Q'sn

"The alien explained that they do not make things. They are fed by destruction. Having met them, I feel it. They thrive on hate. [...] Not even the most hate-crazed Chatcaavan male could approach the magnitude of what I felt in transit. We might feel hate, but they are Hate."

History

Taylitha's comment: "These people, whoever they are... they've been out there a long while, visiting worlds like Birdsong and raping them. Long enough that the planets can grow up again, the way Birdsong did... because if the natives are right, their world was wiped to bedrock at least once before. Maybe the people who did it are in some more distant part of the galaxy we haven't penetrated yet, and they haven't cared enough to come our way." Daqan confirms this: "This has been done to many planets, aletsen. Some your people know of. Many they do not, because they lie farther afield than you have ever gone. Like this world [Quzen], which is far beyond the borders of your Alliance, and your Empire."

Daqan: "The unmakers despise our fire."

Also according to Daqan, both Zafiil and Faullaizaf knew about the haters; the exodus from Quzen, led by the latter, utilized one of the slides on the journey to Qufiil.

Modern

The Birdsong Natives know these aliens as the destroyers, and have some of their technology embedded in their underground caverns: a pedestal, like a control console, rising from a sunken pit, suggesting individuals ten or eleven feet high, with a yellowish glow.

Slides

"When you use the void bridge, they can attack you, the way nightmares might attack a dreaming mind. It cannot be fought in any normal way. [...] When we used the transit, two of my companions were trapped in an evil reverie. We were able to free them, but they were unsettled by the experience."

Daqan: To call them the builders of the bridge is wrong. Even naming it a ‘bridge’ is false. These names reflect our natures: we see something and assume it was made because our nature is to build, to make, to grow. But it would be more accurate to say that this phenomenon is not the result of a making, but an unmaking. They destroy, and the destruction makes holes—destroys space—and then they use those holes for their purpose. To unmake more things ."