Emptiness

Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of the stars is attained.

It seems that they existed in some sort of previous incarnation of our universe, and use abstract terms to describe their existence, such as "feeding on concepts". They prepared for some sort of ascension, but then the Pattern came, which they describe at first as an all-consuming emptiness, elaborating by saying that anything that passed into it was torn asunder, subjected to a set of principles and order that grinds things down to nothing, in a process of which entropy is just one part.