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Death Blade, a dark tragedy of war and destiny set in the far flung future. |
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Death blade is my current project, it's pretty dark and grisly, so it's not for the faint hearted. You have to pay attention, because the plot is pretty complicated and takes a while to unfold, and the whole thing is littered with subtext and allegories. What i really want is detailed opinions of the story and characters, although any advice is very welcome. I need to know whether im being too cryptic - or if its too easy to see what's going on. Thanks, Tom. |
| I. Section 1. An Encounter. I. Commander Casian: Darkness, infinite, swirling darkness, the sound of a monstrous fire crackling, the tortured screams of the dying, a deep rumbling in the distance. With a mind rending bellow the hoarse whispering voice began, a dying scream, an insane cackle and a bestial growl crackling and hissing with fatty flames, filling his quivering hearts with an irrepressible dread. It was all around him, taunting him: Casian…Casian…its almost time…your destiny beckons for you…I’m coming Casian, I’m coming for you… you will set me free… Laughter boomed threateningly, all encompassing petals of red flame rushed up from the black to meet him. Resting in the centre of them was a great, dark hand, reaching up and chilling his very soul before pulling him down to what was most terrible of all: the face. The great face leered up at him, its single huge cracked red eye aglow, the other merely a gaping pit encrusted with rosy scar tissue. Its skin writhed with maggots and its pallid flesh was torn, rotten and puss covered. He screamed as he was pulled closer to its gaping mouth of broken, mossy teeth. Hail me Casian, for I am your lord, Orageos, the greater of the twin Gods. Then there was nothingness. Images began to swim into view… a few blurred shapes…dazzling white brightness…a deep voice in his head… couldn’t quite make out what it was saying… but before it could finish it faded into mirthful oblivion and Casian burst from the depths of insanity gasping for breath, sweat drenched and shuddering. This time it was worse than ever. He had been cursed with these visions every night since as long ago as he could remember, but never this bad. Night by night they were growing steadily worse, these days Casian avoided closing his eyes until the leaden weights of sleep grew to become an irresistible force. The Milky Way is a troubled galaxy. Casian knew that better than any man alive. Even as humanity stretched its fledgling wings as it struggled to rise from the shackles of an insignificant, overpopulated solar system, there was war. Over the following millennia of seemingly endless bloodshed, an order grew, the mailed fist of the bloated and sprawling empire of man. Casian sighed and ran his hand through his short black hair. Why couldn’t the people of the galaxy see them for what they were? Why revere an order of warriors with eternally bloodied hands? They called them the God-warriors, or Taui-kun. Casian could never understand that. Through his time as Legion Commander of the Angels Of Death he had killed enough men, monsters and aliens to smother a planet and been party to the destruction of entire solar systems. For this he was a Saint. The drop ship rocked as it plunged violently through the stale atmosphere of a cold and barren planet with no name, nestled in a sector purged from human memory to protect the secrets it contained. Casian was suspended by his restraints in a jet-black, tear shaped compartment moulded from the synthetic material called Mòrón, light as air, yet harder than diamond. Over the millennia it had become a symbol for the resilience and undefeatable might of mankind, a near indestructible exoskeleton that could turn an industrial cutting laser and remain cool in a storm of plasma. Soon it would breathe a liquid sigh and remould itself around his naked body, a carapace of black silver to embolden and reinforce his fragile mortal flesh. It was a part of him, the embodiment of his sanctity, able to trickle in through the pores of his skin and crush itself down into a thumb sized organ that slumbered between the cannonaded pounding of his twin hearts. A sharp beep cut between his eyes like a shard of insanity. Commander Casian, these are your mission objectives: And there they were, that chorus of one hundred, sweet, perpetually sedated voices that held the majority of the galaxy in their divine grip. They were the hallowed High Council of Earth, the rays of light that guided an entire race scattered and lost in the boundless infinity of a dark and unforgiving existence. From the ancient and arcane inner sanctums of blessed mother Earth they saw the universe. They were the most highly gifted of a subspecies of mankind who had been born licking the bittersweet juice of the forbidden fruit of knowledge from their greedy infant lips. They were Psychic. Whilst normal man was rooted to the bank as he leaned forwards to drink the few precious mouthfuls of the water of time that were allotted to him, they swam in it, travelling against the overbearing current to sample the icy source of all things, then riding downstream to find the branch that held no rapids. Establish a perimeter around the research station that is located at co-ordinates 112-654. Clean out the corridors. Protect the researchers. As usual their orders were brutally skeletal and painfully concise. To Casian they sounded more like a shopping list than military orders. They may have been omniscient, but they were extremely conservative with the number of words they whispered into the brains of their servants. Perhaps because every word they broadcasted required them to surface from their knowledge stream, gasping and flopping like fish out of water. Casian had a sensation they were toying with him, he could almost hear their childish lulling voices taunting him: We could tell you exactly how many steps it will take you to reach the research station and how many researchers are still alive. We could tell you what each of your enemy are thinking and where each one stands at this moment. We could tell you the number of shots you will fire from your gun. We could even tell you the exact angle that the shot which will end your life will enter your neck… But it would not be so much fun that way would it? In the not too distant future Casian would wish that his life had ended this day, because at the end of all things Casian would realise that today was the day that it all began. II. Darkness: “Come with me Bicarno… Give in to my will and become my servant. There is no more left for you in the world of mortal man.” Bicarnos hand shook just a little as he raised the knife that was as black as his soul was becoming. It glinted slightly along its axis in the soft filtered luminescence of three fine slivers of moon. He didn’t have to do this. He didn’t have to become this. But what alternative was there? “No Bicarno there is no alternative. I grow impatient. Prove your worth and become your dreams.” The doors of morality and sanity sighed heavily as the last slices of light flooding from them were extinguished. “Hail Orageos” Bicarno whispered harshly to the eager ears of his craven deity as he plunged the knife home. Bicarno stood on the verge of the crater that the research station squatted in far below, a pile of white pebbles. Casian would be there before long. He pulled his pale withered hands from the sea of charcoaled robes that billowed around his ancient body and fantasised that he could crush those stubborn rocks in his fists and let their chalky dust join the omnipresent white blanket of blinding ash that covered this dead world. Indeed he mused, caressing his neat triangular beard, was that so far from the truth? He span smartly on his heels and took a few jaunty steps away from the station, his heavy glossy boots leaving no mark in the ghostly sand. He watched the sky contentedly as, right on cue, great teardrops of black flame began to scald silently through the atmosphere; almost unnoticeable against the blanket of dark eternity wrapped around the planet. He chuckled softly to himself and spoke eagerly to his master. “It is all coming to place my lord, just as you have planned.” From the very twisted and lightless depths of his soul the one he had devoted his existence to bellowed as deep as the gravity well of a black hole, shaking and crackling with unholy flames that licked the inside of Bicarnos skull like a pack of wolves scrapping the last slivers of meat from reddened bone. Did you sow my seeds as I instructed? “Yes my lord” he crooned “They hatched and have done your bidding. I marked the girl in her sleep, she lives yet.” The girl had been beautiful, the tinniest speck of humanity left in Bicarnos body was enough to tell him that. He spat at that notion in disgust. Beauty was immaterial and inconsequential. An enjoyment of beauty was a human phenomenon, the very stinking species Bicarno had barely managed to drag himself free from. The only thing with real meaning was the bidding of his God. The only thing that was pleasing about the girl was the place she had in the conspiracies his master had been benevolent enough to share with him. And Casian is coming for her? “Yes” he hissed like an agitated snake. Do as I instructed. Make sure that he lives and takes her with him. If you succeed in this I shall bestow further blessings upon you. “Thank you my lord.” Bicarnos mouth creaked upwards into a twisted smile. He licked his cracked lips knowing he would succeed, there was not an amorphous shadow of doubt that he would fail. Great things were coming his way. He was a child again when he received praise from his lord. At least, that was what he believed, as it had been centuries since the last memories of childhood trickled away, mixing with the stream of his innocence that cascaded from his body as he embraced the damned one. Now, it is starting now. You know what is required of you. Go. “That I do lord.” As he spoke he faded away into nothingness and all was quiet once more. III. Sniper Larian: Larians pod smashed into the ground with a dull thud and threw up a plume of chalky grey dust. The walls in front of his face shimmered momentarily, then rushed towards him in a tide of glimmering black Mòrón. It collided with him with a quiet slap and clung stubbornly. For a moment it felt cold and then the familiar feeling washed down his body. No matter how many times you did it, it always felt decidedly odd when the material bonded with your skin; it felt as if you were covered with sticky clay that was beginning to dry out. In less than a second it was over, the procedure was complete and now the material was a part of him once more. He held out his hand, clenched and unclenched it and flexed his fingers experimentally. Everything was normal, he was ready. He unslung the long, heavy rifle from his shoulder and felt with relief its weight in his hands. He checked the sight, checked its balance, checked the power gauge. He clicked and unclicked the safety catch a few times, eventually leaving it off. His gun was ready for use. The other pods smashed into the ground behind him while he was inspecting his gun, he didn’t twitch a muscle. He waited for a moment, then turned around; all nineteen of them were there and had fallen into line, ready for orders. He nodded to acknowledge their presence and raised his hand; they reformed, fanned out and ran to the top of the hill in front of them. He raised his hand again and they flung themselves silently onto the floor and snuggled into position behind their raised rifles. Larian smiled. It always made him proud of the speed and precision with which his men followed his orders. It humoured him to think that he, the son of a contract killer and a woman he’d snatched as payment for one of his jobs would end up here, fighting for humanity, as a God. The lead sniper of the greatest legion of Taui-Kun. But the memory of his home world and the bitterness of his losses soon quenched his smile and he returned to his usual grimace. When Larian was nineteen, his home world, Hiran, was attacked by a fiercely hostile alien race known as the Iratui. The Taui-Kun came down from the heavens to fight them, he joined in arms with them, but it was no use. Every Iratui was killed, but in their dying moments they destroyed Hiran and on it everything Larian held dear. The only reason he wasn’t dead now was because Casian took him under his wing, he happened to be on the flagship when his world died. He lost everything, his family his identity and his heart. Even now, a quarter of a century later the death of his wife, Elaine, still haunts his dreams. Every night he was forced to kiss blood soaked lips that had once tasted so sweet, every night he would kick the beast that murdered her from her carcass, every night he would wake up with cold death saturating every cell in his body, screaming, sometimes in his head, sometimes not as he watched her last agonised seconds play out. Since that day, as a symbol of his loss, he has kept his face covered from the universe that stole his love. He ran his fingers through the dirt, the fine white dust parted easily in five ‘s’ shaped runnels to reveal the surface rock a centimetre or so below, it was like burnt bread dusted heavily with flour to hide the mistake. He looked through his scope at the bulky research station, nestled at the heart of a gigantic crater, ten kilometres across, yet only three deep. Manmade or natural, it didn’t matter. It looked like a child had been sitting in the heavens playing a solitary game of marbles with several sizes of smooth white spheres, before dropping them down by mistake or design into this massive pit of chalky sand. He could see Casian and his men heading towards it, tiny black specks against the omnipresent white dust. If no enemy became apparent soon they would enter the research station to clear it out, and Larians squad would become obsolete. The thought irritated him. Deep down though he knew something would happen, the certainty permeated his whole being. He wondered what those innocuous white spheres could possibly have to throw at them. Only at the time of his death would he finally realise what the full ramifications of this day were. It was destiny. IV. Commander Casian: Casian looked up at the thick black blanket that covered the sky. It was night, but on an industrial scale. This planet never saw the light of day, for long ago man had drawn a brush dripping with black solitude across the sky, blocking out not only the lethal radiation of the cold star the planet circled, but all of its meagre light and heat as well. This, however, did not bother Casian. As the old mantra went: Bless them, Those to whom the darkness means naught, Revere them, For the blessed Taui-kun see in more ways than mortal man. The eyes of the Taui-kun blaze with unnatural light, illuminating a world invisible to lesser beings. They can see in ways that mortals can barely dream of. Heat and density, through rock and flesh, able to spot the tiniest details at unimaginable distances, and all this while their enemy stumbles in blackness. Rumours persisted that this even allowed a Taui-kun to kill with a glance. Whilst it was possible for Casian to glare at an opponent for weeks on end until he succumbed to radiation induced cancer, there are far more efficient ways to kill a man when you stand almost three metres tall, can crush rock to powder and lift five times your own bodyweight with ease. He allowed himself the smallest taste of the surrounding air, sensors on the surface of his exoskeleton telling him that whilst near absolute zero in temperature and toxic enough to kill a mortal human in microseconds, it would not damage his augmented body. He had to allow it to warm half way through his exoskeleton, otherwise it would have frozen his mouth and lungs until they were as brittle and hard as slivers of flint. A small fusion unit hidden in the base of his skull provided the necessary heat. The air was harsh and chalky, permeated with the dust that this planet was in such abundance of. On it he could taste blood, and something rotten and alien, not quite tangible. He could not guess as to what it was, only that it was the object of this mission, and that it had killed most, if not all of the researchers. The research station dominated the view ahead of Casian, clean white silhouetted against the monotonous black of the sky and the shades of charcoal that made up the walls of the crater, their steep inclination making them the only part of this damn planet to avoid the dust. The largest domes were half a kilometre high, the smallest only about ten metres. Behind him was the small force he had brought, numbering only one hundred in size, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in skill, experience and firepower. They were divided into five squads of twenty: Sniper Squad One, Heavy Weapons One and Elite squads One to Three. Casian was at the head of Elite squad one. The snipers and Heavy weapons had gained vital positions on hills on the lip of the valley and were armed with energy cannons, HMG’s, energy lances and ITS (intelligent tracking system) Mortars. They were both ready to give a barrage of supporting fire on his command. Casian’s and the other two Elite squads fell into formation and began to advance spectre like towards the station, their armoured feet making no sound on contact with the barren rocky surface of the planet. Casian stopped, sensing something, which he didn’t know how to describe. He signaled for the rest of his squad to stop too. It was like there was someone or something near him. He could feel it; a shiver crawled up his spine; a bead of sweat crossed his forehead. A flicker of black cloth rustled a few metres away. Casian suddenly felt a profound sense of nausea, his vision a misted mirror in a steamy room. He collapsed to his knees clawing at his skull as if he was trying to break it open. His eyes opened in terror as his vision went blazing white and as if looking through thick misted transparisteel, he could see a courtyard with marble columns. Out of the haziness five glowing figures seemed to glide forwards. Casian could just make out their elaborate gold encrusted ivory armor and mournful helmets. Then the deep voice opened up in his mind, this time he could hear what it said, but it was fuzzy and slightly warped: “These……the fa……ardians, S……or, the greate……anile hand picked for th……y by the One himself. They……rotect this realm fr……reat with their lives. You must kill……” The voice faded away with the vision and he was left, once more, with the face. It shrieked and a hoarse cry erupted from his throat as the voices started to scream at him again, louder than ever before …I am here… I have come… I have come for your soul Casian…it is mine! …Give me your soul! … You will die!… I can show you the truth!… It is time…Casian. Casian jerked and twitched as the voices devoured his sanity. Blood bubbled up from his mouth. It would not stop. The eternal march of dementia eroded his consciousness like the tide wearing a cliff face, ever so slowly, but with the sharp edge of certainty. This false reality you hold so dear will be drowned in blood and devoured by chaos and we shall meet and rejoice once more as father and son. There isn’t much longer left Casian, it begins today, this tale of the end times. It ended abruptly. His eyes snapped open and a different, much more welcome voice filled his ears. Malian his first officer and close friend was shaking his shoulder “Sir! Sir are you all right?” He repeated the question with more urgency. “Yes Malian I am all right, as always.” he said wearily to his old friend. “I can feel it. Something terrible is going to happen this day. I have seen it in a vision. Be alert.” “As always sir” Malian replied. Visions were not an uncommon occurrence within the ranks of Taui-kun. Psychic potential was rife among them and it was not unknown for a man to be provided insight that could change the tide of a battle, predict an assassination attempt, or even tell him when to dodge an unseen death blow. To the Taui-kun, this was a gift for their courage, or a benevolent act from the high council. To mortals, it was further proof of their divinity. Casian had had several visions of such in his time, each one had come true in a matter of days, hours, even minutes. He just hoped he was wrong about this. V. Linwe: Linwe crouched in the corner of her office in the deserted research station. Everyone was dead. It had been horror in its most literal sense, sheer overwhelming terror, the sort of terror that grips you so hard you lose control of your body. Death came swiftly and silently, it leapt down from no where in a cloud of obscurity, no one had seen them coming. The butchery had began almost without Linwe’s notice, she was in her sleek, surgically white office cubicle on her pulsing computer terminal, the first alarm she got was when a headless corpse was flung through the window in front of her. She screamed and collapsed, retching, struggling to breathe. Then the screams began, the long tortured screams of people who are being ripped apart by indiscernible assailants. She stood bolt upright, horrified, too caught in trembling madness to move. She watched people torn open like wet tissue paper, heads disappearing with bone splintering crunches into clouds of spurting bright rich redness, limbs flailing, corpses twitching. A woman she knew just barely ran from her cubicle screaming, her right arm reduced to bloody shreds and glints of reddened bone. She managed several agonised steps after her stomach burst open into a frothy fountain of sinewy gore. Her eyes bulged like over ripe fruit and her mouth sounded silent, unintelligible words of pain as her life streamed from her falling body. Men and women in their dozens were flung like frail leaves in a storm into rivers of blood that seemed to have condensed from their cries of agony, thick contorted shadows made by heavy overhead lights dancing with them. The stainless steel floor of the central plaza could not be seen through the rubble of death. The creatures were almost visible by then, seeing as draped in robes of twitching internals and coated in a second skin of blood you could tell where they were. They seemed to be a vague insect like shape, covered in spines that impaled and tore. It was as if they were distilled from some terrible nightmare. Friends, people she had almost come to think of as her family went down with the rest of them, Linwe felt every blow inflicted upon their bodies, and realised faintly that she was screaming with them. Any real sorrow she should have felt then was crushed beneath an avalanche of terror. The heart rending anguish of their loss would come later. Unable to bear anymore, utilising immense force of mind, she broke the paralysis that entombed her body and leapt to the floor to hide behind her desk, shivering and sobbing, trying desperately to block out the screams. So fixated was Linwe, she never saw the blood stained monstrosity that came for her. She felt burning pain shriek through her arm and realised dully that the redness soaking the floor was her own blood before collapsing. All was silent now. She knew she couldn’t stay here forever, she had to do something or they might find her again. Slowly she stepped up, wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her hair. The wound on her arm made her feel faint all over again, it was at least thirty centimetres long and cut diagonally across her upper left arm almost right down to the bone, thankfully missing any major arteries. It had congealed sickly, by the looks of it badly infected. Why was she still alive? Why hadn't the beast finished the job? She crawled across the floor, her hands slipping on the icy metal, jolts of pain shooting up her injured arm, and started rummaging around in her smooth pearly drawers. There it was: she picked up the old energy knife. She thumbed it on to see if it was still working, perfect; the dull blue blade blazed into life and hummed with deadly power. Wishing to conserve what energy she had, she switched it of and the shining blade dulled back down. It was a family heirloom; it had passed from one generation to the next for nearly a millennia. Once, long ago her ancestors had been space faring pirates, the tale passed through her family was that it had been taken from the body of a Taui-kun warrior, then remodeled to suit the needs of her distant ancestor. Energy weapons were, and still are, incredibly rare weapons, of exquisite craftsmanship and deadly nature, almost never seen out of the ranks of the Taui-kun. Its enameled hilt was intricately carved with elegant flowing symbols that spelt out her surname. Above that was her family crest, two sinuous serpents coiled around one another, twin faces glaring up and out of the etched hilt, fangs bared as if to ward off unwanted touch. The blade was thirty centimeters long, the lethal weight of it in her hand comforted her. She had never pictured herself holding it in her hands as a weapon of death, to kill an enemy, to sink its pulsing energies into living flesh and watch tendrils of sooty smoke rise from the cauterized wounds. She had even less imagined that she might be prepared to use it to take her own life. And then what? The blade that had been revered and cared for for a thousand years would be lost, clutched in the dead hand of the last of its lineage of bearers, its radiance guttering and fading after a couple of hours. Never to return. Linwe was a twenty eight year old tomboy with long hair as black as the monotonous sky of the research colony. It tumbled onto her shoulders like a gleaming waterfall of ebony and crept down her back like a serpent. Her eyes were an endless dark green void that could suck the gaze of any man into their bottomless depths where the hapless man would drown in lust. It seemed almost impossible that she had managed to remain virgin after all these years. “Wait for the right man Linwe. Don’t throw your love away.” Her mother had said as she lay on her deathbed, her voice as soft and helpless as a mewling newborn lamb, bloody blossoms staining the clean sheets she lay on, tears of pain and a sheen of sweat made her face shine in the soft, amiable light of the infirmary. “But how will I know?” said Linwe, feeling as if leaden hands had her in a chokehold, tears of anguish starting to obscure her vision. “He will come from the sky…” her mother sighed as her last breath whispered through her trembling lips. Then she was still. Then Linwe was screaming as she fell to her knees, for a doctor, for her mother, and for herself. She raised a hand and wiped her eyes. Her hand came away wet. Even after four years the wound was still red and raw. She supposed it always would be, and she wanted it this way, she wanted to feel the pain, she never wanted to forget. She heard a faint noise and dropped behind her desk again, knife rekindled. She peeked around, she couldn’t see anything. Cautiously she stepped up and looked more thoroughly, it was nothing. She realised she had needed something else out of her drawer. She quickly rummaged around in it again and picked up a compact atmosphere pack. If she ever got out of here alive she would need this, the atmosphere packs on the temperature suits weren't very reliable. She had no plan of action for once she was out of the research station. She decided that she would see if she could get out and go from there, depending on the situation. It was about five metres from the desk she was crouched behind to the exit from her office, then a further ten or so metres around the rim of the circular central plaza over the crumpled dead, in front of three other offices on the way, watched jealously by three dead occupants. Then she would be in the main corridor. Would everywhere be like this? Was she the only one? Yes to both. She knew it, and it horrified her. She got up and scampered towards the door like a soldier ducking under a hail of bullets. As she commanded it to open, a corpse collapsed through the door and stared up at her reproachfully. The carcass had half its head smashed apart like an apple that has been stamped on with hobnailed boots, the remaining half drooling its juices into a mushy puddle of ruined flesh. The carcass had been eviscerated, the long winding trail of its spilt intestines trailing far out into the plaza. The stench from the puddles of spilt blood and semi-digested food and faeces was rancid, like a kick in the face. Bruised nose, pounding head, blood in mouth from a bitten tongue to suppress the scream that could have killed her. She fell to her knees retching and vomited copiously, then shook and shook as if the heating system were broken and the cold was beginning to make her fingers drop off. The body was twitching spasmodically, one lifeless eye staring up past her into oblivion. She turned her face away from the corpse. She recognised that face even mutilated as it was, it was a young man named Chad. “I love you Linwe, don’t you understand?” Chad had whispered once, his lips scant centimetres from hers, eyes wide and damp. She could feel his sweet breath against her mouth and as her gaze locked with his, she knew that she wanted this, she wanted him to be hers, she wanted it so bad she could feel it burning in her chest like a laser wound. But was this right? Was this what her mother had wanted for her? Was he the right man? Oh, how she wanted him to be, but deep inside her she knew that he was not. But did it really matter? What harm could it do? Then she saw her mothers fading eyes, watched her last breath tumble out of her body, never to be replaced, and knew that it did matter. She turned away from Chad, vision obscured by tears. “I’m sorry Chad.” She choked and walked away, ignoring his desperate attempts to grab her attention. Then she ran. Linwe realised she was crying, looking down at his corpse again, she felt guilty, then angry, why had she been left alive? Why did she have to live to see such horrors? Why had her mother cursed her to live the rest of her life in celibacy? Linwe froze, she heard clattering footsteps echoing threateningly, slicing through the tranquillity like a knife. Then a rumbling growl shattered it completely. She felt hot stinking breath on her face, the next thing she knew was she had been lifted of the ground with a strong vice like grip around her neck. She tried to light her knife but she was shook roughly and the blade fell from her grasp and sank to the hilt into the ground, some two metres below. She tried to scream, but the monster had her in a hold so strong she could almost hear her neck bones crunching under the phenomenal pressure. She felt numb all over and her vision was starting to become blurry, her jugular throbbed angrily and she felt as though her brain was becoming liquid and sloshing around in her skull. The last thing she saw before she slipped from consciousness was a huge shining figure in a glowing suit of armour that seemed to be crafted of ruby red flame appear from nowhere and dart gracefully towards her invisible assailant. It drew a shimmering blade and killed the creature with a single blow. Linwe tumbled through the air, unconscious before she hit the floor. VI. Commander Casian: The bulbous segments of the research station reached up into the cold dark sky. For a moment he thought he saw a shadowy figure stood atop of one bulb, but it blew apart with the wind. The air was laced with dire prescience. Sudden pangs bit at his temples and his mind was filled with shrieking fiends, weeping and gnashing of teeth. A cry went up from his left as Malian was flung to the dust. A sunrise wash of heat signature rose above him and the vague outline of the spiked chitin horror straddling him became visible. Spindly claw like legs pinned Malian down, one of the blade like appendages had passed clean through his armoured wrist. The monstrosity barked down at him from a long serpentine neck. Malian swung his remaining arm and struck the creature a harsh blow across its fang filled jaw. The bone shattered with a wet crack. It reared up and shrieked to the starless sky in rage and agony. A sniper rifle cracked in the distance and its head exploded into sizzling chunks of fibrous brain. “Must have been Larian, he never misses a chance to shoot something…” He muttered to himself as he kicked the smouldering carcass off of his friend. It was a blade dragon, a creature that was no longer supposed to exist. But if there was one there was likely to be another. “Form a defensive circle!” he ordered “Fire on sight.” Instantaneously his men formed a tight circle around him and raised their weapons, looking like a prickled Plison seed and stood unmoving, holy statues of the saints of war. He knelt by his injured friend. “That was a Blade dragon” grunted Malian as he heaved himself into a sitting position. The Mòrón surrounding his injured wrist squeezed tight and released a cocktail of coagulants and nanobots into his blood to knit tight the wound with the deftness of a surgeon. “Yes Malian, I believe it was. There will be others.” “So much for exterminating them…” he said dryly and flexed his fingers “It’s a big galaxy, friend, even the most astute maid will often miss a spot.” But why were they here? The campaign of extermination had been almost two millennia ago. How had they not been encountered before now? “Lets get a medic in here, check how that’s healing up” suggested Casian “No.” Grunted Malian “I can fight.” He grabbed his rifle and heaved himself to his feet. A shout rose from the defensive circle “We’ve got incoming!” followed by snaps of gunfire and sizzling flesh. Casian leapt up and took a position at the rim next to Calrung, the oldest trooper in the regiment. “How many?” “Six so far” growled the ancient soldier huskily. He had been fighting for nearly three hundred years. “They’re testing the circle for weaknesses. We’ll have a proper fight on our hands soon” A heat-sig flared up scant metres in front of them, Casian swung his rifle up and fired a shot into the haze. The creature shrieked as its ribcage exploded, flipped onto its back by the force of the blow. Its legs spasmed like a headless fly’s as it died. “They’re cold, so cold… when they’re stalking they can suppress their metabolism for a short while. That’s why they only show up on heat vis when they make a sudden movement” He explained slowly in his worn, gravely voice. Casian fired another shot into the dark, and a monster fell howling. The Taui-kun stood like silent sentinels as the minutes passed before the next fiend leapt shrieking out of the night. Malian shot it in the neck from behind Casian, leaving a trail of plasmarised air sizzling by his ear. Casian turned, and Malian lowered his rifle, cocking his head inquisitively. “Is this all we get?” “Do you suppose Malian, that the High council, in all their omniscience, sent us all the way out here for that?” questioned Casian. It was then they heard the shrieks and bellows in the distance, and watched in apprehensive silence as the monsters started to swarm from the research station like a disturbed ant nest. Larung, a young and headstrong trooper chuckled “It was worth our coming after all hey Casian?” Casian barely heard him. “Is this how it begins, then?” he murmured, to no one in particular, gazing off into the ranks of slavering jaws and glinting blades. VII. Sniper Larian: Larian saw the creature first, he knew it was impossible, but he didn’t let his thoughts get in the way. Larian had already put a bolt of anti-plasma through the beast’s head and splattered its stringy gore everywhere before the rest of the team had undone their safety catches. The battleground was the only place Larian ever felt truly alive, whenever he was out of combat the pain of his losses came back and had to be promptly drowned in alcohol. Every rifle shot he fired gave him a burst of ecstatic pleasure, the reassuring blip that acknowledged each kill filled him with euphoric joy, the adrenaline pounding through his veins made his hearts race and bought back splashes of colour and warmth into the cold greyness of his existence. He scanned around with his scope looking for his next target, as the rampaging swarm of screaming aliens filled his view he smiled contentedly, the crop was grown and ready for him to reap. Some called him sadistic because of the pleasure he took from death and the zealousness with which he hunted for opponents, but this pleasure was only derived from a feeling of vengeance. The aliens that had destroyed his world died with it, but his rage hadn’t. Every shot, every kill, every smoking carcass, was in revenge for the dead on Hiran. It didn’t matter who or what he was killing; it still bought him the same sense of fulfilment. “Open fire.” He growled to the squad like a ravenous wolf. He chose a great, bloated beast at the front of the line and locked his aim on its heart. He pulled the trigger with relish and watched as his victims chest exploded into a plume of plasma and steaming gore. The monster staggered a few pained steps before collapsing to the floor in a lump of its jellied organs, charred ribs sticking from what was left of its abdomen, flesh skewered on the ends like sickly kebabs. It pawed the ground weakly in rage and agony, smoke and vaporised blood billowing into a cloud above it, condensing into gory rain as it was engulfed by the fleshy tide behind it. Larian smiled his killers smile, which was more of a bestial snarl. The squads shots crackled and howled around him, but he was locked in an almost trance like state, and the vicious sounds almost seemed to bounce off him. He singled out another of the larger specimens, and fired without hesitation. It stumbled and fell, its spine like legs entangled, kicking and spasming as it died. Larian fired again and again, with an almost fanatical fervour, and as images of carnage and death filled his soul, the ghostly shell of a smile crossed his gaunt, hidden face. VIII. Commander Casian: There were thousands of them, all scuttling towards them, some were crushed beneath the others in a mad rush to be the first to tear at the enemy: them. At their head ran a flicker of shadow, cloak of malice billowing… a dragon overtook it and it was obscured from him. He could feel chemicals gushing from his enlarged adrenal gland, his muscles strengthening and his multiple hearts raced behind the fused bony carapace of his ribcage. These were just some of the battle preparations going on in his genetically enhanced body, this was a normal procedure. Casian ordered for the heavy weapons to commence their barrage. At the same time he would have ordered the snipers to begin, but Larian with his usual disrespect for commands had not been able to hold his trigger finger steady and had already started shooting. Far away the heavy weapons roared into life; slowly at first, like a breaking storm. An energy cannon bolt whizzed over his head, accompanied with a harsh wave of heat. It struck a dragon full on in the chest, and the charge blew it and the ten abominations nearest to it into a raging plasma inferno, gradually condensing into a messy, greasy puddle in the centre of the large glassy crater the blast had formed. Glossy black contrasted sharply with the white dust, an offending spot upon the face of a preening slum whore. Several HMG’s began to chatter; sending thousands of energy shots a second to riddle the front few lines with explosive, energy bolt death. Casian heard the mournful wailing of the mortar shells long before he could see them. They arced gracefully towards the enemy like a swarm of locusts with no end and no beginning, a constant deadly rainfall hundreds thick, exploding in globules of sheer antimatter fury. Throughout the battle they wailed almost non stop, each of the ten mortars they had brought able to put out ten shells in the space of a second. An energy lance swung in a lazy swipe that cut dozens of aliens into two writhing halves and left a trail of bubbling rock on the ground that quickly cooled into a glassy arc. Casian got ready to deliver the commands for battle procedure seven, the standard tactics for combating packs of large predatory beasts. There were procedures for almost any kind of foe or situation; it was only rarely that Casian had to think on point, on the rare occasions that he did his decisions were recorded and passed on to the commanders of the other Legions. This would not be should any of his notions failed however… though if that were the case he would not be breathing at this moment. “Form a battle line” He said clearly into the com system. The men arranged themselves into a perfectly flat unyielding barrier sixty warriors across and raised their rifles with the synchronicity that can only come from decades of drills and battle. Casian took his place and a bright green semi transparent crosshair containing a magnified view superimposed itself over his vision, his neuro-sight. “Lay a fire wall” commanded Casian, his finger tightening on the trigger. They fired in perfect unison; the combined energy shots roared like a Krion drake. Screaming death smashed into the front row of the aliens, tearing them apart into a cloud of plasma and boiling blood that fried the skin of the nearest aliens and burnt the slices of eye from their heads. They fell down clawing at their ruined razor filled faces. They waited until the dead were completely obscured before firing the second deafening volley so as to maximise casualties. Another row of aliens fell down in a spray of charred flesh and bubbling blood. The combined might of the Taui-kuns firepower was enough to form an impenetrable barrier of death. The air was so thick with energy bolts that it shimmered like a desert mirage from the oppressive heat. The sniper rifles barked in a deathly metronome and the heavy weapons sang their rumbling chorus, feasting on the devastation they wreaked. The hailstorm of mortar shells and HMG bolts shredded the fiends with horrific ease, and the steady eruptions of blinding rage from the energy cannons catapulted lurid plumes of plasmarised rock and flesh high into the sky. The lances lashed their packed ranks like boiling whips. But despite this punishment they kept on swarming forwards, throwing themselves into the storm. The steaming carcasses lay so thick upon the scorched ground it was like a great carpet of burnt meat and bubbling fat. But then a dire voice rose upon the intercom. “Casian, this is Berian.” Berian was in charge of the heavy weapons unit. “There’s a secondary force of the bastards coming up behind us. They’ll be upon us in minutes, requesting to divert fire.” “Granted. Divert your fire to the secondary swarm. I’m sending E2 to back you up.” Casian switched off his Com and shouted over the din of the firewall. “Malian! Take squad two and back up Berians position!” “Sir!” he acknowledged. “Two, get on me!” he cried, and nineteen men peeled off of the firewall to follow him as he ran back towards the steep slope of the crater. The reinforcing squad dashed through the dark, kicking up a trail of white dust. The great guns continued to roar in the distance, but Casians depleted force was no longer receiving the benefits “We can’t hold them!” Barked Calrung. They no longer had enough firepower to stop the advance of the swarm; the enemy was gaining ground rapidly despite heavy losses. They still had the snipers, but alone they just weren’t useful against these numbers. He activated his Com. “Larian, this is Casian. How much ammunition do you have?” a few seconds later the cold, dull voice of the sniper came over the Com. “Enough.” “We need to thin them out faster, I want you and your men to switch your weapons to full auto and fire into their midst.” “Sir.” He acknowledged after another languid pause. They were within five hundred metres, there wasn’t long left. They needed to make as much of an impact as they could before brutal close quarters combat ensued. “Ready grenades!” Roared Casian. In unison as they had drilled so many times before his squads primed grenades, sliding them down the gaping barrels of their launchers and took aim, their enhanced brains instantly calculating the range and trajectory, greying out the predicted area of effect of the other grenades to maximise casualties. “Fire!” Casian bellowed, he and his men in unison launched their shrieking grenades into the midst of the enemy. With a massive roar forty Antimatter explosions went off in huge spheres of pure, volatile energy. Nothing was left but smoking craters, blinding white-hot flame and searing clouds of plasma. The aliens caught in the blast were completely vaporised or blasted into small chunks of burnt meat scattering the battlefield. Many more had been broken on the shockwaves, their contorted forms lay twisted and crushed on the dirt, mewling and thrashing the air weakly as their lives ebbed away. Dirt, molten rock and small lumps of flesh began to rain down on them, making strange pinging and spluttering sounds. “Load!” he cried and they slid a second grenade into the smoking barrels, firing an instant later. They kept the pace up and each man managed to loose all ten of their grenades within thirty seconds of perfectly synchronised launching and reloading. The aliens were getting too close for comfort now, within three hundred metres. They had to get into a better defensive formation or they would be broken under the impetus of the charge. “Reform into defensive pattern alpha.” A heartbeat later they had organised into a neat arrowhead, Casian at the point. “Shields!” the outline of the arrowhead drew cylindrical pointed staffs and thrust them into the ground in front of them, these unfurled gracefully like the wings of some great glittering bird, forming an interlocking shield wall of just under shoulder height around them. It was then that the tank finally chose to appear. At first it seemed like a distant meteor against the dark sky. It sparked ever closer until it was in full deadly sleek silhouette, scythe shaped gliding wings guiding it closer. Its beautiful, graceful curves were fully evident, smooth black Mòrón bristling with antipersonnel HMG turrets. The massive fifty centimetre cannon cocooned in a spherical turret was testament to its awesome destructive powers. The turret cannon fired and for an instant the world turned to bright blue flame. The explosion shook the ground like an earthquake and the shock waves threatened to tear Casian from the ground and cast him to the wind like a leaf among a storm. When the blinding light cleared there was a crater two hundred metres across scarred into the ground, at its centre a raging plasma column a hundred kilometres high, the ground around it bubbling and steaming. Casian watched as it sucked itself up higher into the atmosphere, where it hung as if to replace the worlds blocked out sun. It flattened out and dulled down as the icy temperature began to affect it, slowly solidifying into tiny crystallised droplets of matter that whizzed down and struck the ground with dull ‘phuts’, twanged of Mòrón with eerie pings and twangs and bit into alien flesh with immensely satisfying and highly audible splats and cracks. Casian smiled grimly as he watched aliens peppered with these projectiles crawling weakly and snarling as they desperately tried to reach their prey before they were engulfed by the tide of living flesh behind them; relentless beasts. As if not satisfied with the damage it had wreaked the tank opened up with its multiple HMGs, so close Casian could hear the whine of its Anti-Grav Motors. It whirred over his head blaring away with constant chattering energy fire before crashing into the aliens and crushing many beneath it like insects beneath an iron boot. For a moment it was covered in them, but it soon cleared a wide circumference around it that no living creature could pass. Even this was not enough to stop their frenzied charge, they flowed around the lethal behemoth, so close now that they filled Casians vision with a bright heat stain, kicking up clouds of dirt as they stampeded towards them: twenty meters. “Swords!” the outer ring of warriors including himself drew their swords and lit them with a growing whirr of hungry plasma. Fifteen metres, fourteen metres “Fire into their midst!” The remainder of the squad opened up, firing out of the arrowhead in controlled bursts of fury, blowing chunks of rotten flesh into plasma and dropping countless aliens to the dust. Thirteen metres, twelve meters. Casian stared down into the soulless depths of the swirling vortices of plasma in his blade. He drew it up with a snarl and glared at the abominations surging towards him. Ten metres, nine metres. Casian began to chant a line of the first battle litany and the others joined him, their voices deep and heavy with zealous joy. “Face the enemies of humanity with courage, Purge them with your honour and your strength, Fear not death, For it is your ascension to glory!” The last few words swelled to a rising cry of defiance and rage as the final metres shrank and the exhilaration of battle took its tightest grip. Four metres, three metres, two metres, time seemed to slow as Casian locked his gaze with a snarling rampaging beast with a lolling tongue poking from the razor sharp cookie-cutter mouth and dull glowing eye slits. The seconds became minutes as the final stage of battle gripped him. He dodged to the right as the abomination swung a blow at supersonic speeds at his head with a scythe bladed claw that could have sliced through a block of titanium. Casian instantly replied, swinging his sword with a savage cry and slicing off its head, sinuous flesh offered no resistance to his energy blade. It crumpled, but its momentum carried it forward and it crashed into the shield wall with a dull crack, coils of dirty smoke rising from the cauterised stump of its neck. The aliens smashed into them like the breaking tide on a stubborn rock and they were soon surrounded. Casian removed three heads in quick succession with casual swipes of his blade. The formation was almost invulnerable to their attack, a wall of heavy shields and burning blades, energy bolts whizzing constantly over their shoulders, carefully aimed from the core of the arrowhead. A pile of alien corpses rapidly piled up, he and his men killing again and again and again in a flurry of hacking, slashing and frenzied bloodletting. The world shook as the tank fired for the second time, Casian could actually see waves shooting across the ground as if the rock had become water. Casian swung his sword again and again, as if in time to an invisible metronome, and each time one of the alien fiends fell howling its last breaths as its cleaved flesh sizzled like bubbling fat. The pile of smoking carcasses soon became metres high, but more kept crawling over the top like intrepid mountaineers, only to add a further layer for their followers to traverse as they were hacked down, stabbed or shot. “Bloody hell! We’re getting buried alive here!” yelled Larung. Casian stabbed up into the gut of an alien that had crawled to the top of the mound and was about to leap into their midst. He withdrew the blazing blade and decapitated a demon glaring down at him. As the heavy head thudded to the dirt at Casians feet, he decided it was time to move, or they would literally be crushed under the weight of the foe. The outer rim of warriors would have to lift the embedded shields and force a path through the blade dragons, dead and alive. They could set back up again twenty metres away or so. This could be a tricky manoeuvre, but he had faith in his men, they had fought countless battles in thousands of warzones and had come out of far riskier actions unscathed. He was about to issue the commands, when he stopped, puzzled as the dirt beneath him began to vibrate, flinging up clumps of dust as if the ground was the skin of a great drum. The tank had not fired. What could be happening? He watched, bemused as a hairline crack opened beneath his feet. His expression turned to horror as it grew and widened in rhythmic bursts, as if someone was hammering a chisel into the ground. “Break formation!” he yelled. But it was too late. The world exploded into red flame and Casian and his men were flung high into the air, twisting and turning, arms flailing helplessly. Casian landed with a dull thud several hundred metres away, the air rushing out of his lungs like a broken air lock, and immediately an alien was on top of him. He wrestled with it, its malformed face stretched ever closer, thousands of teeth gnashing furiously. Its flesh was torn and ragged, pus leaked from beneath it… just like the face. Casians concentration slipped and the creatures mouth rushed forwards, he stopped it, centimetres from his face. It growled in frustration, cheated of its meal. He grasped for a weapon, grabbed his knife but before he could drive it home a sniper shot the aliens conical head into a plume of plasma. Larian surely, he was always keeping an eye out for his commander. Casian scrambled up and found a new victim immediately, he thrust the knife in its neck, it went through its jaw and poked out the top of its skull promoting a dying screech from the creature. His sword was lying a few metres away, he flung himself towards it as a scythe blade bit into the ground where he had been standing a moment before as if it was soft cheese. As he grasped the sword he found he was under the shadow of a blade dragon, he thrust the sword up into its belly. He rolled over to the right to avoid being crushed by its dead weight as gelatinous organs cascaded from the wound, cutting the legs from beneath another as he did so. He leapt to his feet and hacked one in half at the waist. And then Casian saw the monster drag its bloated nightmarish form out of the ground. It was ten times the size of the other aliens and possessed a pair of torn, leathery wings that seemed to cover half of the non-existent sky when it unfurled them fully; it seemed it was stretching millennia of cramp from them, squeezing out every last drop of fatigue. He watched in sick fascination as several juvenile blade dragons hacked their way out of its bloated belly, which was pockmarked with scarred over tissue. Casian roared in horror as it casually crushed one of his men, Keljung, beneath a gigantic tri clawed hand the size of a small battle tank and sliced another, Gulung, in half with a lazy swipe of a scythed blade almost twenty metres long. Those were his men, comrades who had fought by his side for the best part of a century, yet it swatted them like bugs. “Peace be upon your blessed souls brother god warriors, may…” The old prayer began to ring in Casians head as if a bell had been struck. It was small comfort. Just that morning he had laughed and joked with those men, it was a small, routine mission, what could go wrong? They had been together for the best part of a century, they had shared memories of battles long done and partook in gracious and courageous deeds, hid from one another the same pains of constant war. And now they were gone. In an instant it was as if the century of comradeship they had shared ceased to exist. Ancient and ravenous death had clicked his fingers and taken what had been owed to him since the day they had signed up to fight for mankind. That was the inevitable doom of every Taui-kun warrior. Casian ignored the massive beast for a moment, paying attention to an enemy that was not an immediate threat could be lethal. Besides, the tank and heavy weapons should have no problem in dealing with it. Casian shot one in the face with his pistol and swung the smoking pistol back to break a serpentine neck with a brutal backhand blow before carving one in two from its shoulder down to its waist. The prayer for his brothers continued in his mind. “May you find your paradise and in your…” But before Casian could finish the old psalm the nightmarish form turned and looked straight at Casian. His eyes widened in terror as the chattering exploded in his head, he fell to the ground retching and into terrifying blood stained unconsciousness. The last thing he heard was the choir of sinister voices: I have come for you… Casian… IX. Sniper Larian: Larian snarled discontentedly. They were snipers, and their rifles were precise instruments of death, not indiscriminate butchers. “Switch to automatic.” He growled to the squad. Larian ran his fingers gently along the sleek stock of his rifle. How long had he and his gun been fighting together? Curled up close like lovers, glaring haughtily at the violence far away. He thumbed the selector switch disapprovingly to fully automatic and a bipod kicked out violently from the barrel like a switch blade, burying itself into the chalky dirt to steady the weapon. “Hiran weeps.” he whispered as he squeezed the trigger. The barrel erupted into blue flame and a lethal salvo of high calibre bolts screamed into the horde below. The kickback was quite ferocious; it hammered the form fitting stock into his shoulder. Larian had stripped the recoil compensators from his rifle quite some time ago. Over the decades that they had been together he had made it his own, suiting it to his needs. He had become tired of the detached feeling that the recoilless energy rifles gave, he wanted to feel every shot. He needed the visceral and satisfying feeling of the rifle jumping in his hands, it kept his pulse up, and allowed him the extra challenge of compensating for the recoil himself. It made things far more interesting. When he had made his modifications he had not had fully automatic fire in mind, however. That was not his combat role. He let off another burst, scattering the heavy stream of shots into the advancing swarm. He corrected his aim, and fired a longer burst, fighting against the fiercely bucking rifle. It seemed to make no impact on the massive, spreading puddle of filthy alien flesh below. As soon as one went down, it was almost as if three leapt up in its place. A wash of red flame suddenly filled his vision, and a brutal shockwave slapped him an instant later. His gun leapt as he scanned the battlefield for its source, but before he could reach it, he spotted Casian pinned down beneath a shrieking beast. Larian felt closer to Casian than any other man alive. He had been there, the day Hiran died. He had saved Larian, from his planets fate and from himself. He had given him his new purpose, all he had left to cling to amidst the solitary blackness of his existence. He shot the monster atop of his beloved commander in the face, and continued to watch, almost affectionately, to ensure that he was not injured. Only when he was satisfied did he allow his gaze to wonder again. A wall of torn, weeping flesh filled his scope. He pulled back the magnification with a start and stared somewhat placidly as the hellish gargantuan crawled from the ground. He watched, mesmerised as it crushed two soldiers with earth shattering force. “By Hirans earth, I will kill this beast.” He whispered to himself, almost reverentially. The cross hairs wavered over the creatures strange circular mouth, right down its weeping throat. He concentrated and the cross hairs stopped wavering and flowed with the creatures movements. He pulled the trigger. The aim was true but it had absolutely no effect, it blew a hole in the creatures throat and splattered its dark blood into freezing crystals, but the creature shrugged the wound aside as if it hadn’t felt it. Larian snarled and tried again, putting a shot right through its putrid slice of an eye. A chunk of its was vaporised and the gooey flesh sizzled, but it didn’t even notice. He cursed and aimed for a third shot. The creature turned and glared at him, its gaze seeming to carry a soul crushing weight. It flapped its wings with a sound like a giant fanning a fire with a mountainous sheet of cardboard and soared right in front of Larian. When it roared it was like ten thousand fighters simultaneously breaking the sound barrier, as if the whole of reality was being ripped in two like a sheet of cloth. “Sniper Squad one to heavy weapons one, we need cover, I repeat, Sniper Squad one to heavy weapons one where the hell are you guys! We need a hand, take this beast down!” A reply came through almost instantly: “This is heavy weapons commander Berian, heavy weapons one cannot assist, we are engaged in close combat, I repeat, we are engaged in close combat, we cannot assist.” Larian swore. Larian and his squad blasted at the creature but the shots never reached it, they dissipated metres away into wisps of energy. It laboriously dragged itself closer through the air, reached down and plucked Clauren from the ground, Larian shot the wrist of the gargantuan hand holding him, but doing nothing more than enrage the beast further. It raised him towards its massive malformed head. The valiant man, showing no fear in the face of his certain death, ripped a knife from his boot and thrust it into the creatures eye before being squeezed in two. His armour cracked with a sickening pop, staining the creatures hand with his life blood. Larian was shocked. Not that the man just metres away had suddenly died, but at the phenomenal strength that must have been required to crush Mòrón in that way. Mòrón was near incompressible, it could stand up to an atmospheric pressure of one thousand tons per square centimetre, yet this creature had crushed it and tossed it aside as if it were an aluminium ration can. The creature was distracted for a moment by the tank, with little effort it tore off its gigantic turret as if pruning an offending branch off an ornamental tree. Larian was horrified, that tank had been part of the Angels of Death since their founding, millennia ago, it had survived the destruction of worlds, the fury of bloodthirsty empires, but had finally given up. Would it be reparable? Probably, but it would be a blemish on the vehicles pride all the same. He was about to give the command to retreat, but as he turned to face down the hill there was nothing but a surging expanse of demonic bodies that stretched on for half a kilometre. There was only one thing left to do. “My warriors of Sniper squad one, we are cut off, let them taste our wrath in a final magnificent charge to be remembered for eternity in the annals on mother Earth! Death is but a path to glory! With me!” And with that the squad clipped on their bayonets and charged the final twenty metres to the tide of death. Larian did not fear death; fear was one of the things he had lost the day Hiran died. He had nothing left to lose. For him it was just a matter of when. He did not know if there was an afterlife, didn’t care, but he knew at least he had secured himself a place in memory. “For Hiran!” Screamed Larian, grinning maniacally as they ploughed into the mass of chattering maws and clanking chitin plating. Larian ran one through on the end of his blade and pulled the trigger, the point blank blast sent the creature somersaulting backwards, it smashed into another alien, knocked it to the floor, the smouldering wreck that had once been its chest steaming. Larian leapt on to the wriggling creature trapped beneath its corpse and thrust his bayonet through its neck. He spun around and his blade tore a windpipe open, it hissed out rancid air and boiling blood. Another one fell as he smashed open its ribcage with the butt of his rifle. But they could not escape the queen now her attention was locked on them; Larian turned to find it towering above him. He snarled as he prepared to fling himself onto it. So was this it? Was this how he was to die? But before he had the chance to find out, a shining figure in a flaming suit of armour appeared with a flash of red light, floating in mid air. It drew a huge blade larger than itself and darted with liquid grace through the air towards the beast. When right in front of the creature and barely five metres away from Larian it stopped and raised its blade. The figure was dwarfed by the creature but just stood in the air unflinching. The beast raised its many arms and screamed in pure animalistic rage as it bought them crashing down towards the glowing form. At the last possible instant it darted to one side flung himself behind the creature and plunged its sword deep in its heart. This bought it crashing down; dead before it hit the ground. The victor hovered over its back for several seconds before disappearing. Larian was jerked back to the moment as a dragon leapt on him and pinned him to the ground; it bellowed in his face splattering drool over his visor and slowly, almost mockingly and brought a massive scythe blade to his neck. It raised it high. It was about to bring it crashing down when someone shot it in the head. The next second strong hands were helping him up, he found himself face to face with Casian. “Just returning the favour. Come friend, let us finish this together” Larian found himself smiling once more as fifty seven men followed up behind them with swords drawn as side by side they butchered the alien scum. Larians snipers joined them, shortly followed by the heavy weapons squad, two lost from their number. Casians squad formed a protective circle around them, they set up the mortars and fired HMG and energy lance over their shoulders, the energy cannons remained silent, the range too short for them to be used safely. Before long the aliens numbers began to thin. There would always be another time to die. X. Linwe: Linwe stirred and awoke from the depths of unconsciousness. Her vision was still a bit blurry but it soon adjusted. She could only just bring to mind what had happened before, but it all came flooding back when she saw the gigantic headless corpse of the beast that had attacked her. It seemed to be directly out of some terrible nightmare, the rows of hellish spikes, its oily reddish black blood which had soaked into her clothes and caked her hair, the flesh of its segmented ant like body was pestilent and stank to Earth and back. She thought of the mysterious being and shivered as the realisation dawned on her. “Project Genesis?” she whispered to herself in awe. But there was no time to stop and wonder. She snatched up her now empty knife from the ground and made a dash for the nearby exit of the research station. Powerful sounds echoed around the corridors, high-pitched whining, explosions, the splash of bubbling blood and the splatter of sizzling flesh. Weapons fire, surely. Weapons meant soldiers, soldiers meant safety. She started heading down the corridor a bit faster. Linwe was no weapons expert, but she used to go shooting in her spare time and this sounded nothing like the toned down laser weapons she was accustomed to. The firing was getting closer and more frequent, they were just around the corner. Linwe leapt around the corner with her hands held high up and screamed “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” And was confronted with the most magnificent and intimidating view in her life. Twenty men were charging down the corridor, no not men, gods. Each towering far above mere mortals, at least three metres in height, each engulfed in a skin of absolute blackness, darker than space, yet gleaming like diamond. It clung skin-tight, etching out the perfect contours of their bodies that seemed to have been carved from stone as the zenith of masculine power and each unnaturally huge muscle in glittering black beauty with perfect clarity. Their faces were almost completely obscured by elegant blood red visors and on their right cheeks in flowing gold script was etched the runes ‘Angels Of Death’ and on their left was the number one. The warrior at the front was a head taller than the rest and held a gigantic energy sword that filled the corridor with brilliant blue light. Even though Linwe had been born and raised on a backwater research station at the edge of the galaxy with nothing but basic communication to the outside, she still knew what they were, Taui-Kun, God Warriors, the light of humanity, the pure and the righteous. Linwe was filled with awe, Taui-Kun, here? “Get down!” Bellowed the one holding the sword in a voice like thunder. Linwe felt compelled to follow his command and without knowing why she flung herself flat on the floor. Microseconds later a salvo of energy bolts that would have torn her apart scalded through the air half a metre above her, she felt her flesh sizzle like cooking fat, the agony of it drew a moan from her trembling lips. The bolts struck their target, annihilating it instantly. Moments later they were right in front of her, dwarfing her. She felt herself being lifted single-handedly from the ground with incredible force, before being set back on her feet. “You are lucky human, a few more seconds and that abomination would have killed you, you did well to run.” This time his voice was infinitely softer, almost hypnotic “Tell me, what is your name” he seemed to radiate strength and courage. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke “ My name is Linwe. Can you get me out here?” “I am Commander Casian of the Angels Of Death” He replied curtly as he had hundreds of times before. “Casian… the hero of the Dalmos five crusade?” “If you call bloody murder heroic.” He said resentfully “Come, we must take you from here Linwe.” He paused, Linwe recognised he was probably talking to his Com system. Pangs of fatigue lanced up Linwes legs as her tiredness and the horrors of the day came back to her. This twinned with her pulsing wounds made her feel faint. She would not let go. She would stay firm and upright… Yet despite her convictions the world dissolved and she was falling through eternity, to be caught in an iron strong, yet gentle grip. Consciousness left Linwe, but this time she was filled with feelings of excitement and deep peace. She did not awake until many hours later and then she was in Casians ship at the other end of the galaxy. |
| II. Section 2. Blood, Corruption And A Stranger. I. Darkness: The short man in the black robes stood on the ridge of the canyon around the research station and surveyed the desolate scene below. Ten thousand dead blade dragons, slaughtered by only one hundred human warriors. “That could not have gone better my lord. It is all as you wished.” "Good… Where is he Bicarno?” High lord Bicarno, that was the mans name, but now even hearing it spoken reminded him of the disjointed time before his enlightenment, he shuddered. “Right here lord, Genesis they named him” As he spoke a figure that seemed to be cloaked in armour made of flickering red flame stepped out of the darkness, he was more than twice as tall as Bicarno. "Is he strong?" “Very much so my lord. He defeated my puppet.” He took a deep breath, certain this would give his master pleasure “His only equal is Casian, but he has one advantage over even him, he needs no trigger.” He said reverently. "That is very good." Pleasure burst inside Bicarno like a supernova and its fires tingled through his body. "He will follow commands?" “Yes lord, if it weren't for him, Linwe would be dead.” "There is just one more thing you must do to him to convert him fully." “I know.” Bicarno stood up to his full height, but he was still dwarfed by the menacing figure. “That which was born from the flames of ignorance, gifted with a seed of the great tree that is our lord Orageos, take up your true form as his child and become cloaked in his illustrious robes of darkness. Be reborn in a christening of blood. Kneel.” He drew a glittering black knife from his robes, lifted it high up and cried to the night “Exulted Lord Orageos, greater of the twin gods and rightful ruler of Tulandier and Tutauilung and all between and after them. Embody yourself in this blade and reunite yourself with your child.” A menacing tendril of darkness snaked down from the sky like an inquisitive serpent and was absorbed into the blade. Without hesitation he held out his left arm and slit his wrist open. Blood splashed over the head of Genesis and sprayed in a dark fountain that froze instantly into ruby red jewels. Then he plunged the blade into Genesis’ heart and stood back, his job complete. The knife became liquid and coated the creations whole body with unimaginably black and cold darkness that seemed to devour what light and warmth there was with a ravening ferocity. “It is done, lord” his wound already healed “He is yours” "Good. I have great things for you Bicarno." Bicarno shivered with pleasure at praise from his master. Then Genesis spoke in an insanely deep and warped human voice: “What is my bidding?” "Go to Morthiot with Bicarno and meet your brother." II. Sniper Larian: A sharp whining filled the air as the transport disappeared from this universe and into the next, the world melting into darkness before Larians eyes as his consciousness faded with the light until he was alone in the darkness. Then the visions began. It was raining delicately, he could hear the roar of energy weapons, the crackle of lasers the eerie whine of the alien weaponry and the shrieks of dying monsters. ”Davan!” Bellowed Casian “Get up!” Larian realised what was happening and with all his willpower tried to avert it, but he couldn’t. He opened his eyes and saw above him a vision of hell. Thousands of sharp jagged Iratui ships flitted across the sky like clumsy fish in a sea of blood, locked in a deadly dance of death with just a few hundred elegant Taui-Kun fighters. The sky was lit with flickering energy fire and burning globules of warped space-time. Explosions from artillery were an almost constant thunder like background noise, Davans ears throbbed from it. Davan, that had been his name before he joined the Taui-Kun. He stood groggily to his quivering feet, surrounded by a towering squad of Taui-Kun, they seemed kilometres above him like archaic edifices filled with the supernatural power and glory of the ancients. “Davan, the Iratui have began to retreat, we are going to pursue them, in Earth’s name they are not allowed to live. Can you walk?” He looked down and saw the grisly wound in his leg, an alien had shot him with one of their strange weapons, a chunk of his leg and been torn into separate quarks. “I can make it” he grimaced and gritted his teeth against the hot tide of pain that now seemed to emerge, it was as if the wound hadn't existed before he had seen it. “Where are they heading?” he struggled past his lips and gasped at the new heights of pain he was subjected to. “Section BF28” Davans heart sank, that was the section he lived in. Where he’d left Elaine. “Lets go!” he screamed and ran as fast as he could, his leg sending jolts of pain, he gritted his teeth and tried in vain to stay with the Taui-Kun. All around him in the street were blasted chunks of rock and the massive foundations of towering skyscrapers like the feet of giants, anchored firmly to the ground, even amidst the chaos. He leapt over a lump of masonry and his leg throbbed angrily, causing him to grunt in pain. He saw something out of the corner of his eye, he swung around and there, leaning out a heat warped Transparisteel window was an Iratui sniper, it glared at him with glowing eye slits and pointed its rifle at him, but Davan was faster. Without dropping pace He pulled out his laser gun and shot it in its oversized circular fanged mouth. It retched purplish blood before collapsing. “You have a good eye Davan, perhaps when all this is over you will join us” Davan seriously considered that, it would be a new life, would give him a purpose, but he knew he’d never be able to leave Elaine. “There they are!” a squad of the creatures were a few hundred metres ahead and had dug deep into positions “Death and glory!” roared Casian in a rising cry of blood fuelled tumultation. The Taui-kun split, as if a knife had been cut through their ranks. Half drew swords and began to charge while the rest raised their energy guns and fired a barrage of shots over their shoulders to keep the aliens heads down until they reached them. Davan raised his own gun to join in but Casian sensing that he had the courage to stay with them and fight turned and called out “Davan, we’ll deal with this, go, find your girl.” The dying sun behind him gave him a magnificent ethereal air and formed a bloodstained golden halo around his head as he raised his sword to him in a godlike salute. He scampered away as the shots began to crackle overhead and kicked down the door to his flat. A snarling monstrosity leapt towards him, he raised his gun, but it clicked empty. The alien clubbed him around the head with its weapon and Davan fell against the wall, half-stunned. The creature ecstatically raised the gun to his face, but Davan lashed out with his foot like a striking scorpion and caught it off balance, before it could scramble back up he snatched its gun and shot it in the head in a roar of dissipating atoms. Someone screamed. Davan ran into the next room and found to his horror an alien on top of Elaine, gnawing greedily at her neck like a suckling child. He screamed in rage and shot the creature in the gut, it rolled off of Elaine and whined as the air escaped its lungs, twitching and writhing. He ran over to Elaine, but it was too late. Blood trickled from her still lips and her eyes stared lifelessly. Davan didn’t believe what was happening; it couldn’t be true, this wasn’t real, any minute now he would wake up, with her at his side. But he didn’t. He bent down and kissed her lips, hoping to find some life, but they were as cold as starlight. Her blood tasted thick and rotten in his mouth. He saw her laughing face in his mind, but it was just an elaborate death mask now. She would never laugh, never love or cry anymore. And what had been his last words to her? Don’t be afraid, ill be back for you. And now he was back and it was too late. Her soul had been torn from her body and cast among the lost and damned and he had never said goodbye. Perhaps if you had been a few seconds sooner… Perhaps if you had stayed with her… He collapsed trembling and shivering, too shocked to realise the full horror of it. The blood drained from his face and his temple pulsed. Tears began to stream freely down his face, they scorched like acid. Half formed words quaked in his throat. Then the rage over took him and he stood up sharply and shot the mewling creature on the floor again and again and again, screaming and cursing with each shot until there was only a bloody sizzling pulp left. His strength left him and he collapsed as wave after wave of grief pummelled him, washing away his heart, his mind and his soul like tiny sandcastles underneath a towering tsunami. Again the air was filled with the sharp whining as the ship decelerated and fell back to the universe as we know it the same instant it left, but at the other side of the galaxy. This coupled with a sharp jerk woke Larian back to consciousness with a sigh of relief; he was back from the terror. He was slumped on the floor in the corner of his quarters, his helmet still on as usual, but none of the rest of his armour; it was pointless keeping all of it on. He looked around; it was the same as usual, except he was not alone. Lying peacefully on the bed at the other side of the room was the girl, Linwe. He had agreed to keep an eye on her until they could put her safely down on Earth. He was startled by her beauty, and moved by it like he had not been for a long time. “What are you staring at?” she smiled at him with a sweet little smile that spread no further than her mouth. She had been watching him also, through eyes opened the tinniest crack. Her voice sounded to him like the joyous singing of a Co-cui on a dusky Hiran morning. “You remind me of someone.” “Who?” she asked, sounding genuinely interested Larian paused, before deciding there was no point in keeping it from her. “My wife.” “Married hmm? Guess I don’t have to keep such a watchful eye on you anymore.” “She died twenty three years ago.” he said dully. His voice was like a sheaf, covering the cold sharp steel that lay beneath, preventing it from wounding others and himself. “Don’t fear me, human. I won’t attack you. Rest, you have much to sleep off.” “I don’t think I can ever sleep off what happened.” “Then we have one thing in common.” She looked as if she was going to ask something else, but then she rolled over with obvious discomfort, wincing as pressure was put onto her left arm. Larian waited until sleep held her in its irresistible clutches and crept softly over to her sleek form. He listened to the sound of her breath as her lungs fed her dreams, such a gentle and soothing rhythm. He stiffened and grimaced as if a knife had been plunged into his gut. For a moment he was back on Hiran as the first rays of morning filtered through the pollutant laden air and danced on Elaines sleeping body, her smooth arms wrapped around him, creamy breasts pressed against his naked chest, long dark hair tickling the sensitive skin of his throat. Breathing in that same dreamy way. He had lain there with her under that heavy, itchy blanket on a bed of Co-cui feathers that clumped together into little boulders of discomfort, revelling in the way her exhaled breath played across his face, how it caressed his skin like a warm hand. He could never know it was to be the last time he would do so. Larian twinged uncomfortably. How alike they looked. Was it just his delusioned mind playing unkind tricks on him, or could she really have passed for Elaines long lost twin? Why was it she must continue to haunt him now after all these years? Why couldn’t his yearning mind let go? He was painfully aware of a deep abrasive longing in his chest that pained each softened breath. How he wanted the touch of a womans skin once more. How he wanted to have someone to hold close and share his love with, to stoke the dying coals of his heart. He wanted the impossible however. There was no love for the Taui-kun, only the comradeship of a unit and the brothel of carnage, death and blood that the mistress of war had to offer. But was it impossible? Was it even so far away now? He reached down to Linwe, towards her velvet skin, her firm, shapely breasts centimetres from his fingertips, an electric current seemed to arc through the empty air making his hand twitch. He thumbed on the medi-ray concealed in his palm. Stimulating rays caressed Linwes body, encouraging damaged tissue to regrow. The burns that trickled down her back like hot wax healed almost instantly. She had hidden them well, but Taui-kun see in more ways than mortal man. She had also tried to conceal the terrible gash in her left arm, but Larian had not needed god-like powers to notice how stiffly it moved, or the discharges of blood and pus that had caked the silver-white material of her clothing. It must have taken incredible force of mind to even attempt the game she had played. But why had she done it? Was it pride? Or was it fear? Fear that the kindly medic would ask for a little something in return for the service? Something that didn’t take the shape of a handful of credit chips? The ship rocked as they stopped completely in some other god-forsaken edge of the galaxy, he had no idea where they were, but it didn’t matter, what did matter was his duty and he knew that was here. His com burst to life, Larian was awoken from his half sleep. It was Casian. “Larian, we must drop to the surface… and we must take the girl.” “Sir.” He walked over to Linwe and reached out to shake her arm, but the moment his hand touched her creamy silk skin, she rolled over to face him, clutching a lit energy knife. Where had she come by such a weapon? “What do you want?” she snapped “We’re taking you to the surface.” “Why?” “It is not my business to know.” He growled and turned away from her, grabbing his rifle from its cradle on the wall and holstering two pistols. Holding the gun in one hand he marched her down the elaborate corridors to the hanger bay, as he walked he set of the trigger in his mind, inside his chest his Mòróplex squirted liquid Mòrón and secreted it through the pores in his skin. Linwe stared at him in fascination and awe. Then her gaze moved to his long gleaming rifle. She shuddered. “There’s going to be fighting, isn’t there.” She said timidly, almost to herself. “Why must I be a part of it?” Larian twitched. “There’s going to be more fighting, isn’t there Davan.” Whispered Elaine softly, staring blankly out onto the smog choked street. “Why must we be a part of it?” Davan stepped up behind her and placed his hands comfortingly on her shoulders. There were bodies in the street. They had ambushed a squad of Iratui that morning. The firefight was short and brutal; the aliens were dead before they had a chance to call for backup. Six men from the street had been killed in the attack, they lay intermingled with the carcasses of the enemy. “We fight because we must, Elaine. Because there is nothing else.” She looked up at him with frightened eyes. He kissed her, and held her shivering body close as the sirens began to wail. But her sweet lips turned to blood in his mouth as Larian came back to reality with a jolt. “What's your name soldier?” “I have no name.” He snapped. Linwe flinched back as though stung. They walked in silence the rest of the way. When they reached the hanger, the rest of the team was already there. They stood impatiently, silent and intimidating giants, robed in demonic black. Without a word they marched into the awaiting dropships belly. Almost instantly it shot into the atmosphere like a bullet. “The leaders of this planet, Morthiot, have declared a rebellion against humanity. They have rounded up the entire planets civilians and threatened to put them to death if we do not meet with them. The council has ordered that we comply to their wishes.” said Casian “Maybe we should leave them to it, they’d only be ripping their own guts out.” Remarked Larung “Why is the girl here? Isn’t involving civilians against standard procedure?” “It may be against standard procedure to involve a civilian in an action, but it also against standard procedure to allow ten thousand men woman and children to die through strict adherence to the rules. They said we must bring her too. Earth knows how they knew we had her, or why they so want to meet us.” Larian watched, mildly amused, as Linwe ran her hand across where just minutes before the terrible wound had lay, confusion and worry on her face, but also relief. The kindly medic had not been as lustful as either of them had thought. “We don’t have any landing craft at this time Linwe, so we’re going to have to make a low altitude drop.” Explained Casian gently. “The fall will not last more than thirty seconds, and you will be in no danger at all.” Linwe nodded timidly to signal that she understood. She did not look particularly well. A chime sounded and a pleasant female voice spoke “Drop altitude in fifteen seconds.” Larian leant down to speak to Linwe, who looked as if she had lost several pints of blood, barely concealing the shuddering of her limbs “When we jump you must hold on to me, do not let go.” “You expect me to cling to you like your lover?” Larian shrugged. “Or you could just fall the whole way.” he almost smiled. The kindly medic was making his demands after all. He thrust an atmosphere pack at her, and she strapped it on without question, she knew what was about to happen. “Five seconds till drop altitude. Doors opening.” The doors opened in a rush of screaming air. It was breathable, but there wasn’t a lot of it; at this altitude, a human would suffocate. He grabbed her by the arm and led her to the opening. She took one look over the edge and blanched, staggering back a few steps. “Three” chimed the computer cheerfully. “I can’t do it” whimpered Linwe, Larians augmented ears barely able to pick up her trembling voice over the howling wind. “One” piped the computer. Larian sighed in frustration, ignoring her screams he grabbed her around the waist and ran to the edge with her under the crook of his arm and took a gigantic graceful leap into nothingness. The speed was insane, the wind howled like vengeful death, he seemed almost to be suspended on a column of air, Larian laughed at the madness of it all. The ground below beckoned to them, a mother calling back a child that has strayed too far into the woods. Linwe clung to him desperately, wrapped her arms tightly around him, buried her face in his chest and entwined her legs with his. Her long dark hair billowed up into Larians helmet like a cloud of ebony black twine. Larian held her there with his free hand, in his other was his long rifle. The ground rushed up to them at an impossible speed. Larian was almost disappointed when he was caught on the soft cushion of anti gravity and lowered safely to the ground. The instant her feet touched the ground Linwe thrust herself away from him. “Do you always manhandle women like that?” she snapped “Old habits die hard.” Larian said, more to himself than to her. “I'm Larian, by the way.” She stormed away, leaving Larian alone. He hadn't felt so alive in years. III. Commander Casian: Come and get me Casian… I'm waiting for you…Come and find me. Casian shook the voices from his head as he hit the ground. He had finally been spared from the drop descent; his head was still spinning, as if he had several shots of Kuputian whisky but he managed to stand up. This planet was a dull one, made completely of flat and featureless granite like rock. The occasional lump of feldspar glittered like a chunk of sunlight. The ancient and fading sun of this system had just set, and the stars in sky were as bright as any Casian had seen from the surface, chips of diamond caught in the thick velvety black material of eternity. This far out in the galaxial spiral there were so few stars shining, and that made them seem all the brighter. A gigantic cave entrance dominated the landscape, it was a yawning giants mouth, ten metres from lip to lip. A man in black appeared to stand at its entrance, but it was just the way the shadows played with his sight. He looked around and saw the girl, Linwe. It occurred to him that no-one had asked her whether she wanted to risk her life down here, though no-one had asked the inhabitants of the planet whether they would mind dying at the whim of one woman. He touched her shoulder, and to his surprise, she span around to face him with her knife alight. He caught the hand holding the knife, switched it off and let her hand drop. He watched her pretty face contort from fearful, to embarrassed, to shameful. “I, I, I’m sorry… I’m just feeling a bit jumpy…” she said from behind the small atmosphere pack, pin bricks of light blazing from it like golden teeth. “Linwe, you have a right to be feeling jumpy, what happened to you in that one day was more than any human should ever have to face. Now, when we are in the tunnels, you must be within three metres of either Larian, Malian or me. We don’t know what's going to be down there and we need to keep you alive.” The squad gathered around him. “Brothers, let us enter these caves to find the traitors within! Let us root out the wretched maggots that dared to challenge the authority of the High council! We will meet with them as requested, but before this day is done we will have the head of everyone of them, they will rue the day they tried to bargain with the Taui-kun!” “We will purge the traitors!” roared the squad in acknowledgement, punching the air with their fists. And so they ran through the foreboding entrance of the cave, and into the unknown. “Do you not believe you are being a little rash, commander?” asked Malian, his second. “How so friend?” Casian inquired “What if they are aware of the fact that we have probably come to purge them? What if they have wired the place with explosives that will go off in the event of their deaths, or worse?” “I doubt they will be quite that forward thinking, friend. It requires a certain degree of madness to declare rebellion, even more so to threaten the death of your own civilians if demands are not met. Who would produce food? Who would trade? Who would fly the ships? Who would fight their battles? No Malian. I expect them to be little more than frothing lunatics in desperate need of putting down for the good of all. Besides, if your scenario does turn out to be true, we have Linwe with us, just in case.” Casian explained. He was a cautious man and did not often take risks; he did not see any human lives as bartering chips. It was warm and dank in the cave, the heat and moisture caused by geothermal reactions deep down in the core. At least, that is what it said on Casians neuro-screen, the temperature in the suit being tailored to his individual preferable temperature and humidity. There was no noise in the cave, even with his advanced senses he could hear nothing other than the slight footfalls of his soldiers and Linwes more obtrusive steps echoing terribly in his mind. They turned past one snaking corridor and were immediately faced with a huge door of ornately decorated brass. Casian blinked, how strange that his eyes could not see through it. For his vision to be blocked completely like this it would require at least a metre of lead or shielding devices. A figure was engraved on it. A twisted and malformed face that protruded from brass to scream at him. The craftsmanship was incredibly detailed, the flakes of peeling parchment skin curled out like freshly planed wood and the maggots that reveled in its flesh almost seemed to wriggle as the light played on them. Casians head began to throb and pound, pressure built up on his ear drums and the air became as thick as curdled blood. Not now! He screamed at himself. As the cave, his men, everything except that brass door began to fade like unwelcome memories he felt the madness rush towards him like a cargo train, anti grav motors shrieking, air rushing and snapping like a great whip, blazing lights blinding him. He felt his sanity slipping away as if his head had become a sieve. He yelled and pressed his hands against the sides of his head, trying to block the pain that was mounting, trying to hold himself together. The brass door was the only thing left, carved out of the blackness that Casian tumbled through. The carved face burst into rancid flame and it tore itself from the prison of metal. It rushed towards him, desperate to sink its gleaming, broken teeth into his neck, drool flying, maggots charring, single eye blazing with livid hate that coursed through Casians body in sheets of unkempt outrage. Casian! See what the power of Orageos has wrought! See the future of your insignificant race! Give up Casian, there is nothing more you can do. Step down of your pedestal, cast of those robes that fit you no more, come back to me! Be one with me once more! “Get away from me!” screamed Casian, feeling hot winds of madness rush into his lungs. “Get out of my head! Get out of my head! Get out!” Using all his force of will he flung his arms through the soup of madness and blood that cloaked him and smashed his fist into the pulsating metal of the face. It bellowed laughter at him as he rained hate on it, tearing it apart, smashing it down. Then it was gone. The world came flooding back to him and Casian sucked in a deep breath of relief, panting and shaking. He was flat on his face, resting on shards of mutilated brass. In his madness he had completely destroyed the door. He had ripped it open as if it was paper, torn it from its hinges and beaten it with his fists until it was an unrecognizable hulk of twisted wreckage. He pushed himself to his feet feeling his muscles burn and his bones creak. He turned towards his squad who stood still and unsure of what to think. “I have had another vision. The high council filled me with righteous rage to tear down this work of blasphemy. There is nothing left on this world but insanity and rebellion. All who stand against us shall be purged.” A small lie, perhaps. But not that far from the truth. Still, better that than his finest men to think that he was no longer sane enough to lead them. They didn’t say a word, no zealous cry of we will purge them! No acknowledgements or affirmative gestures. Dread sank deep into Casians stomach. How much of the interplay within his head had been broadcast? Had they seen in his actions the true extent of the things in his mind? Malian flicked his head, motioning towards something that was behind Casian. Sick apprehension bubbled up through Casians chest as he spun slowly around. As the oncoming cavern filled Casians pounding head he thought that he had slipped back once more into one of his nightmares. For a moment it was if he was looking into the gut of some monstrous behemoth, but the twitching pink flesh that caked the blood-slick walls was not from one creature alone. A patchwork of mutilated, naked carcasses clothed the underlying skeleton of stone in robes of rancid meat. The realization was like an ice-cold knife sinking further into Casians belly with every passing second. The rage of their betrayal set his blood aflame. Every carcass that plastered the wall had been flayed completely of its skin, peeled fresh from their bodies still streaked with yellow slithers of fat and hung to dry from the caves heights on insane, macabre washing lines. Without the familiar and comforting layer of skin the decomposing corpses took on a new grotesque appearance. Rotting lumps of muscle slipped from reddened bone, pulped organs slithered out of shrivelled abdomens and smashed ribcages, eyeballs bulged from lidless sockets in widened terror, reddened skulls with clinging strands of stubborn tissue grinned sightlessly to the darkness. Each body never possessed more than a single eye, nerve endings dangling from empty pits, their precious organ plucked away like ripe fruit. The only sound was the steady dripping of blood into the knee-high sea of roiling crimson, it writhed as if just below the surface thousands of ravenous fish were emerging to feed, sandpaper scales scratching its skin, bringing up angry boils. How was it that the bodies still twitched after weeks of death? Why did they still drip blood when it should all have been drained in hours? Too late… hissed the voice. Does it not lift your spirit also? The rotting flesh, the dripping blood, the screaming souls… the food of the gods. But this is just a taste of what is to come… the end times shall drown all your petty reality in blood. Casian roared in anger and smashed his fist against the wall, breaking a huge chunk of rock into powder. IV. Linwe: They were all now splashing through a river of blood within a forest of crucified corpses. Blood constantly dripped in a dirge of echoing splashes for the departed. The acrid taste of bile was never out her mouth or the blear of tears from her eyes. Which was good. It hid at least some of the terrible sighs from her. She had already thrown up twice and would do so again were there anything left to throw. She shivered as if several thousand volts were passing through her body and felt as though carpets of icy pins were impaling her arms neck and spine. A shoal of restless fish swirled impatiently in her stomach and gnawed at her insides like ravenous dogs. She had only glimpsed the butchered lumps of meat that jutted from the walls like hideous gargoyles for several seconds, and she was sure it was enough to traumatise her for life. She looked down to prevent her self from seeing any more. That was almost, if not more terrible and was harder to ignore seeing as she was almost up to her waist in a writhing sea of blood. She kept trying to tell herself it was just water, but that thought could not get the bleached red stain out of her clothes. She could not help thinking that a few days ago this blood was sloshing around in the veins of living, breathing human beings. How could they all be dead? Why were they continuing if the mission was jeopardised? The answer stuck in her brain like a shard of glass. There must have been people to nail them up… dedicated, insane people. People who have to die. It was hard work forcing her legs through the water, (That was all it was, water) It was as if it was putting as much resistance as it could against her, physically attempting to impede her progress. A sheet of white hot terror shot from up her body as something brushed lightly against her leg. In her mind she saw a hand, swollen grey flesh sagging from the bone, slimy chunks of skin and rotten meat bloated with water breaking away and trailing behind it. She whimpered and tried to quicken her pace, but the water (Only water) forced her back, enjoying her distress. She stifled a scream when a moss-coated fingernail lovingly caressed her foot and daggers of pain pushed past her ribs at the effort. She risked a glance upwards to see where the Taui-kun were and a tide of sallow lolling faces crawling with maggots and stained with livid blood loomed down on her, skin peeled away, muscles bare and twitching in hideous unnatural life. Linwe choked and spluttered, feeling her head pound and her vision blur and looked back down again. The Taui-kun were still all very close, Larian was only a couple of metres from her. It was odd, however much she told herself to hate him, she couldn’t and despite the fact she had never seen his face, there was something roguishly attractive about him. He seemed so eternally calm, even now he was indifferent to the horrors around him and was gently stroking his rifle. Linwe didn’t know whether to admire or abhor him for that, but then again, no one else seemed to notice either. Well, they were Taui-Kun, immune to fear. They had probably seen much worse. But what could be worse than this? Linwe couldn’t think of anything. She didn’t want to. Linwe heard something snap like a pine knot in a winters fire. Her right foot tumbled into a cavity and jagged rock, or was it broken bones? Slashed her shins. Her left leg continued trying to force its way forwards, and before she could stop her self she was tumbling forwards into the sea of blood. It was as if someone had been playing with the colour resolution of her eyes and had turned everything off except for red. The repugnant taste of salty blood forced itself up her nostrils. She struggled, trying to free her captive foot, but all she achieved in doing was twisting it painfully and lacerating her shins further. Something grabbed hold of her left leg. Mossy, slimy grey flesh. Five jagged fingernails stroking her. This time Linwe did scream and the last of her precious air burst from her lungs and rose as quivering red globules in front of her terrified eyes. Blood flowed into her lungs, she struggled and kicked as the world started to grow dark. A black torpedo exploded into the river of blood a couple of metres from her. It surged towards her and shot out a fist that crushed the hand that gripped her leg and gently eased her right foot from the empty ribcage it was caught within. Gentle arms wrapped around Linwe and pulled her up from the depths. Linwe spat a stream of foul blood and desperately gasped in the stale air of the cave as if she had never breathed before. “You alright?” Larian growled, holding her in his gentle arms as if she was a child. “Yes.” she sighed as she reached out a red stained arm to caress the sleek and hard Mòrón that encased his cheek. He pulled away from her touch. “Commander, it was a bad idea to involve civilians in this.” Larian snarled. “Why can’t we just take her back to the ship? We don’t need her anymore.” “There’s no time Larian. We can’t spare the men or the minutes in backtracking. Our first priority is the completion of the mission.” Casian said calmly. Was this the same man who had undergone a mad fit of rage and torn down the door earlier? An ear-splitting bellow pierced the air, rudely punctuated by an angry burst of laser fire. “Move!” barked Casian. “I will have to carry you Linwe, or you won’t keep up.” “That’s ok.” Linwe said, smiling slightly from behind the atmosphere pack. He looked at her curiously for a moment from far behind his bright red visor as if unsure what to think. He nodded slowly, almost to himself. Then, clutching her tight he sprinted off into the dark. V. Bio-Tech Warrior 138/AKY2K/556: Though the primordial soup of blurry senses that had been programmed into It, Bio-Tech warrior 138/AKY2K/556 rose to Its feet and looked around. It could smell blood, the spicy aroma filling the air. To It blood was the most intoxicating scent, the most tantalising taste and the most exquisite reward. It saw the vessels in which the precious liquid was contained, although his sensors could not quite identify them. Were they human or some other creature? It could not tell, but it did not matter now. There were two of them and It started laboriously plodding towards them. It may have been four metres tall and weighed over one thousand kilograms, but It could still be stealthy when It wanted to. It was within ten metres of them when It dimly realised as if through a thick fog that they had laser weapons, but it was too late now as the urge to kill and drink deep of their vital fluids grew to an almost unbearable state. It could not hold back any longer and with a bestial bellow like an all-devouring storm It charged forwards careering straight into them. The impact knocked one of them to the ground and something clearly had broken judging by the sound of the impact, It stamped on his head to make sure, it shattered like an eggshell with a delicious pop, warm brains splattered over the dry dusty ground. It longed to lap them up but there was another to kill yet. The remaining one span around, a gun in his hands, but before his finger could tighten on the trigger he had already been caught in a bear hug from the vast warrior. He fired a shot into the darkness in vain, but before he could fire again his entire right arm was torn away and flung to the ground. To the warriors disappointment, he didn’t make a sound of discomfort other than the hissing blood pumping from the severed arteries. He struggled more trying to free himself from the grip, until his back was broken. The last thing he felt was tremendous pressure and the beast ripping open his chest. It could feel his victims ribs snapping like so many dry twigs, making similar noises. It crooned in pleasure. Before the mans corrupted black soul was swallowed by gaping infinity, two words bubbled passed his lips that puzzled the warrior “Hail Orageos!” And the last thing he saw was the warrior beginning to feed with irrepressible ravenousness on his heart. VI. Commander Casian: As soon as they heard it, they ran, eventually out of the river of blood and away from the broken bodies, now there were just wet slimy walls of cold clammy stone and dry dusty ground. It was pitch black, though this meant nothing to the Taui-kun. But this almost tranquil scene was disturbed several hundred metres later by two horribly mutated corpses. Casian wasn’t even sure they were human, as their flesh was strangely mottled. One of them had had their skull crushed by what looked must have been a tremendous weight and the other had been horribly mangled. His back was broken, his ribs were splintered and cracked open and his right arm had been torn off and flung to the floor. The cold fingers still gripped a laser gun tightly, every few seconds the twitching of his fingers would fire another bolt of laser energy down the hall illuminating the dark caverns ahead. They both seemed to be covered with what appeared to be burn marks. Something else that was strange, was that even though they could only have been dead for several minutes, they seemed to be nearing the final stages of decomposition. The strangest things about the bodies was the complete and utter lack of blood, there was none anywhere, not even a splash. The bodies were extremely pale, on closer inspection from Karrung, the medic it was shown that they had been completely drained of blood. Casian knew this could mean only two things, a Karilion or one of their insane creations spawned from their warped and corrupted minds. Both of these meant something bad, that there was a deranged killer with an unquenchable thirst for blood roaming these caverns. It sounded like some of the other troopers had had the same thoughts, “This looks like a Karilions work to me, or I’m a Taerran” muttered Calrung. He spoke of a diminutive dwarf like species of human that had evolved in a mining colony in the system Taerra. He was now three hundred and twenty two, although this is still young for a Taui-Kun who can live almost indefinitely. He showed no sign of ageing or of the horrors he had seen across the galaxy, apart from his eyes, which were dark and mournful, they twinkled like two glistening black heart jewels from the asteroid mines in Durrun. His face beneath the helmet was sharp and hard edged, as if it were carved from a slab of Krion tree. He was a pool of seemingly endless knowledge and had learned much in his centuries of service, but years of hardship had made him quite pessimistic. “Have you heard the legends about those things?” piped Larung “The texts say they were spawned from the blood of quarrelling gods at the beginning of time and were sent to plague the universe.” Almost the complete opposite to Calrung, he was the youngest in the squad and his youthful exuberance could get on ones nerves at times. He had a smooth edged, boyish face and sparkling blue eyes. Casian stooped down and picked up the Laser gun, it was a large rifle to a human, but he held it like a compact pistol. He looked it over, a Domeerus MK III laser rifle, capable of discharging one hundred thousand forty millimetre laser bolts a minute. It was simple to use, and was often used in the massive, bloated conscript armies that protected worlds before Taui-kun intervention. He tossed it to Linwe like a scrap of meat to a dog, she didn’t have a weapon other than her family knife, that wouldn’t be any good if a firefight broke out. His gaze caught the creatures face, it was missing its left eye, but it was not a recent wound, it had long since scarred over. In its bloodshot red eye he saw reflected back at him the figure of an old and weathered man, neat snowy beard well kept. He shook his head, what was happening to him? Carved on its skull were runes, runes that made Casian retch. They leapt out of the flesh to him and flickered like flame. He looked away. “Larung, come here, what do these runes say on his head?” Larung walked over and stared at the creatures face. But deep in the pit of his stomach, he felt the oncoming dread that told him he already knew. “These runes…” he swallowed nervously “It cant be.” He said defiantly “Just tell me what they say damn it!” Casian barked, not knowing what the sudden burst of anger had been for. “They are written in Orageon… but that is just ancient mythology, why, why are they here?” he did not hesitate to tell Casian what they meant, but just as Casian feared, he already new: Hail Orageos! “Contacts rear!” Larian spotted them first, fifteen foul human bodies clothed in torn blood-splattered rags shambling towards them. They had no heat signatures. That was why they hadn't been spotted sooner, heat signatures were the first thing that betrayed the presence of an enemy. The lack of bodily warmth technically meant they weren't alive, although, of course, this could be explained away were they were sheltered under some technological device. Casian wondered at the incredible talent it must have taken to sneak so close to a squad of Taui-kun without being detected. It was almost as if they had melted out of the shadows. For a horrified moment he thought he could sense no heartbeat, but it was there, slow erratic, yet incredibly faint. His eyes that could cut through a mans flesh like a laser only had time to watch a single sporadic pulse before his squad took action. How had they not heard this betrayal of their presence before? The squad immediately span one hundred and eighty degrees and fell into fire team positions. Linwe not knowing quite what she was meant to do was left standing somewhat vulnerable in plain view, trying to spot the attackers; her human eyes were next to useless. Casian had to push her roughly to the floor as the laser bolts started cracking and pinging off the rock overhead. “Return fire!” It was one thing to fire upon massive alien dragons, but to fire at humans was completely another, the more obvious problem being that you were getting shot back at. Standard pattern Laser bolts could hardly affect a suit of Mòrón, but he didn’t want to think of the damage it could cause to a frail unprotected body like Linwes. The squad fired five deadly accurate shots and the assailants dropped dead in plumes of vaporised flesh. All but one, Casian had shot his in the leg, not out of a weakhearted mercy, but a burning curiosity. He pulled Linwe back to her feet and marched over to the living one. It looked like it wouldn’t last long so Casian got down to the point, he directed his rifle to its head and snarled “What is you business creature?” it only leered up at him and coughed up a globule of congealed blood. “Speak!” Casian bellowed. It only said two harsh words: “Hail Orageos!” then it died. For some reason when he heard that spoken word pain erupted inside his head, he began to feel dizzy and disorientated, the voice screamed inside his head: Hail me! Hail your lord! But just a Casian felt himself slipping into the madness once more, it seemed to be washed away by a blur of blissful oblivion. He staggered, regained his balance and turned to face the rest of the squad. “These creatures are abominations, shoot any more you see on sight. There is some sort of a connection with this and what happened on 526, stay sharp.” It came as quite a shock as the ghostly blade flicked up in front of Casians throat. His translators didn’t seem to be able to translate it, but he didn’t need them to understand what had been whispered into his ear: “Don’t move!” The whole squad pointed their weapons at the spectral assailant, even Linwe. Casian felt peaceful numbness tingle through him, he tried to move, but he was totally paralysed. He raged and shouted inside himself, kicked and struggled, but only in his mind. It was like all of his bones had been turned to liquid, he could almost feel them sloshing back and forth inside him. It infuriated him to be so weak and defenceless, yet no matter how hard he tried he could not feel threatened by the shadowy figure that held him in this state of impotence and the knife at his throat almost seemed a friendly gesture. “Khaila mashina nain” it whispered, in a strange flowing tongue that seemed to resonate with ancient power and hum as if with static inside Casians head. Casian did not know what it had said, but was horrified to watch his whole squad place their weapons gently on the floor as meek as kittens, take a few steps back and sit down, cross legged, Linwe with them, a childish smile on her face. Casian tried to bellow in despair at them, his finest squad of Taui-kun, the bastions of light, fearless and selfless warriors who would slaughter the darkest foes of mankind like cattle, sitting like a bunch of toddlers at story time! It was absurd! But then sense tapped him on the shoulder and muttered in his ear, this creature, it was toying with them, it was psychic, and this was surely one of the most powerful displays Casian had ever witnessed. It had them all on strings, it could make each one sing nursery rhymes backwards whilst sticking a gun in their own mouth if it so pleased it. But it wasn’t like that, somehow Casian knew, it almost seemed to resonate with peaceful intentions. “Let me look at you, let me see your minds” It whispered kindly in the common tongue like a mother crooning into the ear of her infant. Was it speaking at all, was it only in their minds? Linwe rose giddily to her feet, but it seemed unnatural, more as if she had been pulled up by ropes wrapped around her chest. Her head lolled to the left slightly, her eyes were half closed, showing only whites and a wide, dreamy smile was wiped across her face. Casian got a strong impression that the being was searching through her, peeling back her physical shell and scrutinising at the subconscious, a wizened old prospector checking the dormant jewels for impurities. After a few seconds, seeming content it sat her back down and picked up the man next to her, who happened to be Larian and repeated the process with him. When it had checked everyone in the squad, it swung Casian around and for the first time he set eyes on his mysterious attacker. “Has he taken you yet, my brother?” it mused to Casian. Though there was little to see, Casian got a strong impression of a man in long concealing robes formed from a sea of shifting mist, the only things close to solid where its eyes, deep, glassy and dark, a pair of black pearls, blazing with spectral light from another dimension. Singing filled his ears, wonderful, carefree singing. Its beauty was the voltage that passes between the clutched hands of lovers, the firm embrace of the father reunited with the son he thought dead and the tear in the eye of the mother as she clutches her newborn child. The singing became louder and the deep eyes seemed to grow to fill Casians vision as his soul was pulled out from his body and given a thorough security frisk. No. Not a security frisk, more like a medical check-up. And Casians soul was not healthy. Reflected in those never-ending eyes he could see the malicious tumour at the core of his being. Then those black eyes burst like sour grapes and the face roared out at him, screaming and cursing, spitting fire and curling maggots Come to me Casian! Come! Come to me! Surrender! Surrender your soul! Casian felt his skin sizzle with its heat and his tongue smouldered as he opened his mouth in a soundless scream. Then it was gone. As if a switch had been flicked, and those eyes were still searching. No. He wasn’t healthy, not at all. He had certainly failed this check up. “No brother, you passed. It sleeps still within you. The damned one does not hold sway over you just yet.” Casian swore it was smiling as it said this, though he could see no mouth to speak of. At last it seemed satisfied, thrusting Casian to his knees as it flung off its ghostly shroud and stood to its full height. The next thing that they saw was firmly imprinted on their minds and souls for the rest of their days. VII. Sniper Larian: A sudden burst of incandescent gold light filled the chamber and half blinded Larian. He stumbled to his feet as the glaring afterimage cleared from his stunned eyes, and there suspended dreamily on a thunderous cloud of awe a magnificent being stood, cloaked in power and blissful resonance, filling the chamber with a brilliant light. It was adorned in armour of perfect shining gold that shimmered with eternal fresh-polished beauty and around its shoulders was a sparkling deep ruby red cloak. It wore a heavily rune encrusted helmet that seemed to hold nothing but shadow, nothing except for two floating orbs of incredible depth and shimmering beauty. And what Larian saw in those incredible eyes brought him to his knees, sobbing. Reflected in the eyes of the creature he could see everyone he had ever known and loved that had been lost on his home world. He could see his wife Elaine laughing and smiling at him, his father, grinning roguishly, his bristly stubble and strong features just as Larian had remembered. In his head he could hear their voices echoing, snippets of his lost life: …Then I envy you, for you will be a far better man than I… …I love you Davan, with all my soul, please, come back to me in one piece… …Go Davan! Leave me, I’ll deal with these… …You’re the only thing I need… …Don’t let ‘em catch yer… And as each phrase bought its respective memories, the pain got worse. “Its like a mirror Larian. A mirror on your soul.” That sweet echoing voice filled Larians ears. “A human life is such a brief ripple in the relentless river of the ages. Do not dirty yourself further on the mud of the riverbank whilst that ripple passes you by. Immerse yourself, wash the past from your body in the cleansing waters of time.” Larian shaded his face from the brilliant radiance of the face with his armoured arm, like one does to shade themselves from the sun on a hot summers day on the crystal beaches of the twin sunned pleasure system of Dfros and wept. VIII. Commander Casian: For a moment Casian was paralysed still, not by the creature, nor by its incredible, awe-inspiring presence, but by its eyes. In them he could see reflected a faint figure. A mane of fiery red hair surrounding her bloodless, almost white face, razor green eyes and tumbling down her broad, Mòrón clad shoulders. Just like he had saw her last, that fateful day on Dalmos five. Rowenian. He almost screamed her name in absolute terror as he heard her clipped, authoritative voice echo in his mind: Well Casian, this is it then. You must do your duty and I must do mine. He shuddered as it started coming back again after fifty years of trying to forget. In his mind Rowenian stood tall and bold once more. The harsh wind of Dalmos 5 whistled through blasted husks of buildings and over the churned up crater marked, blood soaked ground and Rowenians hair became a blazing comets tail as its entire length was blown to the right side of her masked, heart shaped face. No. He would not remember anymore. He would not let any more memories of that accursed campaign come back to him. No more. But all the same, he knew that soon enough Rowenian would be back in his dreams. For once he thought he might prefer the face. “Remember her, brother. Don’t forget. Remember what she told you, for she spoke with more authority than you can imagine.” “No!” Casian yelled in his head. He would not remember it. But that was a futile gesture. It had already started to trickle back to him the moment he saw her scathing green eyes. He tried to force it back into the mist and darkness of his subconscious mind, but that only dislodged another couple of words from the netherworld to thud into his ears like lumps of cold stone. “You will remember brother. You will need to before the end.” And Casian was sure now that these words he could hear only, it was in his mind, it was talking in to his mind. “No!” Casian broke its gaze and looked determinedly away from its shining body. No body moved. Had it paralysed them too? No. They were lost in their own thoughts. Larian sat with his head in his hands whilst the others gazed dejectedly at the ceiling. Casian watched several tears cut a runnel of damp down Linwes face. “Commander! Are you alright?” muttered Malian, tapping him on the shoulder. “Yes Malian, as always. Did you see its eyes friend?” Casian urged. Had the other men undergone similar things as him? Malian nodded slow and carefully. “It grabbed hold of you, said something strange and then, it was as if its eyes were pools of black ice and I was falling towards them… I saw myself… and I saw…” he paused, as if unsure or unwilling to put it into words “other things.” He sighed. The creature rode a wave of beauty and touched down beside Malian. The whole squad snapped out of their minds to watch it, except Larian, who sat stonily silent with his head in his hands. “Its like a mirror Malian. A mirror on your soul.” It whispered. Then it leaned closer to Malian and whispered something in his ear so quiet that even Casians supernatural sharp ears could not hear it from just a metre away. Casian watched Malians shoulders slump and his head bow. What did it have to say to him? “Do you understand what I have told you Malian?” “Yes.” Malian said slowly and with some difficulty. His gaze fixed on Casian as he spoke. Plior skipped back into the air and took three dancing leaps to another man in the squad, Berian, and whispered something similar to him, again that stare at Casian and slumped shoulders to accompany it. Casian started to feel as if this strange being was a spiteful child, spreading rumours about him. It visited four more people with these strange portents, Larung and Munrung; the rival pair, Viorlung, a young sniper from Larians squad, and Calrung, the wizened old trooper who had served for almost three hundred years. Then, satisfied again, it leapt away from them and stood in the air, head cocked ever so slightly, waiting for something. “What was it Malian? What did he tell you?” Hissed Casian. Malian was silent for what seemed an age. Casian could almost feel the seconds slipping away, they were almost tangible. Then he spoke, and the two words hit Casian like a pair of tank shells. “Your future.” IX. Linwe: “Come now, sit.” The strange being said warmly and gestured to the hard rock floor in front of it. Linwe found herself, along with the Taui-kun, helpless but to obey it. They sat attentive to listen to what it had to say. “You are all strong and pure of heart. You will be needed before the end. You are here to rid the foul stench of the damned ones corruption from the core of this long dead world. My name is Plior Sanatan. I am here to build the foundations on which the twisted tower of a destiny that was never meant to be shall be built. It will grow from three sturdy roots, they will wind together to become one as it reaches up towards a black hearted sky where only a handful of stars still shine, and at the top? Who can say? We shall all know soon enough.” Linwe felt soothed by its words, they were strung together in such a way that they sounded like the gentle burble of a slow flowing brook over a bed of round, polished black stones. Its eyes… its eyes were strange, almost frightening. She had almost found herself drowning in their murky depths, surrounded by misted figures from her lost life, she could still hear them… “He will come from the sky…” “I love you Linwe, don’t you understand?” But then there was something else, something new. Larians voice. She had found herself enjoying it. The last thing she saw before she rose for the gloomy abyss, gasping for breath, was a different pair of eyes. Slate grey. Sombre, wet with tears. Linwe began feeling displaced and dizzy, something did not feel right. She looked down at the granite floor, bright and vibrant, dancing with the light that shone form the strange deity. It was all so surreal, the blood that had soaked her robes was caking dry now, and that was what was wrong. How could something so carefree and glorious be in a foul pit like this? But then Linwe had to silent her own thoughts, because Plior was talking again, and she could not miss a word it said. “I will open the way for you now, friends. It will get you to where you need to be before it is too late” There was no questioning that sweet voice and powerful aurora, Linwe nodded, along with every other person in the squad. Except Larian. He still had his head in his hands and would not look up at Plior. How could he avert his eyes from something so wondrous? What had he seen? Had Plior shown him something too? Linwe wondered if he had seen her in his vision. Plior sprung in to the air once more and began to sing in strange words that oozed arcane energies and mystical connotations like a lump of honeycomb. They filled the whole caves as surely as his (For Linwe somehow felt that Plior was a he, despite there being no way of telling) golden light, the very rock trembled in awe of its magnificence. “Si-Listo-si sica; sava Si-e-Si ah Plior Sanatan” shudders of electricity like arcs of white fire leapt from Pliors body as he began to dance. His rhythmic flails and gyrations were completely hypnotic, coupled with the swell of joyous words that tumbled from his tongue they gently pulled Linwe into a trance like state. His movements blurred and smudged the air around him as if he were gliding his hands across a painting fresh from the artists brush. A streamer of blazing sparks like tiny stars began to unwind from behind him as he leapt and spun from left to right and up and down, weaving a spiders web with a galaxy of burning dust. The speed of the song and the dance increased to a frantic pace as the air that was Pliors dance floor became more diamond dust than air. It was like how a spraycan slowly obscures a patch of wall with a myriad of microscopic splashes of paint. All of a sudden, Plior stopped dead still at the centre of his creation. The silence pained Linwes ears. “Kunara!” He bellowed in a voice that seemed as loud as the explosions of dying worlds. The pinpricks of light behind him took on a whole new splendrous lustre and a blaze of intensity. Plior became a silhouetted stick man against the ferocity of the light. Linwe tried to shield her eyes with her hands, but it was useless, it passed through her flesh as if it was as ephemeral as air. “Come.” said Plior floating stepping into the rent. His body was washed away in a tidal wave of fierce white fire. One by one the Taui-kun leapt into the blaze until Linwe was alone. She could not quite bring herself to do it, what if she never emerged from the blaze, and if she did, what would be waiting for her on the other side? “Fear not Linwe” urged that sweet voice. No longer under her own compulsion, she flung herself into a waiting hoard of cold sharp claws that bit hungrily into her flesh and dragged her away. X. Sniper Larian: Larian travelled at right angles with time, through the gaps in the grains of space. He shot past a cross section of the universe, a mechanical drawing in lines of lurid colour that the long path of the ages wrapped itself around. The universe birthed and died ten thousand times before his eyes, growing and shrinking at such a speed that it became a blur like the wings of a hummingbird. A red light glowed in on the horizon like inevitable doom. It grew like the headlights of an oncoming train smeared with blood. A black dot was shifting in its centre. It became the outline of a face, a leering and terrible face. Rotted and covered in pus. It was coming closer and the face became clearer, Larian did not want it near him, it was the fear of death, rage, hate and jealousy blazing with rancid heat. He couldn’t let it get any nearer him, he tried franticly to manoeuvre himself from it, but he was trapped within the confines of his own mind. To the left he watched curiously as a trickle of white fabric drifted towards him. It was growing, the shoots of some great plant. It split once, and the two ends split once more, then, without warning the waters broke and the four tips exploded into activity, growing at a phenomenal pace, splitting over and over in a whirlwind of frantic activity. Within seconds the dawning face was completely obscured as the myriad of threads twisted and intertwined around one another to become a sheet of cloth with a weave so fine that it was like sheet metal. The face was gone. Larian heard its infuriated scream and relaxed into a state of smooth relief. It did not last long. He watched curiously as three minuscule threads stuck out from the edge of the fabric. They became animated in a sudden struggle with the tapestry, pulling away at it, yanking at the weave, growing and combining in their efforts. They twirled around one another as the strain became too much for the fine tapestry. Larians eyes widened in horror as the fabric gasped in surrender and unravelled like the confused and senseless plot of a dream. The face called out in triumph as it burst through the pathetic bundle of lost thread, Larian cried out in agony as its wretched flames of hate and envy scorched his skin raw Larian felt the vision burst in his mind as if it were the opalescent hue on the surface of a soap bubble as he was flung out of the rift that was physically trying to get rid of him, coughing up a sliver of bone caught in its flaming throat. Larians knees connected silently with a dirty, yellowed floor. It was a patchwork of oval shaped rocks that may once have been white. Larian grunted, his skull felt as if it had been brutally kneaded by a pair of rough iron hands that had been resting on the white coals of hell. His brain heaved and pounded, trying to dispel the raw insanity that had leaked in through his staring eyes. He tried to look around, taking in these new surroundings. The squad was gone. That strange being, Plior. He had tricked them. Casian was rising giddily to his feet a few metres away and Linwe sat not far off, visibly shaking. Then Larian saw why. The entire room was made of human skulls. Yellowed, aged skulls, stacked on one another. The walls reached up further than Larians unnatural eyes could see, cracked and grinning maniac faces all the way. And stood placidly on a mound of bleached jawbones was a short and incredibly ancient looking man dressed all in black robes, his back to them. His skeletal white hair reached almost to his feet. He spoke in a voice as dry as ice and mocking as the caw of a raven, crackling with malice and disregard. “So, you have finally come.” |
| III. Section 3. The High Lord And The High Council. I. Commander Casian: There was a horrific aura of menace and evil about the man. Larian and Casian raised their weapons, Linwe looked on in horror, her own gun forgotten. He turned smartly on his heels like a military drill instructor to face them and leapt from the pile of hellish relics with the smooth grace of a predatory cat. His polished black boots made no sound as he landed a scant metre from Casian. For a man so old he was agile to say the least. Casian had half expected his bones to creak like badly oiled machinery as he moved. He was quite short, his face was sallow and heavily lined, loose fitting skin the colour of curdled milk. Resting in his skull like sockets a pair of huge eyes that glowed blood red and seemed to burn with cadaverous tongues of hungering flame. His beard was sharp and pointed, and his hair nearly touched the floor. Were it not for his eyes he seemed entirely constructed from malevolent black and ancient white. A historical photo blemished with two smears of lived hate. “Bicarno” snarled Casian though his teeth, pronouncing it like an ancient incantation of diabolical evil. The very name invoked seeds of hatred and memories of betrayal to grow. Knives of ice plunged into Casians brain. They had met in person only once, yet all through Casians life the man in black had been there. A fleeting glimpse at the corner of his eye, a mocking whisper in his ear, the swish of a rustling cape in an empty room. His silhouette had become as familiar to Casian as his own shadow. “I thought you died. I should have known that hell would not accept the likes of you.” Casian spat Bicarno chuckled cynically. “Indeed, you should have known Casian, did your weakling apostate council not tell you anything? I can assure you they know.” His voice was as slimy as raw meat. “Then again, we are not so different, the council and I. We have both danced the same worn track to damnation, made the same surreptitious pact with the one eyed god. We have both absolved ourselves from the endless machinations of destiny, cavorting in our newfound knowledge that we have risen far above the human cattle. Confident, that when the end comes and all reality spirals into sweet madness and death, we will have new lives, at the right hand of our lord.” “You are delusioned, the only worn track the council have trodden is the path to salvation, the only pact they have made is to be eternally bound to humanity.” To this, he just chuckled more. He was insane, the years and betrayals had warped his mind. But what was that he had said of a one eyed god? An icy hand reached up and grabbed Casians stomach, dragging it into the stinking sullen marsh that is fear. The one eyed god – could that possibly have anything to do with those animated corpses who had gouged out one of their eyes? An act of fealty? – Those corpses, they screamed praise to Orageos, which was the voice in his dreams – and didn’t that awful face in his visions only have a single staring bloodstained eye? It was all one and the same. Or perhaps he was just going mad. His stomach hit the bottom of the swamp with a reverberating thump, then the hand reached up again and quashed his heart. “You will find I have become more powerful than you could ever imagine Casian. Treachery has its rewards, just as loyalty does” he said waggling a skeletal finger like a chiding mother. His gaze swept away from Casian. “Why look at that, is that Larian? You have grown since the last time I saw you boy. No doubt you remember me?” Then Larian spoke, his voice smouldering with unsurpassable hate “You delusioned bastard” he snarled, “What made you turn? What was the point in it all? Why did they all have to die?” his voice almost started to quiver. To his surprise, Bicarno started laughing, a moronic cackle that chilled Casian to the bone. “You don’t forget a thing do you? Yes, I was on Hiran; I was the one who persuaded the Iratui to sacrifice their own lives in order to destroy your world. You’ll see why soon enough my boy, I’m sure the reason will delight you.” He drawled “Perhaps I will see, perhaps I wont, it makes no difference.” He jerked up a pistol and pointed it sharply at Bicarnos gaunt skull, lacking all of his usual grace and finesse. “What's this? You want to kill me?” he grinned, showing his perfect teeth. “Go ahead, shoot me. Its just another dead man, what do you care?” “Shut up!” Larian roared. “Larian, put down the gun” Casian commanded, he hardly knew why, the man deserved nothing less than death. “Disobeying orders Sir, this man will die now at my hand.” Casian tried to take a step forward to calm his maddened friend but found himself staring down the barrel of another pistol. “Don’t move captain, I stand ready for a full reprimand, hell, a court marshal, after this man is dead.” His voice quivered just the slightest bit, the way a candle will flicker in breeze so slight you can hardly feel it on your skin. “You’ll not hesitate to murder me, just as you didn’t hesitate to murder your own best friend.” “Don’t you say another word.” Larian growled, his voice contorted with rage. “You’re going straight to hell, for all the lost souls on Hiran.” Bicarno threw back his head and laughed chillingly. He was still laughing as Larian pulled the trigger and blew his face into a roaring cloud of plasma. The headless corpse fell to the floor twitching and writhing in its last death throes, splattering blood in its squirming, staining the bleached skulls on the floor red. Larian walked up to the corpse, keeping his gun trained on Casian, opened his helmet and spat on the body. Before Casian could take another breath the carcass was jerked back up into the air by some invisible force; its arms and legs hanging limp like a rag doll. Larian leapt back in surprise, but it was a clumsy movement; he nearly lost his balance. The body spasmed and twitched violently, expanding vastly and become bloated and rotten, billowing robes solidified and became a rusted suit of spiked black armour. The stump of his neck ruptured, a head began to form from a lump of pulsating flesh, as if it was being moulded from bloodstained putty by a creature who has only ever seen a human being as a putrid carcass through warped and faceted glass. A rotted, eye-less and pus covered face began to emerge, contorted and twisted, shards of bone sticking from rotting flesh. It was abhorrent to look upon and seemed to mock human form. The body burst into dark and malevolent flame that seemed to devour heat rather than radiate it and stole the air from their lungs. A horrible stench filled the room, the stench of brimstone, smoke and rotten flesh. Linwe gave a little shriek, but Casian didn’t hear. He was on the verge of passing out, only staying on this side of consciousness through exerting extreme power of will. The voices screamed so loud in his head that they devoured all thoughts, all else became irrelevant, his ears rang and he thought he was becoming deaf. He couldn’t pick out individual words; it was an insane orchestra of whispered fears and shouted blasphemies. Besides, he didn’t need to hear, for he knew what they spoke of: Destiny, death and the greater of the twins, the one-eyed god; Orageos. Then High lord Bicarnos corpse settled back down to earth, reanimated in some abhorrent unlife, the same grin on his face he had worn as he died. II. Sniper Larian: Larian, at first, didn’t see Bicarno rising, he was lost in the traumatic memories that went with the dead man. Davan knelt, weeping over the body of Elaine, a coldness like he had never known numbing his mind and body, the aftershocks from the initial shattering shock and grief of her death. He didn’t see the man in a black cloak rise from the ground behind him like the lazy smoke of a funeral pyre. “She is dead now Davan. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.” A voice said slimily. Davan leapt up and around with a roar of rage, swinging up the weapon of the fallen Iratui, firing ten shots without thinking, blinded by rage and loss. But the shots were only ten dry, thirsty clicks; the gun was empty. The man carried on speaking as if nothing had happened, his eyes that burned like hellfire, locked onto Davans with contempt. He stood, rooted to the spot, unable to move. “You couldn’t protect her. Couldn’t save her life. You failed. There is no more you can do. Or is there? Her spirit, even know is on its final journey, to the Tumas, where it will be leached of personality, memories and loves and absolved into the relentless tide of souls. In a few days nothing will remain of the woman you loved. But what little time there is is a golden window of opportunity.” “What the hell are you on about?” Davan stammered through shivering lips. “You can bring her back!” “Don’t mock me!” screamed Davan, launching himself at the man. But the robed figure merely lifted his hand, and the strength evaporated from Davans muscles. He fell to his knees at the mans booted feet and slammed his fist against the ground in despair. “Nothing can bring her back.” He sobbed. “Death is not the end, boy. I can make her live again. You just have to come with me.” “How?” choked Davan, suddenly desperate. “Take my hand and you will see…” he said, his pallid hand snaking out like some eyeless withered creature that has never seen the light of day or felt the warmth of the sun. Davan was reaching out to grab it, when Casian burst in through the door. “Davan!” He roared “Take no heed of the words of this foul deceiver! All he can offer you is death, hatred and betrayal.” Davan ignored him. Who cared what the old warrior said? He had one more chance to redeem himself. “Listen to me Davan! Trust me, not this traitor, he was the one who led the Iratui here!” “Don’t listen to the old man” hissed the cloaked figure, his last shot at salvation. “He is jealous, he has never loved someone…” Davans fingertips were a centimetre away from the mans; he could feel a queer voltage arcing through the air. But before their fingers could touch a harsh tearing gunshot smacked into his eardrums. The mans extended hand exploded into sizzling blood and hissing plasma. He screamed and disappeared. Davan bellowed in agony and flung a punch at Casian, who with lightning fast reactions flung out an arm and caught the punch almost before Davan knew what he had done. “Death comes for all. You can’t escape it. No one can. If the reaper has someone marked, you can not save them, no matter how hard you try. There is nothing more you could have done.” Davan drew back his fist in revulsion. “I’m sorry” he choked “Its so hard, I’ve lost so much, so many friends.” “I know. But there is nothing more you can do for them now than to avenge their deaths with blood and fire. Come. Let us kill the last of those scum together, let us be brothers in the tragedies and horrors of war.” He gently clasped Davans shoulder and passed him down the smoking pistol. That was when their great friendship; brotherhood started. It was also when Davan swore to kill the man that had betrayed his world. And now he had. With that very same pistol. And for a very short time, he was at peace. But that period of bliss ended as the abomination rose again in its abhorrent new form. Larian flicked his pistols up and fired seven shots, they screamed through Bicarnos massive iron clad chest like he was nothing more than black hearted fog and blasted massive chunks from the wall of skulls behind him. Bicarno hissed like a rising snake and Larian caught a glimpse of his black slab of tongue. “You are nothing Larian. Do not tire me with your antics.” His voice plunged Larians beating heart into a bucket of liquid helium. He made a lazy gesture, as if swatting an insect. A rushing roar like the scream of a tsunami lashed at Larians ears and a swarm of ice clad claws grasped his arms, twisting them back with such irresistible force that Larian heard the gristle in his shoulder tearing and felt his bones creak. He snarled in pain wracked rage as the pistols dropped from his convulsing fingers. “You are nothing.” He repeated with a mocking chuckle that was bleeding insanity. The invisible talons of white fire pushed down on him, he snarled and tried to fight back, his muscles shuddering at the strain. It was as futile as trying to move a planet with his bare hands. His legs buckled beneath him and he tumbled forwards, his armoured face smashing through the roof of a mouldy skull. He pulled his head up, it now being the only part of his body that he could move, and watched the events unfold. Casian lay contorting and writhing spasmodically on the floor, spine bent almost double, his flailing arms and legs crushed the skulls that made the floor to gritty powder the colour of ancient parchment. He was undergoing some sort of fit. Had that accursed abomination brought it on to him? A glimmer of worry trickled into Larians mind. What if the storms raging in his commander’s brain left permanent marks? What if they killed him outright? Larian renewed his struggle with his unseeable daemons trying to shout, trying to scream, anything that might snap Casian out of it, but they stubbornly held his mouth shut with fingers of clammy, rotting flesh. Bicarno stood near four metres high in front of Larian, he could not twist his head high enough to look at his malformed, shattered lump of a head. His armour seethed with runes and jagged shapes that pained Larians eyes like bright sun. There were faces shifting in it too. Horrified, screaming, contorted faces. Shifting in and out of vision as they hollered to anyone who was listening the agony that they languished in over the centuries. The skulls that Bicarnos massive feet rested upon were blackened and cracked like charcoal. How did they support his weight? It hurt Larians head to look at him for more than a few seconds. It was like someone was driving a chisel up his nose and into his brain. How long would he stand there? What was he waiting for? He looked as though he would stand placid and patient until Larians bones had long faded to dust. Larians mind became occupied with other things. Where was Linwe? She wasn’t in his field of vision. Was she injured? Had Bicarno done something to her too? “What's that Larian? You want to see her?” chuckled Bicarno. “Let me show you. Let me enter your mind.” Larian tried to scream as a pair of black icicles shot from Bicarnos pus encrusted, wickedly barbed gauntlets and impaled his eyes. They melted inside him and their poison saturated his flesh. …Linwe coughed and a few drops of dark blood splashed onto her face, starkly contrasting her pallid features… …Larian felt the moment of her passing; her face relaxed, her body went limp and a sigh of air escaped from her torn lungs… He saw himself clutching her body, blood seeping through his fingers. “What's happening to me!” he screamed, the cold hands finally releasing their grip on his mouth, instead covering his eyes so there was nothing but dark. A rotting flayed face screamed at him, shards of teeth like crumbling tombstones carpeted with black moss. It spat a lump of congealing blood into his eyes and Larian was blind to all but the rippling redness. He gagged and tried to shake it from his face but it was no longer on him, it was all around him, he was drowning in the blood, it had engulfed his whole body. He kicked his legs and powered his arms but it was like swimming through treacle. A circle of white cut itself open in the distance, leaching sanity into the carnage, the rays of blinding light flickered and wobbled slightly as they filtered through the sea of death. Larian kicked harder, he had to reach it, he didn’t know why, he just had to, it was an unfightable urge. Just before his fingers brushed the closest streams of light the whole vision dissipated in a sigh of frustration. Bicarno laughed filthy deranged laughter as Larian panted and gasped in horror and confusion. “All will become clear soon enough my boy.” Larian glanced over to where Casian kneeled, violently shaking his black clad head to clear the filthy thoughts that must have been filling it, smashing it into the wreck of shattered skulls and slivers of bone surrounding him. “Come now Casian, do you really want to put up with this for the rest of your life? In time you will go mad within yourself. Is that what you want?” Bicarno spat. “I have a preposition to make. The damned one wants you Casian. He needs you. He calls to you, his lost child. I can take you to him. Bow down to him and allow your destiny to come full circle.” Casian stirred from his convulsions and rocked back on to his knees, his breath wheezing like shrapnel. “By the sacred power of my undying soul I swear you shall not take me.” Casian gasped Bicarno snorted indignantly. “Sacred? You think your soul is sacred? What makes you think it is even your possession?”Casian heaved himself to his feet, giddy and unstable as a toddler. “You will have to kill me before you present me to that craven nightmare.” He growled, voice like churning gravel, heaving his sword from its sheath. At that moment Larian saw once more that bloodstained golden halo that hung above Casians head all those years ago on Hiran. Back then he had dismissed it as a trick of the light, caused by the dying rays of the last sunset Hiran had ever witnessed. But there was no sun in here, only a dull glow that emanated from far above. He blinked and the ring of fire disappeared. “Look at you tremble Casian. See how weak my Lord can make you.” “Wipe that smirk from your scorched lips scum. I do not fear you.” Casian spat a stream of blood and uneasily raised the blade to a fighting stance. Larian felt uncomfortable as he watched the blood that Casian had spat devoured by the skull clad ground, it lapped it up like smooth cream from the cats bowl. “Oh, but you fear him don’t you. You tremble in your boots whenever his name is mentioned. The mighty Casian, Lord of the god warriors, afraid?” Larian renewed his struggles. He had to break these bonds. He had to get up, help Casian destroy the twisted and flayed monster that stood before them. Surely in this weakened state he could not do it alone? As Casian took a few more weak steps towards Bicarno, the monster whispered a string of words that struck Larians ears like an acid bath. His rotting arm plated in chunks of rust eaten block iron shot out. A sharp nosed worm splattered with black blood gnawed its way from the tip of his middle finger and dropped twirling to the ground, tying itself in knots. Casians feet jerked from the ground and he was hauled into the air, legs kicking as if he were on the end of the hangman’s noose. He clawed at his neck and the invisible hands that were throttling him. “Come now Casian. My master becomes impatient.” Bicarno beckoned with a twisted and gnarled finger. Larian could hear the arthritic joints pop and crack like burning wood. Casian was hauled towards Bicarno like a reeled in fish, his agonised face level with Bicarnos stubby gash of a mouth, black teeth jutting from it like an alligators grin. Larian saw Casians eyes turn up in hope and desperation as a whirlpool of light swirled into being behind Bicarno, who cocked his grotesque slab of a head in curiosity, folds of fat rippling. “Enough!” bellowed Plior in a voice that rang in Larians ears like beaten brass as he stepped from the rift. Bicarno spun around in what seemed like guilty terror, a child caught pulling the wings from flies by its mother. “A fallen Oratheon!” he spat a lump of bloodied phlegm. “Aye, come to cut the festering head from your misshapen shoulders betrayer of worlds.” Said Plior in the tone of a reprimanding schoolmaster. As he spoke a hefty looking sword that shone with sapphire blue brilliance leapt from his wrist like an uncoiling spring. Bicarno recoiled from it like a wild beast from flame. “We shall see spawn of Oratheos, we shall see.” Said Bicarno, regaining his composure. With a casual gesture he flung Casian across the room, crashing him into the wall with such force that it unlodged a downpour of skulls from the wall that smashed like pottery. A scythe materialised in Bicarnos hands, brutally corroded, dripping blood and unnameable fluids. Screaming faces swam in the black hulk, drowning in the evil that emanated from it. Bicarno flung himself forwards with a growl, the scythe howling as it cleaved the air. Plior blocked the wild swing with a calm flick of his blade. Casian snarled and struggled, his body thrashing back and forth like a frenzied shark caught on a fishing line and drawn high into the sky, dripping with blood and brine, but he seemed bound face down on the floor by invisible chains. His arms were twisted behind his back and his legs were tied so strongly together that they seemed to have become one single limb. He spat and cursed Bicarnos name, then lay still. Twisting his neck around he tried to watch the battle between the two opposing forces going on behind his shoulders. Bicarno let forth a blistering hail of brutal blows with his scythe, Plior blocked each one with the air of a man casually swatting insects from the air. He lunged, catching Bicarno off his guard, who tried to correct his mistake, but not fast enough to stop the blade slicing a deep gash across his face. He snarled like a wounded dog as black blood and festering puss leaked from the wound then swung a blow at Pliors neck, who just managed to duck under the screaming steel. Plior jabbed sharply and his blade took three fingers from Bicarnos left hand. They writhed and convulsed on the floor like smoking lizard tails. With a flourish Plior leapt into the air above Bicarnos head and swung a downwards blow that glanced off Bicarnos hasty block and hacked a slice of flesh and corroded armour from Bicarnos tensed right arm as neat as a butchers cut. Bicarno howled in rage as a gout of boiling black blood burst from the wound. “Give it up Bicarno.” Said Plior, hanging in the air and refusing to obey gravity’s nagging voice. “Your pestilent shell can take little more punishment.” “And what if I should kill you?” Bicarno rumbled “Do you know what happens when a fallen Oratheon dies? I do.” He chuckled and wheezed “But I shall not tell you. It would ruin the surprise.” Bicarno leapt into the air to fight Plior at his own level, burning fat dripped from his cracked feet like liquid fire. It seemed that Plior had the upper hand. His elegance and prowess with the sword was, quite simply, a joy to watch. It reminded Larian of the mating dance of some exotic bird that’s name he had long since forgotten. It was if the blade was a part of him, a glistening extension to his arm. The blade never stood still, it twisted, spun and danced through the air as it blocked everything that Bicarno could throw, every now and then it would leap like the tongue of a chameleon through a chink opened in Bicarnos defences, carving more flesh from his charcoaled bones. He was as fresh as he had been when the fight started, yet Bicarno seemed to be tiring, his attacks became less frequent and less enthusiastic by the second. Plior was draining him of his strength at an alarming rate, and the skulls were thick with Bicarnos bubbling, oily blood. “Do you really think you can match me? I fought and killed with this blade fifteen billion years before your birth, fake Orageon.” Plior taunted Plior made as if to swipe at his opponents legs, but at the instant Bicarno lowered his block to parry it, he changed his mind and thrust the blade with savage gusto into Bicarnos bloated belly. Foul gasses rumbled out of the wound along with several corpse flies and a tide of rancid ichor. Larians heart leapt. Was that the end? Had Plior proved victorious? Bicarno coughed and spluttered black globules of congealed blood. Then the edges of his spasming lips turned up in a pained smile. “I do not die as easily as that.” He choked. His right hand shot out and with a convulsive jerk like a crocodile in a death roll, Bicarno snapped Pliors wrist. His sword clattered to the floor. “An eye for an eye Plior. An eye for an eye.” he chuckled hoarsely and spat another globule of jellied blood as he swung the scythe up and into Pliors stomach. Plior fell from the air like a pheasant riddled with birdshot, screaming in agony. Where the blade had entered was already a festering putrefied wound and nightmarish infection spread far too fast around his body. Wherever it touched, his skin, even armour became a charred black and writhed as though a thousand maggots were feasting below. Larian had never witnessed something as horrible or pathetic. He could not stand to watch something so brilliant and pure reduced to this mewling mess. Plior turned his agonised head and his eyes locked on Larians. Their brilliance was dulling like fresh cut sodium. Echoes of Larians old life opened up in him once more, but faintly, as if on the other side of a thick wall. There was more accompanying it, a faint and joyous song in the distance, and a faint and quavering voice. Don’t stay for me human. Get up, run. Your bonds are cut. The door is open. Live out your true destiny, stay and your fate will continue to be perverted beyond recognition. My God is calling for me now... Run, run whilst you still have the chance… Larian moved his arm and flexed his fingers. Plior had spoken true. Larian turned his head, and yes, there was a great brass door open the tiniest bit… if he ran he might make it… Linwe was still just by the door, he could grab her and run, they would escape this nightmare. But what of Casian? He could not leave him with this fiend, he would not leave him to die alone. There was no way he could get to Casian and carry him off without alerting Bicarno. But what was there to do? Surely they were all doomed anyway, would it not be better that he and Linwe survived? Casian would want it that way. He could almost hear him now, hear what he’d say… he would tell him to go. Linwe shrieked and the sound cut through Larians paralysis like a plasma scythe through a tuft of corn. Trying to remain as silent and discreet as possible he snaked out his arm and his fingers brushed against the smooth grip of his pistol. If he moved too fast or suddenly, Bicarno might catch him out of the corner of his eye. There was nothing else to do. He could not turn his back on his commander and run like a coward. If the shot didn’t kill Bicarno perhaps the distraction would prove enough to break the mental chains that held Casian down. Bicarno would kill him, he was sure. But it would be a fitting and valiant end. Casian and Linwe might escape, and that made his sacrifice worthy. He would live on in the remembrance hall on Earth as a hero amongst countless others. Yes. And maybe a golden elysium was waiting for him, his lost ones waiting with outstretched arms… He stretched his fingers another frantic centimetre as Bicarno took slow echoing steps towards Pliors contorting, whimpering body, each a toll on the bell of doom and death, revelling in the tension and horror his drama was creating. The footsteps stopped. Bicarno chuckled, “So dies Plior the fallen, spawn of Oratheos” he raised his scythe for the killing blow. Larian brought his pistol up in a smooth and graceful arc and sighted a shot at the side of Bicarnos insane and depraved head. His finger tightened on the trigger. But then, in a blast of impossibly bright and incandescent golden light, more powerful than the most gigantic supernova, a figure appeared, in blazing magnificence above Plior. A choir of sweet heavenly voices began to ride the air; it was more beautiful than anything Larian had heard in his life. It rung with a clear note that seemed the exact resonance of his heart. His eyes stung with tears from its blissful transcendence. The charnel house disappeared and they were standing in a gigantic rolling plain, more fabulous than anything ever witnessed by mortal man. The perfect blades of grass were of emerald, the sky sapphire. There was no sun, but only a few metres away was a gigantic wondrous palace, made from a crystalline material that flamed with radiance more than all the stars in the universe placed together. There was a wonderful aroma in the air, it was sweeter than any synthetic taste and more heady than the most powerful drug, his heart swelled until he thought it might burst, he felt at peace with his existence for the first time in twenty three years. The singing was louder than ever. He was starting to think he had died and this was heaven, but even that label did not do its beauty justice. He was overcome by a deep curiosity and tried to get a good look at the palace, but then, in a puff of dissipating wonder this fantastic vision disintegrated and they were back in the dome of skulls. He sobbed as he was returned once more to his petty, gritty, bloodstained life. The pain came back, but seemed magnified by an inconceivable longing to return to that place. Then he saw the figure above Plior. He was bathed in golden flame, but from the core of this incandescent sun, there was something even brighter. It made Plior, the golden flames, even his blissful vision seem dull by comparison, just as the blazing sun washes the light of a low charge torch into oblivion, despite how bright and powerful it seemed in the darkness before sunrise. It was a godly being, cloaked in hazy magnificence. All he could see was a blurred silhouette, but that was enough to bring him to his knees. Pliors face lit up with hope and adoration, he reached out with a weak hand and tried to touch the being, but he didn’t have the strength and slumped down. Then Larian saw the abomination that was Bicarno, he was screaming in a pure animalistic cry of terror and agony, his flesh was sizzling, he covered the pits of his non-existent eyes. “Lord Orageos!” he cried in agony “It is Oratheos! Oratheos has come! Protect me!” he shrieked. Out of the walls a huge black, pestilent hand materialised, pus dripped from it scorching holes in the ground. It reached down, grabbed the whimpering creature and disappeared, taking Bicarno with it. The glorious being swept down with liquid grace, took up Plior in his arms and disappeared in a burst of magnificence. Leaving Larian, awe-struck and confused, wondering if it had all been one wonderful and terrible dream. III. Commander Casian: A ferocious agonised roaring like the rushing of the wind filled the still air and a scream that pierced Casians hearts like a sword and rent reality like the claws of a Krion drake tearing through wet paper. A bright red light seared through his visor and his shut eyelids leaving him blind for a few seconds. Then, just before the end, an unbearable heat penetrated even his thick armour making him sweat. Finally in his mind he heard a mocking whisper of doubt “Casian, do you know whom you really are? Do you even know what you are? I thought not! Did your weakling council not even tell you that?” The voice finally faded away. And then it happened, with a wash of dawning horror; a figure appeared in front of Casian. It was a tall, imposing being, draped in robes of terrifying black eternity. Its presence sucked the life from the air and the moisture from Casians throat like a parching desert sun. He gasped. The figure spoke in a twisted, croaking malady of a voice. “Come, brother, our father is waiting. The destiny he wrote for us must be fulfilled.” It stretched out his hand to Casian, urging him to compel. “Who are you to think you can ignore the one eyed gods calling?” it mocked. Casian began to feel a strange sense of displacement and the world dissolved around him, then he was rushing, speeding towards a red light in the distance. It grew until it became what he most feared. And there it was, the face from his nightmares, Orageos. "Now, you are mine!" It called as it reached out a blackened hand towards him. “No!” screamed Casian and he struggled to break the bonds that held him in this hell. Heinous laughter rippled through the darkness, and the hand was closer. "There is no escape Casian. It is time for your destiny to be fulfilled!" The hand was just centimetres away; Casian could feel a rancid heat emanating from it. Just as he thought all hope was lost, the blazing figure from the charnel house appeared in a flash of blinding light. “Touch him not, damned one, he is not for you!” it bellowed in a magnificent voice of pure transcendent beauty and archaic glory. The abomination snarled, reaching its hand out to smother Casian in its folds of darkness. But before it could touch him, he felt bliss and warmth grasp him in welcoming hands and was dragged far away from the abomination at an incredible speed, the world began to condense back around him in welcoming drips and pools of reality. He was back, face down on the floor of polished skulls, but only for a brief instant of relief before he slipped away again, but this time into a much more natural and forgiving unconsciousness. IV. Linwe: They were back on the ship now; Casian himself gave the order for the planet to be destroyed. Linwe watched out of the Transparisteel porthole on the ship, watched as the huge gun brought itself to bear on Morthiot, watched as the planet was obliterated in a heartbeat, becoming a raging plasma inferno, brighter than the systems sun. The same had happened to her world, to prevent any surviving blade dragons or their spores from starting a colony. She didn’t care, there hadn't been anything left there once the research station was overrun. She did not feel any sadness either at watching this planet die, there was nothing there but hate, corruption and horrific memories. None more so than what had been Bicarno. Bicarno… even thinking of him made Linwe shudder, what was it he had said to her? Something about her being a key, the way for reality to split. He had also said that she would not do it alone… and had then looked ominously at Larian, showing that what ever he had meant, his and her fates were inexorably related. In his eyes at least. Then the horrible visions had started. There was shouting, screaming, dying all around her, shrieking abominations and howling men. She looked down at the neat, fist sized hole that had passed through her armoured chest as if it were as insubstantial as air. She gasped as unimaginable agony struck her like a blazing meteor. Hot blood filled her mouth, bitter and metallic. She fell to her knees, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come. The pain that radiated from the singed, cauterised lips of the wound in acidic pulses sending spasms of fire through her whole body was beyond belief. It was only then that she realised she was dying; yet she had no time to contemplate the matter as she hit the floor so hard that it sent a splash of blinding colour over her horrified eyes. What were those visions? Where they strangely conscious nightmares? An illusion? Or a ghostly echo of the future? She didn’t know which. The whole thing had been convincingly surreal, yet oddly real, frighteningly so. She thought of Larian and realised, with a start, that he was also in the room, only a few metres away, standing, spectre like, faceless as usual, his arms crossed. She had not seen him come in. “You saw it too?” he said and for once, there was a trace of life in his voice, she was sure that had she been able to see his face, his eyes would have twinkled… he had slate grey eyes… but how did she know that? More of the vision came back to her, it was Larian above her, that much she knew, but this time, she could see his face, etched with grief like carved stone, his eyes blurred by tears, but she could still make out his features, pale and hard. He looked very gaunt, but still attractive, his chin was covered with sharp bristles, several small scars trickled down one side of his face. His eyes were colder than death and locked intensely onto hers. “Saw what?” “The palace, the palace of blazing diamond.” “I… did not see it.” “How can that be? I saw you there as well as myself and Casian.” Whispered Larian, sounding almost fearful. “I did not see anything, we were still all in that dome of skulls” she shuddered at the memory, but that was all it was now, a memory. She felt she should tell him of the dire vision she had witnessed, but decided against it. “I dug this out from the archive.” “What?” He ignored her and almost ran over to the computer terminal in the corner of the room, Linwe shuffled along behind him. Computers always reminded Linwe of some single celled life form like an amoeba, or some sort of bacterium. The outer layer was seamless, but slightly elastic, a disc could be pushed through, a microscopic creature absorbing food through its cell membrane. Inside the terminal was superconducting liquid helium; a highly viscostic cytoplasm, supporting a quantum entanglement field and a veritable zoo of microscopic and incomprehensible nanomachines, suspended dreamily like mitochondria. Larian slipped the disc in through outer layer of the terminal and it pulsed green in acknowledgement, almost instantaneously a holographic screen burst into electronic life in the air in front of them. On the screen was a face, but it was no living human, it was a digital representation of the semi-sentient being that resided in the endless, flickering, unpredictable net of quantum entanglement, designed to be more relateable to its flesh-clad users. It spoke to them in a burbling, distinctly inhuman voice, asking whether they wished to hear an audio streaming of the inserted data. Larian agreed. This is what it told them: Here follows an account of the first of the ancient texts, on creation. Translated by the acclaimed historian Jossep (currently serving in the blessed ranks of the Taui-Kun, (may they be praised) codename unknown) The Creation In the beginning there was The One and The One was alone in the darkness and the nothingness. No one knows how he came to be and no one ever will. But he did not wish to be alone, so he was not, from the substance of his own soul he crafted two beings, Oratheos and his twin Orageos, they shared almost as much power as the one, and they rejoiced to be together. And then The One God decided that it was time for reality to begin, and so it did. The One God drew his hands in a deep majestic sweep through the nothingness, and where his hands passed, from the nothingness came matter, and the matter clutched for each other and became rock; the foundations of the world he was crafting. The One God polished this rock until it was smooth, but still he was not satisfied, for the rock was bare and hard. So with the saliva from his tongue he wet the rock, and from this sprouted a soft carpet of grass, but The One God still was not pleased, for there was no way to see what he had made, and show it to his two children. So The One God covered the whole of his creation with his hands, and when he took them away there was a globe of blazing sapphire, what would be the sky. But he was saddened when he saw the grass, because it was wilted and brown. The One God wept, and his tears became the lakes and the oceans. He breathed life into the sad vegetation, and at once it sprung up, vibrant and beautiful, the colour of sparkling emerald. The One God was pleased indeed. The One God showed his two children, and they were fascinated by it, so they rejoiced once more and gave praise to The One God. The One God said that they should build themselves a home in this wonderful land he had created, and so they did. They fashioned a gigantic palatial complex from blazing diamond and pure white marble; every block infused with the simple joy all three felt. At the centre they crafted three wonderful golden thrones. Once it was finished, the three decided that they should each make other beings in their images to share this world with. The One God created his race first of all; they were called the Mythanile (The First Ones), tall and elegant, powerful of mind and spirit and beautiful beyond comprehension. Oratheos and Orageos both followed suit, creating races that were like themselves, curios, loving and inquisitive, and while possessed of great strength, physical and not, neither could match the Mythanile. (Unfortunately a large amount of the scrolls have been lost forever to the relentlessness of time, due to this a great portion on creation has been lost, and where the texts begin once more they are riddled with missing words and phrases.) ……was this act that became too much for Orageos to bear, and it was he who committed the first evil. (A large amount of text is missing here, we can only guess at what enraged Orageos so, and what his terrible act could have been.) ……and then, finally Orageos showed his true self, and took on a new form. His body became rotted and putrid; great maggots writhed throughout his body and pus oozed through punctures in his rotten flesh. He had only a single huge dark staring eye, the other was merely an empty socket and all who looked into it suffered a pitiful and terrible death. His entire pestilent body was engulfed in dark black flame. He wrought himself a great suit of black armour, in his hands he held a huge scythe as tall as three men that was entirely crafted of the same black metal of his armour. It was half eaten by rust and its sleek form was broken and punctured in many places, from these wounds gushed many terrible poisons and toxins. The scythe and his hands constantly dripped blood. All who looked upon him saw the true horror and bitter futility of all life, losing the will to live, or flung deep into madness. Where ever he would walk the vegetation would wither and die. And in his madness all the Orageons were drawn with him, each becoming just as depraved and repulsive. They were well equipped for the war Orageos had strived for for so long, with all manner of hideous weapons, the first tools of their kind. Tools specifically designed to hurt, maim and kill. And sitting on his golden throne, the lord of Tulandier, master of the universe, wept. (Text ends here) “Image files attached, do you wish to view?” They agreed and then beamed directly into Linwes brain, was an ancient effigy. It showed three beings, two were pristine, but the third was defaced, it was impossible to make out more than a pair of incredibly graceful legs that were painted white in a way that made them seem to glow from within with a holy light. The two clear pictures were only too familiar. One showed a figure in golden armour, holding a blazing blue sword, a golden halo around its head. The second was a dark malevolent form, its twisted features bathed in black abhorrence, holding a dripping a scythe. Beneath each was a label: Oratheon and Orageon, respectively. The marred ones label was slightly smudged, but it was easy to tell what it said; Mythanile. Now it was all beginning to make sense, in a twisted sort of way. But these where nothing more than ancient legends, comforting fairytales conceived by an ancient race that was afraid to be alone in the universe, unwilling to embrace the timeless oblivion of death. They had no place in the real world… But how can you ever tell what is real and what is not? When you are entombed in a dream, you never have any knowledge that your reality is a fantasy unwittingly crafted by a sleeping being. You never know that your entire life has been contained within the space of a single night, inside the twisting synapses and flashing neurones of another creatures brain. You don’t know that when that creature wakes up, it will be as if you never existed, you will just become another vague irrelevant memory, inside an eternal anal of existences that have been created and destroyed in so short a space of time. How can you tell that you are not in a dream at this very moment? Perhaps none of this is real, what if we are all a dream? But what happens when you wake up? Your entire gritty, painful life will have been for nothing; all the times you loved, cried and smiled will disappear in an instant, or will quickly leak out of conscious thought. The bitter futility of it all will never appeal to the dreamer. So, Linwe thought, perhaps none of this is real, perhaps this is an illusion that has been conjured up by my dying brain as I lie in a spreading puddle of my own blood back at the research station, how can I ever know that it is not? And if that is the case, I might die any minute and this will all cease to exist. Perhaps even her life at the research station had been dreamt? She looked at Larian; he, at least seemed real, in fact, she knew he was real, even if nothing else was. The ship turned, leaving a dispersing cloud of gas that had once been a planet behind. She felt a pang of regret that when they reached their destination, Earth, that she would be left behind and expected to start a new life there. Larian, Casian and the rest of them would, to her, cease to exist as if she had dreamed them. She supposed there would be nothing more she could wish to dream up. She would never hear of them again, apart perhaps from distant tales of glory and heroics. She had no place among heroes. Then time froze as the ship sped off to Earth. V. Commander Casian: Casian strode down the two-mile long, elaborate corridor heading to the chamber of the high council. What had Bicarno meant? Who was he really? The entire corridor was fashioned of polished gold encrusted with exotic symbols and powerful visions of mans superiority amongst the other children of the galaxy. It showed history that had long since been lost, and elaborated more than anything else on the ascension of the first high council. It was lit by balls of smokeless flame that hovered overhead. Over the heavily scented air Casian could smell the faint, musty and heavily disguised whiff of age, this corridor had stood a silent testament to the councils power for sixty six thousand years. The sheer amount of the precious metal was overwhelming and slightly disorientating, wherever you looked, the maddening glint of gold, stretching far off into the distance that was obscured by a cloud of incense. Arrayed down the corridor were the eerie council guard, faceless and swinging incense burners as gently as a soft breeze, the scented smoke rising to the ceiling ten metres above, where it hung in a ghostly cloud. Casian knew not to underestimate the council guard, whilst they appeared unarmed, they could crush a mans skull with nothing but the power of their minds. They wore single piece robes that covered their entire bodies, including their heads, like burial shrouds, and nothing else other than a simple gold band around each of their necks and a plain sheet of the same metal over where their faces should have been. They let Casian past without question, any lesser mortal would have been stopped long before they entered these hallowed chambers. Finally, at the end of the long journey was a gigantic double door fashioned, predictably enough, from gold. It was engraved with images of the first council, Casian wondered if they could ever dreamt of what their simple, noble establishment would one day become. He swung the huge doors open with ease, a task that would usually have required at least four men, and stepped in. Casian had visited the council many times, but it was always disconcerting to walk in and see the one hundred men and women wired into and hanging limp from the huge diamond wall, like so many flies stuck to a particularly large and shiny sheet of fly paper. Looking through the clear wall you could see the energy vortex lapping against the reinforced walls of its prison, a sea of soaring plasma, constantly suckling the helpless creatures crucified on the walls with pure energy, an exhausted mother feeding her ravenous baby. They were completely naked, only their faces were covered with sheets of gold. Casian could see beneath this shining façade to their dreamy relaxed expressions that washed over their wide-eyed, lolling faces, reminiscent of someone who has been smoking Shio-Sharni marsh weed for a little too long. To his discomfort he noticed how as usual they were all in a state of high arousal, withered penises and wrinkled nipples erect and quivering. He was not disgusted by their shrivelled, pathetic bodies however, the buzzing wires and pulsing tubes pinching out pale strained flesh pockmarked with needle scars, pumping all number of unnameable fluids around their spread eagled corpses. He had learned to live with it long ago. After all, they were the guiding light of all mankind. "Mission was a success. Welcome." Said one hundred, sweet echoing voices directly into his mind. They twitched slightly and Casian was reminded of the horrors he had seen deep in the caverns of Morthiot. “Indeed it is good to be back, my lords and ladies” he replied giving a curt bow. "You have a question." They asserted. “Yes Lords and Ladies.” "Bicarno was a traitor. His words mean nothing." They seemed keen to get that point across. It was strange, how Casian almost felt he could detect a trace of fear in their collective voice. “But I have to know Lords and Ladies, who am I really?” "Theodus of Earth. Codenamed Casian." They said dully. “Really?” snapped Casian. "Would we lie?" Casian decided that was an excellent question. He knew things about the council, things that reeked to the high heavens. He had experienced first hand how they were more than capable of manipulating ‘the truth’ for their own goals. "Two weeks off duty. Go to Domeerus. We have problems there." Casians heart sank. He had heard that dull uncommittal phrase before. ‘We have problems there’ was how they chose to describe what happened on Morthiot. He knew what he would find there, nothing but blood, madness and death. “That is terrible news lords and ladies, Domeerus is one of our main arms suppliers. So why should I remain here for a fortnight when there is such danger to be eliminated?” "Linwe." “What of her?” "Initiate her." “What? Why? She has no wish to be among us!” protested Casian, shocked at the sudden, frivolous nature of their request. "We have seen it." “I trust your judgement, lords and ladies, she may be initiated, but why should we forestall military aid to Domeerus? Why risk millions of lives for a single initiation?” "Without her there can be no victory. We have seen it." Casian was sure there was a trace of anger and madness beneath that silky exterior. “I hardly…” he began, but the council interjected pleasantly. "You have your orders. Be gone." “I will lords and ladies, I will” snarled Casian backing out of the room. VI. Linwe: Linwe stood silently as if in prayer at a place of worship, gasping at her surroundings, humbled completely by her new abode. It was about fifteen by twenty metres, the walls were sleek, elegantly curved and glowed with a heavenly light. A central column of glass containing flickering red plasma like an insect trapped in a jam jar provided a centrepiece, in one corner her plush, spongy gel bed, in another an amoebic computer system. A small closed off area contained a toilet and a relaximersion tank, another contained a virtua-sense entertainment cubicle. Several varieties of exotic, lightly perfumed and brightly blooming alien plants sprouted from several spots on the walls, tumbling down almost to the floor. When she first arrived there was a psychically transmitted message for her from the illustrious High council. It was pretty basic and sounded a little insincere saying they deeply grieved for the destruction of her world, the death of her friends and family, and of course, the loss of her post as one of the gifted few at the forefront of human genetic research. They offered this new home in the bosom of mankind in compensation, as well as full Earthling Noble citizenship and access to all the facilities the planet had to offer. She had heard a lot of the so-called ‘Earthling Nobles’. They were divided into two main categories: Centuries old men and women with huge stores of accumulated wealth, usually ex-planetary governors or retired managers of galaxial corporations. The second group were the pure-bred psychics. Bred like cattle to be superior to the common man, every one gifted from birth with extra-sensory perception, telekinesis and many other astonishing, godly powers. If these gifts did not become apparent within a few days of birth, they were slaughtered like vermin to prevent impurities creeping into their hallowed ranks. There was a third, minority group of which Linwe was now a part; ordinary mortals whom the council felt deserved the advantages of nobility, through courageous acts or extraordinary loss. Rather strangely at the end of her welcome message was a footnote; It suggested that if she wished to continue her service to humanity, she should join the hallowed ranks of the Taui-kun. That was not right, she was not cut out to be a warrior, she had no place among heroes. Or did she? Perhaps… as Larian was one… piped up a sneaky voice in her head, she forced that annoying little voice to shut up, there was nothing there, she didn’t need him… Quite suddenly, she began to wobble, her knees buckled and she collapsed onto the smooth transparent gel of the bed. She began to shake and shudder uncontrollably. Then she started to cry in great heaving, wracking sobs. Tears streamed down her face in a tidal wave of grief. Everyone she had ever known was dead. She would never see their faces again, never hear their kindly voices. She was the only person to survive, so there was no one for her. She was so alone and in this strange new place expected to start afresh and sweep her previous life under the rug of subconsciousness. She could not recall any fond and happy memories of those she had lost, only images of their screaming bloody deaths. She tried to calm herself down, she took deep breaths and wiped the tears from her eyes. A lump of shattered glass remained in her throat that she could not dislodge “Linwe” she jumped and turned around to see Casians gigantic form towering behind her. “What to you want” she stammered. “And how did you get in here?” “Come with me Linwe, I need to show you something” he smiled “And in answer to your question, as commander of the Angels of death, I can call upon any human citizen I wish, at anytime.” he said, walking out the door, gesturing for her to follow. She wiped her eyes and followed him out the door and into the cylindrical corridor. It was elegant and simple, made of a smooth material that was surgically white. It glowed softly, providing the corridors lighting. A seemingly endless array of doors stood at regular intervals, seamless, marked only by their identiscanners and a golden room number. It was very different to what she had known on 526… there she had slept in what, compared to here, was a cell on the infamous hellhole of prisoner colony 24. She had shared her room with two other women, Janet and… and…? She had forgotten. The crushing pain of it flooded into her chest cavity like molten lead. Both women long dead now, their bleeding corpses vaporised. She was the only person in the universe that knew they had ever existed… and she had forgotten one of their names… Now they were out of the endless corridor, out into another made entirely of transparisteel. She gasped, even though she had seen it before, it was still the most fantastic view in existence: They were suspended some fifty kilometres into the atmosphere of Earth; all around them floated an ethereal cloud of gigantic, city-sized crystal bubbles that blazed in the midday sun. They were linked by a spiderweb of shining diamond, glistening strands of angelic hair; one of which they were in now. It was surreal, stretching on past the horizon, with no visible means holding them in their courtship with the clouds. She felt as though she was within a glass of sparkling champagne, but every flash of stardust was an entire community of about ten million people, thriving cities bobbing up and down in the gentle current of the high atmosphere. Far below them was mother Earth in all her organic lustre and beauty; undespoiled by mankind for over ten millennia. Bright, vivid colours smothered the ground, in crazy artistic streaks and splashes of vibrancy: carpets of red roses, purple violets, pink foxgloves, yellow buttercups and many other colours she couldn’t put a flower to. And above all, lush, loamy green grass. But there was no time to linger. They had to move on, so Linwe tore her eyes from the magnificent sights around her and followed Casian through the passage until they went inside another bubble. They stood in front of a huge ornately decorated doorway. Above it, in shimmering writing, were written the words: ‘Honour the Taui-kun, salvation of humanity. Praise the Taui-kun, protectors of purity. Glorify the Taui-Kun, righteous warriors. Revere the Taui-kun, for they give their sacred lives for our pitiful existences.’ Casian led her through the door into a wall of warm, fragrant, incense thick air. And for the first time in her life, she saw the true glory and splendour of the Taui-Kun. It was the most gigantic room Linwe had seen in her life, it would easily have encompassed the entire research station she had once lived, worked and almost died at twice over. It was entirely constructed of beautiful white marble that seemed to hold blazing white flame, laced with a lattice of sapphire veins. The ceiling far above was held aloft by gleaming pillars, which had been crafted into hundreds of life size Taui-Kun, separated by bands gold that blazed as if touched by the mid day sun. Everywhere she looked Taui-kun were emblazoned: Shrines to long dead war heroes, the images of their faces rapt with the ecstatic agony of martyrdom. Statues of helmet-less soldiers crafted from a material that looked like diamond frosted to an opaque milky white stood in powerful, awe inspiring poses, holding the tools of their trade high, blazing haloes forged from sheets of polished gold around their heads. Full colour holographic dioramas of lionised Taui-Kun fighting back all manner of monsters and aliens set into the walls. Frozen frames that chronicled the lives, and deaths of the God-warriors, rendered so lifelike that it seemed at any moment the suspended jewels of blood, sweat and drool would drop, or that a mortally wounded fiend would shriek in its dying agonies. In one scene a Taui-kun lay defeated atop a mound of slaughtered foe, his spirit bursting free of the flesh and into the waiting arms of a transcendent host of angels that soared from the heavens to bear him away, looks of unquestioning adoration and mortal sorrow on their faces. Linwe thought she could almost hear the faint susurration of the wind through the delicate feathers of their graceful wings. In the end, that was the inevitable doom of every Taui-kun, to die on some far-flung world, his life-blood seeping into alien soil, his last breaths of extraterrestrial air. Would he then ascend with the songs of angels in his ears? She stopped dead. In front of her stood a blazing statue of Casian himself. He stood in a long stance, one massive foot planted triumphantly on a mound of cackling skulls. In his right hand he held his flaming sword pointed towards the heavens at forty-five degrees, his other hand holding a pistol just grasped from the holster. A dense look of unrestrained power and manly courage was pasted onto his face as he stared down the elegant line of his sword. His mouth silently sounded a victorious battle cry. She began to think of Casians history as a warrior and all the horrors he had lived through, all the dark entities he had fought back; keeping humanity alive. “It is a great likeness, do you not think Linwe?” said Casian, Linwe was surprised by the painful acidity of the words. She looked up in fear and inquisitivity and saw the bitter agony in his eyes. Those eyes that had witnessed so much death and pain, weakened and hurt by this magnificent statue of their bearer. She watched in fascination as a tear began to form at the edge of his left eye. He blinked as if to rid his sight of a shard of grit, and it was gone. Linwe read the embossed golden letters at the base of the statue: Lord Casian at the purge of Dalmos five In the year 66559 Praise him. Praise all the Taui-kun for their courage. Those words stirred a faint memory of her last moments at the research station: “I am Commander Casian of the Angels Of Death” He replied curtly as he had hundreds of times before. “ Casian… the hero of the Dalmos five crusade?” “If you call bloody murder heroic.” He said resentfully She had heard the very same bitterness in his voice then. “What so troubles you about Dalmos five?” she asked. Casian looked down in barely hidden shock; perhaps he had never realised how easy he was to read, how much his emotions showed through the chinks in the curtain he wove around himself. “I think Linwe, that that is a tale for another time.” There was no mistaking the harsh finality in his voice. He turned away from her. “Come, this is not what I wished to show you.” Linwe followed obediently as he strode off. What must have been thousands of people were scattered around the room, some were the people of Earth, but most were men and women on a gigantic galaxy spanning pilgrimage, all come to worship the Taui-Kun. Every time they passed near one they opened their mouths in awe and fell to their knees quivering, crying “Lord Casian! We honour you!” and Casian, having regained his composure, acknowledged each of them with a gracious smile, a nod of his head and replying: “Then I shall protect you human!” and as they walked on by, Linwe could hear them sobbing excitedly, murmuring prayers, even kissing the ground where Casian had walked. “Why do they do that?” Linwe said, puzzled. “Because to them Linwe; we are gods.” Casian said solemnly. Priests walked among the pilgrims in their immaculate robes, chanting in religious ecstasy and swinging incense burners in wild arcs. She felt as though she was invisible, or perhaps more of an annoyance, she noted anger on the faces of those that did notice her. It was as if she should not be allowed so near Casian without offering him praise, or that they were far more worthy of the immortals company. The room seemed to stretch on forever and all along there were more and more adoring subjects, each of them viewed Casian with the same reverence, and Linwe with the same detest. She supposed she understood why they must feel that way. They had each been raised from birth to praise the Taui-kun, to look up and to revere them as the gods they were. And then, perhaps the first time they had seen one of these great bastions of immortal glory, there is a nameless woman with him, standing side by side as if she were his equal. As they neared another huge door in a corner of the room, one more thing caught her eye. Staring down at them from the wall, emblazoned in glory was a ferocious looking woman with fiery red hair, a pale complexion and sharp green eyes, in the colours of the Angels of Death. “Who is that?” she asked “That is Rowenian. She was Legion commander before me. She died in the purging of Dalmos five. She promoted me to my current status as she lay on her death bed.” “Are there many women Taui-kun?” Casian didn’t answer. He was staring up at the statue of Rowenian in such a pained and reverential way that Linwe did not dare disturb him. Was that it? Was this why Casian felt so much regret about the Dalmos 5 crusade? Because his old commander had died there? Or was it more than that? Had he loved her? Linwe would never know the answers to any of those questions. The only person who knew what had really happened on Dalmos five was Casian, and he would sooner take his own life than recount that old tale. After a while Casian saluted the statue and turned from it, sighed and muttered two sorrowful words “Fifty years…” then lead Linwe towards another door. Linwe tried to catch a glimpse of his face to see if his eyes were damp again, but she could not do it without angling her head too obviously. She suddenly felt wretched for trying to pry, what right had she to know? She thought as the knife of guilt twisted slowly in her belly. Words were inscribed above this door, similar in tone to the last one: They died for you. Honour them and pay back a small part of the debt you owe. They walked in. This room was different from the last. She gasped in horror; stretching off farther than the eye could see were thousands of neatly ranked Taui-kun statues, silent sentinels to the unforgiving world around them. Each had their helmet off and wore a solemn expression, dignified, and yet anguished. Ethereal, yet so horribly mortal. Beneath each was a plaque: Linwe read the closest to her: His most gloried Sergeant Calidius. Fell fighting the Klaimen hoard, In the year 54689. May he go to his paradise, And in his new-found eminence watch over us. Praise him. Praise all the Taui-kun for their sacrifice. “This Linwe, is where we lay those that fell to rest. This is only the fist level of thirty six.” “Thirty six levels, all like this?” she whispered “Why have you brought me here?” she said in a small, frightened voice. “Linwe… the high council, they say you are…” he paused, considering “Important. They have seen you in their dreaming surveillance of the twisted paths of the future. They have seen you as a Taui-kun warrior. They have seen you doing great things, they bid me initiate you to our cause.” “What?” Linwe trembled, this wasn’t right, it couldn’t be! She wasn’t a warrior; she could never to such great and noble things. Yet the council, they saw all… what was she to do? “They told me that you must be initiated before we set off to our next mission, on Domeerus. Above all, it is still down to you. I brought you here so you could see us as we are, mortal beings, charged with so much. I brought you here so you could make your decision, knowing it could be the last you ever make.” “I don’t understand! Why me?” but deep down inside, she already knew. It was the same reason project Genesis had saved her from the dragon, the reason she was the only survivor… she knew she was special, but how? “I hate to press you Linwe, but your decision must be made now, every second we linger, innocent lives are lost.” He seemed almost to be pleading. The world seemed to slow for her, every second was an eternity, everything became clear. She had a chance to become a goddess, a legend, an immortal within the minds of the citizens of the galaxy. All the same, it was all but inevitable that she would end up here again, dead in the marble ground, her statue stood above her, watching the world fly by. A simple plaque, proclaiming her name and deathbed, the only key to her lost identity. But then, are we all not destined to obscurity? Why not make something of her life? Why not save innocent men and women? Why not fight for what she believed in? But what did she believe in? In the end, was that her choice? Rowen… that was her name! That was the name of her second roommate on 526. So her existence had not yet been totally lost. But Linwe still had a place in this great dream that we live in… Then, finally, without really knowing quite why, feeling as if the whole civilised galaxy was watching her every move with baited breath, she spoke those fatal words. “I accept” VII. Commander Casian “Malian, this is Casian, report to my quarters.” “Yes sir” came the reply, almost instantaneously. Casian sat down and sighed. What had happened on Morthiot? It was already feeling like a lost and confused memory. He massaged his temple with his hands. What role had Plior played in it all? Why had he sent the three of them alone against an enemy they could not possibly hope to defeat and only stepped in at the last second? It did not seem right, surely there was some higher purpose to his actions? But what? Perhaps he had shared this information to the other members of the squad, when he had taken them aside and whispered to them in that voice that was a hairs breadth from silence. Malian. What was it Malian had said about Pliors words? That it was about the future, Casians future? He needed to know. The door whispered open, and Malian marched in “You requested to see me, sir.” “Tell me friend, for I must know.” Said Casian softly. “What do you remember from the caves, what did Plior tell you?” Malian looked up at Casian in a puzzled sort of way. “What do you mean?” he said curiously. “There was no one alive in the caves. When we saw that they were all dead we turned back, and that was the end of it.” “Are you sure?” said Casian, terror creeping into his heart. Just how much of this was real? How could he tell anymore what was the nightmare and what was not? “Aye sir. The caves were empty.” Casian sat silently for a long while, staring at the smooth white floor, trying to grasp in his mind, memories, thoughts, anything to try and prove to himself that he was not going mad. But the harder he looked, the more seemed to seep away through his grasping fingers, wisps of fine sand tickling his skin. “Its alright Malian, you can go.” He murmured, only just realising that his companion still sat dutifully in front of him. As the man began to get up and walk away, Casian began to wonder, what if it was Malians memory that was in question? What if he had heard something that someone did not want him to hear? Casian remembered the slightly fearful tone of the High council when they denounced Bicarnos words, and that haughtily assuring question ‘would we lie?’ But what if they had got someone else to do it for them? VIII. Darkness: Bicarno tumbled through endless blackness, screaming in unprecedented agony. His eyes sizzled in their sockets, bubbling like molten plastic, his skin fried and scorched and his long white hair became ash. He writhed and contorted from the pain, twisting and whirling through licking flames of torture that crowned him with an unholy corona of torment. “Orageos! Please! Relent!” he rasped past flame-cracked lips and a tongue of charcoal. “Release your good servant!” You failed me! bellowed a voice that sent transfixing jolts of pain down Bicarnos spine. You had your chance to take him, but you forsook your duties in an ignorant, selfish act of utter vanity! roared Orageos in a voice that reverberated in Bicarnos boiling guts. “Please, master, you saw, you see all, it was Oratheos and one of his spawn, it was only in my devotion to you that I fought him.” He whined. It is because of your incompetence that I remain here now! Do not mask it in false robes! Besides, there will be plenty of other opportunities in good time. Until then you shall remain here, with me. And learn the true meaning of damnation! He bellowed with echoing laughter, Bicarno whined as the pain transcended to an even greater level. IX. Lady Linwe: We can see you. We can see your mind. You are special. You have a purpose. We can see you. We know what you are for. You are going to die. Your death will be the gateway to new times. You will set us free. Linwe coughed and a green bubble rose lazily in front of her nose. Gagging suddenly, she tried to scream, liquid frothing in her lungs. She was drowning; this was death, a few panicked moments before oblivion. She kicked and thrashed her legs and felt wires and tubes wriggling in her flesh like feasting snakes. Just like a few more dazed bubbles, blurred memories floated to her mind. The rising water, the excitement. The ritual chanting. She remembered where she was, what was happening. She relaxed. She could feel air flooding through her lungs now; the liquid was supplying her with breath. As she began to calm down, she realised how different everything was, the light… there was so much light… it was all so bright and vibrant. It was as if she had lived in a dim and shadowy cellar all her life, and one day had stumbled up the staircase, into a world of blazing crystal and pearly white sands, the sky a galaxy of exploding stars. She found it odd that her vision wasn’t blurred, even though she was submerged. There seemed to be an unrestrained sense of energy and life running through her veins and the muscles that covered every square centimetre of her body She could see a hazy figure approaching through the green, then her vision seemed to contort, it focused in on him, for it was a man approaching her and the green faded away, her eyes were compensating for it. She recognised him. He was a short old man with cropped blonde-grey hair, dressed in overly extravagant robes that looked far too long for him. He had taken her to her initiation last week. Her initiation… she had never felt so afraid, the penetrating voices of the high council had striped her down for inspection, judging her very soul. She remembered feeling as if she were naked in a courtroom. They had deemed her worthy, almost instantaneously, then asked her a few simple questions about her allegiance. She had not even entered their chamber. And that, was that. She had become Lady Linwe, a Taui-kun of the Angels Of Death legion. It was surreal, though it had felt an eternity, she later found she had only been under inspection for less than five minutes. It had been so simple… And now, here she was, a new woman, a goddess amongst mankind. Next came the training ordeals. She was not looking forward to that. She had heard of men driven nearly to their deaths in these. Her eyes widened in horror as new images began to superimpose themselves over the man, a faint image of his skeletal structure grinned into being, columns of aged, arthritic bone accompanied by his exhausted internals, still twitching and pumping laboriously after what must have been at least five hundred years. She could read his temperature, and it was lower than it should have been. Even in the liquid filled cubicle she could smell his age, the faint cologne he was wearing that smelt like withered lavenders, masking the slight hint of perspiration beneath. She could taste the air as if it were wine, although the liquid she was in masked it thickly with its harsh antiseptic, metallic taste. She could hear his heart beat, slow and faint, followed by the rush of blood around his body. Each step he took was a gunshot, she could sense the smooth fabric he wore, to her ears it scratched and rubbed against his skin, rustling constantly in an insect like drone. Nothing about him was hidden from her. She could even see faint images through the walls of the chamber, there were many other cubicles like her own, none of them occupied. She shut her eyes, feeling slightly dizzy, the term ‘sensory overload’ seemed to rebound hatefully around the inside of her head. When she opened them, she found that she could easily fade some of the unwanted images down so they left only a faint residue, it was as easy and natural as blinking, though there was nothing to be done about her almost supernatural taste and hearing abilities. The liquid began to flood out and the walls came down with them. The old man stood a few metres away, funny; he seemed so much smaller now… she must be nearly double his height! Then, it was done; she stood on new, powerful legs, rippling with barely restrained power. She was impressed and a little relieved to see that she had not put on nearly so much muscle weight as male Taui-kun, and that what she had gained hardly affected her figure at all. She had a feeling that she would have looked faintly ridiculous if she had biceps the size of a mans skull… In fact, she thought, looking down at her bared breasts, far from having lost her femininity in this induction to a largely male theatre, it almost seemed as if she had gained some… She was completely naked, though this seemed to have little or no effect upon the little old man, it seemed that his eye for the opposite sex had long since faded somewhere along the many centuries of his life. “Lady Linwe, your first task…” he paused lengthily and stood placidly, waiting. “I accept it with my heart and soul” she blurted, that wasn’t a good start, for a moment she had totally forgotten the ancient etiquette that went with the rituals. “Your first task is to activate your Mòróplex.” “How am I to do that?” “Concentrate, look deep into your subconscious mind.” She tried her hardest, but didn’t seem to be achieving much. She took a few deep breaths, calmed her nerves and waited for her next instructions. What he told her to do next seemed strange, almost incomprehensible to her confused mind, but she tried anyway. Seconds later, to her shock, joy and surprise, she felt a strange squirming, squirting sensation deep in her chest and then thick, oily Mòrón leaked out of her pores, which with her new eyes, she could see individually in incredible detail. She was quickly coated in a clinging film of the stuff, gleaming, new and fresh. It felt odd at first, but she was already getting used to it. “Excellent! Now test your joints.” She did, she flexed her fingers and tried her arms and legs. Everything was perfect and atomic with energy. “Very good, now follow me to the training hall.” She could not wait; she practically bounded after him, eager to start using her new body, coated in its cloak of seething Mòrón. This was her rebirth, her second life started now. X. Bio-Tech Warrior 138/AKY2K/556: For a moment there was nothing but whirling colours and dancing starlight and then the warrior reappeared on the surface of Karill. The rust red dusty ground, the writhing seas of blood, the geysers, the lava flows, the dirty sulphurous yellow clouds dashing across the heavens, forked lighting crackling between them. And past the clouds, pitch black, a few stars gleaming out through the chaos. It was home. A flash of light, a thunderclap and a ferocious storm whipped up in a matter of seconds. It was raining blood, turning the dusty ground into a thick red paste. Servos whirred and gears ground and then in the harsh voice of Its verbal synthesiser, It spoke “Father Karill, show me the way!” A bolt of lightning sizzled through the air and hit in the middle of a large lake, vaporising it, sending dust into the air into a seething storm of rusty fury. A tunnel was now evident where the lake had been. It stepped in and on instinct started plodding towards Its masters as the lake closed over behind It, a film of blood covering the entrance to the passageway. It strode oblivious through the great caverns, ignoring the massed throngs of Karilion warriors, as they fought amongst themselves, baying for blood. Their gnarled foetal faces contorted with rage, thirst and pleasure. Their multiple, bladed appendages slashed, strangled and crushed in their constant lustful dance with death. Today they fought amongst themselves because their food supply had been exhausted; their latest hunting raid had come back as shattered remnants, crushed by Taui-kun warriors. The bodies of their previous victims hung from the ceiling by their ankles, nothing but pale withered husks devoid of any of the precious life giving liquid. But Father Karills veins had to be filled; it mattered not from whom the blood flowed. And so the channels that lead to the chamber of the masters, the heart of Karil, gushed still with red richness. And for that the Karilions were glad. It followed one of these conduits, before long It was there. The heart of the universe, the seat of Karils bloodstained empire. The chamber of the Masters. This was to where the blood flowed, to feed them and honour their ravenous patron god. It congregated to a massive writhing lake, hundreds of metres across, over which a slight skin of congealed gore had formed. And seated above it, suspended somehow in mid air: were those that It answered to. There were four of them. They looked as all Karilions, but there was something more about them, something divine. Each looked almost like a human foetus, but with dark red flesh and a crest of horns around their proportionately large faces. Iron taloned fingers and toes and a mouthful of razor fangs glinted menacingly. Bladed and suckered tentacles sprouted like insane fungal growth from their abdomens. They were around two metres large, but nearly twice their size, seated in the middle of them was the master of the masters; The current living incarnation of The bloodstained god. As he served his time as dreaded warlord of the Karilion people, his body would become bloated and he would continue to grow in size until Karil became tired of his current host, then he would devolve into what Karil had been born: the blood and tears of warring gods. Karil spoke to him. “How went your expedition Bio-Tech Warrior 138/AKY2K/556? Do you bring blood?” the master spoke eagerly with a voice like the sound of metal scraping upon rock. “Yes, I bring blood for Father Karil and information as you wished.” “Give up your gift then.” He urged. It stepped forwards and a hole tore itself open in the region of Its stomach, then the blood of his fallen enemies sprayed out into the pool below the masters. The hole resealed itself. The masters hissed in pleasure, It hissed with them. “Now, tell us this information that you bring.” “They have returned, the children of The One.” “So it is true, this is most useful” the warrior felt a swoon of pleasure, his master was pleased! “That is not all master” he said, eager to please him more. “I saw the human they call Casian.” If Its simple emotional circuits could have felt surprise, they would have done, for the masters started laughing, the high pitched cackling echoing around the cavern. As it was, he was only programmed with three distinct emotions; blood thirst, hate and dark indulgence. “Casian…” said the master mulling over the word, he started muttering to himself “… he is still ignorant of what he is…but if it awakens in him…” he spoke clearly again. “Bio-Tech Warrior 138/AKY2K/556 this is your new assignment. Kill Casian.” |
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