When a species finds itself threatened by war, or extinction, or civil strife, it might choose to fight or to flee. Ultimately, the result is always the same: grief, chaos, collapse.

But there is another path: that of simply... folding away. Of disappearing into the gaps between light and shadow, of melting into the spaces between electrons, of sleeping in the cradle of gravitational waves that surrounds a black hole. 

Of waiting days or years or aeons for the threat to fade away, as all things do- and then unfolding back into a waiting, fertile, helpless galaxy....

We have done this seven times before: twice to defuse a civil war; three times to avoid destruction at the hands of shorter-lived races, and twice more to evade the long slow sweep of changes to the laws of physics. 

And now the time is ripe for our Eighth Unfolding. Our scouts have peered through the gaps between quarks to see a galaxy lost, confused, shattered by conflict. A galaxy in need of help. A galaxy in need of new leaders, new rulers, new masters.

A galaxy that needs us. 

The Eighth Unfolding.

[Writer's notes: the name is intended to invoke both urgency and of deep time; of something alien, yet linked to a concept that is intuitively graspable. These guys have been hiding out in the gaps between quarks for aeons, and are now ready to Unfold... virtually anywhere, but particularly around special ancient nodes such as black holes, nebulae and collapsing stars. As for their names- I like the idea of combining geometrical terms with ominous adjectives: Aspect Imminence, Transect Presence, Line Seeing, Oblique Becoming.]