Architect (The Final Architecture)

Architects are mysterious, moon-sized aliens that destroy inhabited worlds, reworking them into abstract artworks and killing all their inhabitants. The pre-eminent threat to sentient life in the universe, they are responsible for the genocide of countless species and the destruction of Earth.

While their origins and goals were initially completely unknown to most of the universe, they were later found to be natives of unspace, a dimension "beneath" normal space, and their genocides were revealed to be tasks set to them by even more powerful masters.

Anatomy and Physiology
Architects are truly immense beings, each roughly the size and mass of Earth's moon. When fully within real space, Architects appear as giant spheres made purely of translucent crystal, studded with enormous spiky "mountains" that can reach a hundred kilometers in height. The entire body of an Architect is solid and undifferentiated throughout. The crystal patterns of each Architect are unique enough for individuals to be distinguished with the naked eye.

In unspace, an Architect's structure resembles a gossamer knot of information and mind. Since matter cannot exist in unspace, they exist purely as information. This is their natural state - the crystal form is simply the state their mass-energy assumes under the normal universe's physical laws.

Reproduction and Life Cycle
Architects evolved from a stable and self-replicating pattern of information in unspace. The Architects maintain this "nursery," parts of which regularly coalesce into new, fully-formed Architects. The process has no close analogies in any natural biosphere - those who witness it describe it as being like if the weaving of a spider's web somehow produced new spiders. It is unknown if the nursery is unique or if others exist.

Senses
Architects can sense the presence of conscious thought, which affects unspace. Architects can only distinguish the presence, location, and quantity of sentient beings, and are not truly capable of reading minds or telepathy.

Powers & Abilities
While they are sapient, Architects use no technology as such. Instead, each Architect wields awesome destructive power, sufficient to destroy an entire planet.

Architects primarily work and fight using their control over gravity and space. Architects can use their gravitational powers to manipulate matter at scales from planetary to atomic. Smaller objects, like all but the largest spacecraft, can be blown to filigree in an instant with minimal effort. Architects take longer to work with larger objects, taking around an hour to wrench Earth-sized planets into various abstract shapes. In groups, Architects can even damage and disrupt stars, though actually destroying stars seems to be beyond them.

When ground operations are necessary, Architects launch their crystal spikes to deploy crystalforms, constructs made from their crystal bodies in the shapes of alien races they have exterminated. Crystalforms are not separate beings, but rather remote extensions of an Architect, controlled like puppets with its gravitic power. Crystalforms refract lasers and simply flow around physical damage, making them functionally indestructible.

Architects are creatures of unspace and can enter and leave that realm at will, effectively making each one capable of faster-than-light travel under its own power. As natives, Architects are wholly immune to the negative effects of unspace on sentient minds and can travel much more freely.

Homeworld
Architects are natives of unspace, an extradimensional space "beneath" the normal universe. Unspace is a realm so alien and hostile that many scientists did not believe that it was real in the same sense as normal space, which is called "the real" in comparison.

Unspace is best visualized as an ocean beneath the real. If the real is the surface of a sphere, then unspace is the sphere's interior. Unspace is "smaller" than the real "above" it, which allows for travel through unspace to proceed faster than light relative to the real. This is the only way to travel faster than light, though unspace's other properties make this hideously dangerous.

The physical laws of unspace permit the existence of mind, but not matter. While any information entering or leaving unspace is conserved, the presence of sentience is required for anything from the real to maintain coherency there. Unmanned travel into unspace is impossible, since any such craft would effectively cease to exist upon arrival. As a side effect of not physically existing in unspace, a conscious real-space creature in unspace perceives itself in a subjective reality in which it is completely alone, even if it was accompanied by others when it made the jump. A conscious visitor in unspace also perceives itself being watched and stalked by something horrific and hostile, a sensation so awful it almost always leads to suicide. Unspace travelers must generally be anesthetized during travel for this reason. It is nearly impossible for visitors from the real to detect or communicate with other visitors or spacecraft, or to perceive the actual structure of unspace - doing so requires unique biology, advanced technology, or both.

To its residents, unspace is a sea containing patterns and flows of information. Life within unspace is relatively sparse, much like an open deep-sea biome, and is based wholly on these information patterns - nothing else can exist there. Unspace natives are not trapped in their own solitary worlds like travelers from the real are, and can perceive and interact with each other normally.