For this post I will give some details about Gallurum and some of the other eldritch entities in Innocence Seekers. While I have given very little about Gallurum so far in Innocence Seekers: April Light, what little I have mentioned says that it is an exceptionally powerful entity that was able to utterly destroy the Donsilans’ galaxy-spanning empire. Do note, though, that there are unmarked spoilers ahead.
Gallurum is just one of many such entities that may appear at any time. The presence of just one of these entities within a galaxy is enough to scour it of all life, and needless to say, the Donsilans were far outmatched against Gallurum. While I haven’t mentioned it in the story yet, one of these things had already completely devastated the Andromeda Galaxy sometime before the events of Innocence Seekers, although the pendant holders do not know this yet.
The appearance of entities like Gallurum is closely linked to forbidden rituals performed by overly-ambitious interstellar empires. Again, I haven’t mentioned this yet, but before Gallurum’s appearance, the Donsilans fought a fierce war against a race whose name has long been forgotten. Ordinarily, the war would have ended in a quick and decisive Donsilan victory; however, for some inexplicable reason, this race was not only able to match the Donsilans, but defeat them. This continued for around a century before suddenly the race was all but wiped out by an outside entity. Without warning, literally every ship and spaceborne structure owned by the race was destroyed, and life on all but one planet inhabited by the race completely annihilated, in the blink of an eye. At that point the Donsilans figured out what was going on.
They figured out that their enemy had earlier performed a ritual that called a greater power to assist them, “at a price”, with said price being the destruction of the galaxy itself. Such a ritual will grant the ones performing it near-endless power, but only for a set amount of time. Once that time is up, the entity responsible will use the power it granted to the race against them, utterly annihilating them with an attack that not even the Donsilans understood. The Donsilans had realised that that race had, in its quest for power, potentially brought about the end of all life in the galaxy. As such, the Donsilans headed straight towards the one remaining planet of their former enemy and demanded to know what had happened.
The lone planet was, of course, inhabited by those who knew fully well what lay in store. They explained that the entity that appeared near their homeworld was composed of an amalgamation of trillions of dead souls, all belonging to that race. They also explained that now the entity had appeared, the galaxy was doomed, and that their only hope rested with a single magical girl (the predecessor to the April Light).
If left unchecked, such entities will wreak havoc across the entire galaxy, going through massive fleets as if they were made of tissue paper and bombarding planets until they become a ball of lava (okay, for the latter, not really, but they are capable). A side story to Innocence Seekers, which will be associated with the first three sagas, will detail what exactly happened in the Andromeda Galaxy.
About the entities themselves, they are roughly the size of a planet. While at a glance they look spherical (due to their gravity), the similarities to planets end once one reaches the surface of these entities. The majority of these entities possess an atmosphere (in the case of Gallurum, it is around 80 per cent carbon dioxide, 15 per cent methane and five per cent other gases), but the surface emits an incredibly poweful magic field that utterly annihilates any solid object that comes close to the surface (although anything moving at roughly the same order of magnitude as the entity’s escape velocity will reach the surface somewhat intact). Only those with natural resistance to magic (such as magical girls) will be able to survive on the surface (and even then they need to be in their mage outfits, otherwise their bodies will die from asphyxiation unless the atmosphere is breathable).
The entities themselves have a peculiar structure. The outermost layer is, like any rocky planet, the crust, and is composed almost entirely of iron (the surface itself may be composed of iron oxides instead). Beneath the crust is a relatively thin, highly radioactive mantle that is composed of exotic matter. This mantle is what makes these entities extremely resillient; the entire Donsilan space navy was unable to penetrate Gallurum’s outer layers despite focusing all of its firepower on one spot; they only managed to penetrate it by using the main weapon of the starship Altair (which has yet to appear in April Light). However, should one get through the mantle, one would find the interior of the entity to be almost completely hollow and filled with vacuum. Right in the centre is the “core”. The core is a massive structure whose composition is unknown. However, it houses the “brain” of the entity, the one controlling it. Needless to say, its magic power is immense; the Donsilan magical girl who fought Gallurum two million years ago only managed to draw against it, and had to resort to teleporting it to the Cave of Illusions on Ocypsa, where she sealed it at the cost of her own life.
Once one gets within the core itself, things start to become weird. The immense amount of mana within the core causes the very fabric of spacetime to warp, which wreaks havoc with causality and may result in a nasty fate for anyone unlucky enough to find himself in the core without adequate protection from the effects (at that point, having your soul trapped for eternity is the best thing that can happen to you). Speaking of protection, certain Inherent Abilities (such as Akari’s Eternal Stream) can prevent the warping of spacetime within the core and allow safe passage, and protection can also be granted by certain magic devices. Even with protection, one must contend with the fact that space itself is warped, which may lead to things such as disconnected rooms, or ending up back at one’s starting point despite going in one direction only.
Anyway, that will be all for now. I would say more, but I’ll leave that to the story.