Chương 218: Nova Wars - Chapter 173

There are hints, at the edges of recorded history, of the terrible things the Terrans have done in the name of victory. Or at least in the name of not losing. Not to others. To themselves. - Dreams of Something More, 25 TXE, speaking to a Lanaktallan, taken from " Anecdotes of the Apocalypse, The Latter Years of My Service." The system was, to put it best terms, unholy. A place where space was rotted and twisted. Where the flow and ebb of spacetime had been wounded, become infected, and had begun to rot and decay.

Like a gangrenous abdominal wound it oozed discolored dark matter pus and noxious fumes of putrid gas in dark purple and dark green wisps. Dark lightning, the forks an absence of light and unclean, snarled silently through the vast clouds the color of bruised flesh. The entire area, a ragged disjointed volume, encompassed over a hundred light years of space. A single star sullenly burned in the center.

A thing of impossibility, it burned lightless and emitted nothing but cold and darkness as it silently consumed itself in an orgy of self loathing and hatred. It chewed on its own guts as it burned with impossible hatred and malevolence. Any tendril of rotting space or spiraling tentacle of gas that touched it was pulled in, screaming across particle wavelengths, to be devoured by that dark stellar mass that could only be called a star by the most lenient of definitions.

The gas and substance were not just for show. The touch of the gas would corrode battlesteel. The darkness emitted by the star could cause warsteel to decay into a rotted skein of decayed lace. The matter itself would dissolve even energy into more of its own substance with an obscene noise that echoed silently across the energy spectrums. It was a vile place.

Recently, only forty-thousand years ago, a Hellspace portal, called The Eye by those who were damned enough to view it, had opened in the rotting and hatred filled system. It connected to another place. A place where life dwelled. But it was life consumed by rage and fury. Sometimes barely suppressed, but mostly screamed out in joyous violence. The Eye of Gorthaur stared down at the system. The Seven Rings of Gehanna was a system shrouded in darkness. The sun gave out no light, only thrummed with hatred.

Set at the mouth of the Tartarus Dark Matter Sea, with the Eye of Gorthaur only a light week 'north' of the massive red giant named the Eye of Barad-dûr. The gas giants had burned away in the gaze of the Eye of Gorthaur, the inner planets devoured by the hunger of the Eye of Barad-dur, leaving only a single planet surrounded by six rings of asteroids, three in each direction. The single planet was known as the Isle of Dread.

A place of toxic seas, blasted landscape where molten warsteel ran in rivers as red as blood over black ashy ground covered in wreckage of a million battles. Nine great cities adorned the Isle of Dread, like great cankers on already diseased ground. Great war machines were forged in the black depths of the planet. Starships were constructed by laborers who hated each part and strut. In days past the Nine Dread Lords would have contested against one another for primacy of the Isle of Dread.

Since the Terran Extinction Event and the Grand Dark Crusade of Burning Light they worked in tandem. With friction, betrayals, and plots, yes, but still they worked as together as their madness and rage allowed them to. To build the machines to punish those who dared insult them. To raise the armies to sweep enemies of mankind from the universe. To forge in rage and hatred the grand war machine that crushed all who beheld it.

The Eye of Gorthaur could be used to transit Hellspace or reach a place that most would not dare. The two systems were linked by the Eye just as they were bound by Hellspace. And by hatred. Ships were forged in both systems. A planet was drawn in by the malevolent intellect of the Graveyard of Hope. There, armies fought beneath a rotting sky and starships were built in the light of hatred. Every few centuries the Grand Dark Crusade of Burning Light would attack.

It appeared without rhyme or reason to those who did not understand. To those who did understand, it made perfect sense. The Matron's Special Blend left the City of Sour Cones and Dusty Smoke to destroy the very planets of a species that had attacked two cattle worlds and used biological warfare to kill the moomoos.

When the Special Blend returned to the Isle of Dread to race across the plains as they screamed in rage, that civilization was little more than a desperate echo pleading for help in the last radio transmissions that eminated from where now a red sun burned sullenly. The Red Nettle Legion had erupted from the Isle to destroy an entire civilization, leaving their people wandering the wastelands crying out to remembered Gods to succor.

A Telkan trade transport was forced from hyperspace by a Red Nettle Battlewagon whose keel had been laid down during the Human Mantid War and then they had been boarded. Great hulking warriors of the Red Nettle Legion had stomped into the hull spaces of the Telkan trading vessel. Then knelt down and opened their hands. Shielding inside the great armored fists of the Red Nettle Legion's warriors were sleeping podlings. Kidnapped, clones, and kept as pets till they got too old, when they were euthenized.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. The Telkan went to that system with the intent to xenocide. What they found, they never spoke of. The most they said was that they'd missed it. By the time they got there, "it" was done. All feared the Legions, the Hordes, of the Isle of Dread, who fought beneath a dead sky. They fought one another to hone their skills for fifty thousand years. From the Great Glassing to the Unbagging.

The Fields of Blood and Iron, on the Great Plains of Remorse, were usually full of warring factions honing their skills, were usually covered with the Matron's Special Blend racing back and forth chasing the ghost moomoos in the sky that rumbled back and forth on their fiery hooves. Normally it was the real of the "Idiots", or the Fallen Martial Orders. But for weeks the Martial Orders of the Crusades had arrived in force. Pink and white bonfires were built on the rocky badlands of Kittahhead.

Then came the day things changed. The endless warring was set aside. The vehicles rolled away. The troops marched to their barracks. The sun set and the plains were empty. During the night members of the Martial Orders went out into the plains, hammering in great iron spikes into the dirt and attaching chains. War "slaves" stripped to the waist lifted the heavy spiked iron chains, unheeding of the blood than ran from the rents in their flesh. A Knight cracked their whip and the slaves heaved on the chains.

And slowly drew great iron crosses from the soil. The chains fell free once the blackened skulls erupted from the earth to pile up at the bottom. Tens of thousands of crosses dotted the Plains of Iron and Blood. There was great chains fitted into harnesses laying in the sweeping endless prarie. There were pink and white bonfires and chains smeared with paint in the badlands. From the citadels, washing across the entire world, the sounds of drums erupted.

A frenzied hammering of warhammers and fists on warsteel drawn so tight it sang across the hoops. Before dawn rose the dropships began to land. Crews ran out and built bonfires of wood and bone that threw a lurid light across chain and iron cross. From the dropships they were carried. Bound, gagged, blindfolded, they still screamed and struggled. The great Treana'ad Warriors and the smaller workers were dragged to the chains and the harnesses put upon them even as they raved and gibbered.

The Telkan, Tukna'rn, Puntimat, Nakaroo, were bound by chains and lifted into the air to be strapped to the crosses. Terrans were dragged out, lifted onto the crosses, where the skulls piled at the base stared with red eyes. Bands were used to hold their arms and legs still so that spiked could be driven through to hold them on the cross. They all screamed their rage and fury back, eyes burning red. In the center they lifted the girl with the lightning bolt.

Drums hammered as young females of all the species left dropships, their bodies and features completely hidden by white mist silk from the Elven Courts. They each held a single candle in front of them as they began to sing and move between the crosses and the harnesses Treana'ad. Choirs of the Martial Orders began to sing as the sounds of vast pipe organs wove into the hammering of the drums, elevating both into something more than just the sum of the singing, the drums, the pipe organs, the violins.

The girl with the lightning bolt screamed in rage and lightning exploded from her, the thick arcs of phasic energy connecting all who were crucified or bound. Three rings of young females of all races circled the girl with the crimson handprint and the blue lightning bolt. Their voices were sweet and pure and in a dozen different languages. For five days and five nights the girl with the handprint and lightning bolt screamed and the rest screamed with her. On the sixth day her screams stopped. Her head dropped.

She slumped against the cross. She began to whisper. Whisper names. Whisper names that she had never met. The others began to whisper with her. The phasic energy still crackled. She was still joined to the other. Sometimes she whispered in Telkana. Sometimes in Treana'ad Hive Speech. Other times in Nakaroo. Mostly, in one of the languages of Terra. Still the girls sang and walked in a slow circle around her. The inner clockwise. The middle counter clockwise. The outside switching every sixth rotation.

As the sun set the names turned to soft lyrics of revenge, of wrath, of rage, of hatred. On the sixth night she lifted her head and began to sing with the girls who surrounded her. By dawn the others sang with her, their voices weak and trembling. War 'slaves' slammed ladders against the arms of the crosses or approached the bound Treana'ad. Buckets were passed up. Sponges were dipped in milk and honey stained red with bull's blood and used to wet lips. Brows were anointed with oils.

Those that had survived, nearly 4/5ths of them, were taken down and taken aboard dropships that moved to the great fortresses. Those who did not survive were taken down. Were wrapped in silks winding sheets. Were taken down into the burial chambers beneath the planet's surface. Some were spirited away to be sealed in dark chassis that had been built for them before they had ever been born.

Inside the fortress cities the singers were brought into the dark and twisted labyrinths that housed secrets that were not meant to be known. Flesh rippers, more machine than man, went to work. For some the singing became screams. Others went silent, their mouth still moving as they whispered the lyrics. Some whispered names still. While the flesh was still raw and bleeding the contents of the Forge Vaults were brought forth. For some, the armor and weapons were ancient, from before the Glassing.

For others, the weapons and armor had been forged while they had hung on the crosses. The smiths worked, sealing the singers and whisperers inside their armor until such time as they could control their rage and convince the armor to release them. The girl with the lightning bolt and handprint whispered names and the song at the same time, as if there were two of her talking. Her cybereye was replaced with one that was bulky and painful. Pain did not matter.

Pain was the Malevolent Universe (praise unto her) telling you that you were alive. A Forge Surgeon saw that her blue lightning bolt was made up of thousands of almost microscopic 1's and 0's. The the red handprint was made up of millions of names, all squirming and twisting with the desire for vengeance. Not all survived bonding to their armor. Those were taken, in secret, to where armored chassis had awaited them since before their mothers knew the names of their fathers.

In those dark passages and chambers horrors were performed. In those dark and terrible chambers and passages war crimes were forged. On the tenth day the survivors were taken back out to the plains and laid where they had suffered. As the sun set their eyes opened. Their madness, not cured but tempered, surged and their own rage sealed them into their armor. The girl with the red handprint and the blue lightning bolt rose to her feet with the hissing of pnuematics and the clatter of chains and gears.

"WE LIVE! WE DIE! WE LIVE AGAIN!" she shrieked out. All around her the ten thousand of hundred lifted their weapons and bellowed. Some shouted names. Some shouted threats. All shouted in rage.

"FOR CARNAGE! FOR HATE! FOR WRATH!" she screamed. The others echoed.

"FOR LOVE!" The Founding of the Tenth Order was complete. As it had been written. So it was. HAT WEARING AUNTIE Did anyone else feel that? It was like the entire universe just heaved! ---NOTHING FOLLOWS--- TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS There's some bad imagery coming out of Terra. ---NOTHING FOLLOWS--- TELKAN FORGE WORLDS Bad? That was horrific. ---NOTHING FOLLOWS--- RIGEL It's going to get worse. Trust me. ---NOTHING FOLLOWS---