Humanity has yet to find an occupied Amalgamation world that was not targeted. Even the smallest orbital platform or mining outpost was sought out.The attacks were simultaneous. Not quite perfectly: the central worlds were all struck at the same time, to the extent that this even means anything over interstellar distances, with outlying systems mopped up in an inexorable tide of xenocide. But the murder of the Amalgamation took no more than six standard Terran days.The destruction was thorough. No sapient life besides humanity survives in the former worlds of the Amalgamation. At least one ship survived by hiding in interstellar space, but it was long cold by the time humanity found it. Under the circumstances, finding more derelict ships would be distinctly low-probability events.The malice was overwhelming. Whatever killed the Amalgamation hated it. It particularly hated the Amalgamation’s culture and arts, taking special care to wreck and spoil whatever it could find of beauty, strength, and worth. This destruction was not perfect, but to this day there are huge gaps in humanity’s understanding of the aesthetics of galactic society.The xenocide was ritualized. As for the various species of the Amalgamation: most died on the first day of the attacks. The others were brought to various places in the Tomb Worlds (invariably one of local religious or cultural importance), and had things done to them. Several centuries have turned the evidence of those things into battered, scattered bones, to the secret relief of xeno-archeologists. It was already too easy to think too hard about what must have happened there.The oversight was deliberate. Whatever murdered the Amalgamation knew of humanity’s existence. The location of Earth was well-marked in the records, and the Amalgamation’s monitoring of humanity was both constant and comprehensive. Earth should have met the same fate as the rest of the Galaxy.

And nobody knows why it did not.

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