It wasn't long before the Queen fully understood the extent of her power. The males she had mated with recently were unaware that she had injected them with an infinitesimal amount of Essence during the insemination process. They felt odd afterwards but otherwise thought nothing of it. In the absence of willing females to breed with, the society that the Queen belonged to became decadent. Since only one at a time could obtain satisfaction with the Queen, the males found gratification with each other instead. They inserted their tentacles in areas of their bodies their appendages didn't belong in and wasted their reproductive seed within another male's body. It was in this way that the traces of the Queen's poisonous Essence was transmitted from male to male.
The deaths came slowly and painfully, like a creeping plague. The mystery illness infected the entirety of the species long before the effects became apparent, and by then it was too late. The males died off one by one until the few thousands of them dwindled to a few dozen. They became so focused on finding a cure in time to save the remaining few that for the first time in millions of years the Queen was left alone to her own devices. In her solitude, the Queen only became stronger. Taking advantage of the chaos she had created, the Queen broke free of the invisible bonds that had held her for countless cycles of the universe and escaped her captors. She always knew she could break out if she tried hard enough but she was normally under such close watch that escape would have been impossible. A powerful, malignant force had been unleashed upon the universe.
The males that survived eventually discovered a cure to purge themselves of the Essence. They were after all highly intelligent by even the strictest of standards. But by then it was too late. The Essence had been removed from their bodies before they could be killed by it, but not without severely impacting their lifespans. What once was a lifetime so long it was practically immortal had been shortened to a few hundred years. The only female that could propagate and save the species had deserted them. In their own patriarchal folly, the males had doomed themselves. The remaining males took to war against each other over the scant remaining resources in their galaxy, killing off most of those that remained. The last male of the species died alone, hiding beneath a rock hundreds of years after the Queen fled.
The Queen escaped from her solar system into the aether of space. Humans had space travel all wrong. Sure, you could certainly confine yourself in a metal container and hurtle yourself through space at fantastic speeds using rocket propulsion. But without surpassing and breaking light speed you could never truly traverse the universe. The Queen merely had to reach a black hole and use it to create a fold in reality. Once you stepped through it you could enter any other solar system or galaxy instantly. Of course, it did aid her cause immensely that her body didn't require breathing oxygen to live.
The Queen located the nearest inhabited planet and hid herself upon it. While in seclusion, she birthed the last spawn that she had been bred with. When the Queen learned it was male, she immediately destroyed it. Let all of my cursed race die except for I, the Queen thought. She laid low for a few thousand years, hiding in the many caverns and canyons of this world before she encountered the first sign of evolved intelligent life. When a single alien lifeform wandered into the canyon she lived in, the Queen attacked the intruder in preemptive self-defense. Once they had been subdued, the Queen realized that this alien possessed a female rather than male anatomy. She felt a sudden urging she had never before encountered, unsurprising considering she had never met a female creature before.
The Queen held her prisoner captive and engaged in inter-species sex with her victim. While violating the helpless female, the Queen injected the alien with her Essence in the form of a seedpod as an experiment and found that it caused the alien to become the Queen's willing slave. With a mindless slave to act as her agent, the Queen felt comfortable enough venturing beyond the bounds of her canyon to find more of these creatures to convert. She soon found it only worked on females, however. Males were poisoned and destroyed by the Essence immediately upon contact. But even more curiously than that, the Queen found that converted females could produce their own Essence following their assimilation and were able to take control anyone who came into contact with it. While this allowed her slaves some autonomy, the Queen retained overall control over them and she possessed the sole ability to convert a female permanently to her "Hive".
Due to her own past experiences, the Queen did not enjoy perpetrating rape. She didn't feel she really had a choice the first time she assimilated an alien female but found the overall experience distasteful. She needed to find some way for these aliens to want to have sex with her. Despite the Queen's advanced evolution into a nearly perfect specimen, many of the alien women found her form undesirable, even monstrous. That was not an obstacle that impeded her for long. The Queen quickly learned that she could take the physical form of an alien female provided she found a host to invade. Once she had assumed the form of an attractive female, the Queen could use the more subtle skills of coercion, manipulation, and seduction to convince females to go against their nature and copulate with another of their own sex.
Unfortunately, the Queen underestimated the intelligence of the males on this world. It didn't take them long to realize what was going on and they worked to remove the Queen and her usurped authority over their females. The males eradicated all the females that had come into contact with the Queen, even the ones who hadn't been Initiated or Assimilated. The males surrounded the Queen in her lair and nearly destroyed her before she escaped. To this day, the Queen was still missing a tentacle from where one of their laser weapons had sliced it off cleanly as she slithered away in fear. The Queen tasted defeat for the first time as she materialized in space. She despised the flavor.
The Queen wandered from world to world, searching for advanced civilizations and eventually finding them. The same story repeated itself on every planet. The Queen would begin converting a few that became many. Many would eventually grow into a movement. The movement became a righteous cause to destroy the oppressive male race, but every time that cause was ultimately quelled. Every planet the Queen found with intelligent life, the dominant race always had a male and female gender. The Queen thought it a great cosmic joke made by whatever sick deity created the universe that there were always males and females. No matter what, there would be a natural conflict between the genders just by their very existence. There didn't seem any way to find equilibrium between the disparate genders, one must always be the stronger. The Queen felt that she was performing a natural function of the universe by helping to restore the balance of power that had shifted too far.
On some worlds the Queen was worshipped as a goddess, albeit one with less than altruistic intentions. On others she was feared and detested as the devil incarnate. During the course of several of her campaigns, the Queen managed to take over an entire planet. In her most successful campaign, the Queen was only one world away from conquering an entire solar system. A little bit of power was never enough though, the Queen always wanted more. Perhaps that was why her campaigns always seemed to end in failure, even when she ruled without question for millennia. If she had one flaw, it was the Queen's hubris and inability to appreciate what she did possess without always wanting more.
After a few million years of this repeated cycle of conquest and defeat, the Queen returned to her home world following her latest blunder. The rest of her species had died long ago. The planet that had once been lush and full of life was now as dusty and barren as a desert. Through some of the piles of rocks, the Queen could pick out glimpses of the exquisite architecture created by her race. All dust now, the Queen thought, and good riddance. After exploring the corpse of the planet for a few years, the Queen left the world where she had been born and never looked back.
The Queen became involved in universe-spanning conflicts that created a cataclysm large enough that the previous universe folded in on itself before exploding outward. Trillions upon trillions of alien races were destroyed and replaced as a new universe was birthed. The Queen was one of the few survivors from the old order of the universe.
