The Architects: a Alien Race from Shards of Earth
"The Architect was impossible to miss on screen, a vast polished mass the size of Earth’s lost moon, throwing back every scan and probe sent its way."
"A bulk like a moon, its near half a crazed mountain range of gleaming crystal spines a hundred kilometres long. The light of Berlenhof’s star touched them and gave back rainbows, cut apart into its constituent frequencies. The dark side of the Architect was a faceted hemisphere, semi-translucent, monstrous suggestions of form all the way down. A machine or a rogue world or a force of nature; no mere human could fathom it."
"There was a singular mind at the heart of all that crystal, a consciousness as vast as oceans."
"And Idris could see through its senses that the planet was mottled with a kind of rot, a disfiguring decay that the Architect needed to clear away. That rot was thought, the collected minds of all the people living there. They exerted a pressure on the fabric of space that the Architect, for reasons Idris had never grasped, felt the need to release."
"The Architect had launched a couple of its smallest spines into the Heaven’s Sword, inflicting significant but incidental hull damage. Then the spines had begun fragmenting out into… soldiers, Trine had said. Individual mobile units. They had been made of the same crystal as the spines and took on many shapes. Some were humanoid, most were not: many legs, no legs, serpentine, arachnoid, flying ray-forms and other less recognizable things."
