Chương 23: Nova Wars - Chapter 22

The past is always there. The blood soaked foundation that the present is built upon, the gore smeared stones mortared with bone, the ground it sits upon a graveyard. No matter how high you think your people have climbed, the ground and foundation are always there. You would be wise to remember that others are closer to the ground than you and still building their foundation. - Dalvanak the Maimed One The planet was largely overgrown.

Plants and weather had torn down structures made of hyperalloys and ferrocrete with the inexorable march of time. Fungus and mosses had torn apart the ferrocrete, time and geological shifts had eventually torn apart the hyperalloys, although here and there were great piles of twisted hyperalloy beams haphazardly scattered through the gravel of ferrocrete.

An ice age had come and gone twice, the grinding of ice with enormous pressure had torn hyperalloy struts apart and scattered them across the landscape as just another boulder. Gone were the great cities, the highways, the maglev trains and cargoways, the starports, the farms, the factories, and the suburbs and living complexes. Forests, deserts, jungle, and grasslands had reclaimed the planet. One spot was different. The forest was held back by ferrocrete, forming a circle around a large multistory building.

Macroplas windows still gleamed, the surface of the building still shone. Holograms still danced and capered in the windows, even though the parking lot was empty of vehicles. There were strange structures in the parking lot. High peaked round tents, lavishly painted and dyed yurts, small huts, even tiny houses. They were painted gaudy colors, often with tassels or flags fluttering in the breeze. For centuries the parking lot was empty, silent.

Once in a while a figure would move from the structures in the parking lot to the big building, their forms and features hidden by sharp planes of pseudo-crystal created by phasic energy. A sharp eyed observer would note that for the first few thousand years the boxes created by sharp planes of phasic energy would avoid one another, making sure long minutes passed before they used an entrance to the large building that another had used. Then the patterns changed.

Some crystalline protections drifted over to be near others, or joined them to enter the building at the same time. The structures in the parking lot became more ornate, more lavish, decorated with all manner of flags, banners, ribbons, tassels, paintings, murals, and tapestries. After a while what left the structures were strange creatures. Tall, just over two meters. Conical heads with three eyes and four tentacles covering a lamprey-like mouth, two arms, and two legs, a faded violet or even gray.

They wore lavish clothing, some scintillating gowns and dresses, others formal tuxes and suits, all bedecked with jewelry and amulets. They often had items of power orbiting their heads, bodies, held in their hands, or worn upon their person. They would often meet in groups, communicating wordlessly with their phasic power, all though a few used vocalizations, making them the exceptions that proved the rule.

At times the creatures would build large bonfires and sit on woven mats around it, passing back and forth mugs of strong drink, food roasted on ornate sticks, and a stick that designated whose turn it was to speak. Decades would go by and the parking lot would be empty, the buildings suffering slightly from neglect, but without fail the creatures would return, gather around the bonfire, or within the vast building. The rest of the planet grew wild, overgrown.

Animals changed as the ecosystem recovered from the damage it had suffered in eons gone by. Inside the building were vast storehouses of wondrous objects, many on display and guarded by fierce mechanical guardians that never seemed to show wear or tear. The shelves were always stocked full, always displayed a dizzying variety of strange objects. The middle of the building was taken up by a strange contraption of rails, animatronic creatures, flashing lights, and artificial scenery.

Skulls and skeletons were the primary decoration, all of the bejeweled and bedecked with colorful decorations. Loud booming laughter, screams, and roars could be heard from hidden speakers. Every time the strange creatures gathered, some would climb aboard the rickety looking carts, drink deeply of a strange and foul concoction, have small biting insects poured upon them, and ride the terrifying path. When those who rode stumbled from the contraption, the others gathered around to hear what visions they had seen.

Thousands of years passed as the ecosystems reclaimed the ruins, eventually even reclaiming the thick layers of bones and skeletal remains that had littered the planet. Deep beneath the building was a redoubt, with vaults containing items and relics of great power and/or rarity and/or value. There were chambers that were strange and unknowable to those not privy to the secrets.

There were comfortable and lavish dwelling areas, even subterranean delights such as an underground lake or the shore of a sea deep beneath the surface that had beaches that never saw the light of the star. One chamber, deep within the crust of the planet, in particular was ancient, powerful, and its magnificence showed true to its function. Gems hung in a carefully designed pattern, each gem gleaming despite the lack of light sources. Glittering crystalline powder hung in clouds and streaks here and there.

Each gem stood for a stellar system in the galactic spur the planet's star was part of. The clouds of crystalline powder represented nebula, gas clouds, and dangerous areas. Often beings came to this chamber. Sometimes a single solitary one, other times in small groups, and still other times the entirety of those present. The one that came the most was notable in its disfigurement. Powerful fingers had torn the flesh from its head, at one time revealing the cartilage that made up its skull.

Two of its feeding tentacles had been torn away, one at the root, the other halfway down. One arm was slightly bent and twisted, the cartilage never having healed right after being broken so savagely that shards of cartilage had erupted from the purple flesh. It was missing two fingers on its left hand, the scars showing powerful meat tearing dentition had been used to savage the hand.

It dressed in finery, a long sweeping gown covered in precious gems or seed pearls, with a train that stretched out behind the being for several meters. It often wore a bejeweled tiara that glittering with phasic energy and power. The creature, a he because the creature had decided that he was a he, would move through, examining that gems, appraising the outside universe. The facility, the parking lot, the underground chambers, were his domain. He was Dalvanak, the Maimed One.

The others were those who sought his wisdom, who had come to worship the same entity he had come to worship. The Malevolent Universe. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Those who sided with him had been known among their uneducated kind as "The Cult of the Defiled One" and had been derided as heretics, lunatics, and worse. Now, they were all that remained of their people. And they had no interest in resurrecting their people.

After all, those who were gone had failed the Malevolent Universe's tests and no longer deserved existence. Dalvanak was known as a being of great power, a keeper of secrets and lore that others could only wonder upon, and explorer of fearsome places where no other of their kind dared to tread. It was he who had prevented the burning of the hyper-atomic planes. It was he who had tamed the Tomb of the Mad Lemurs of Terra and learned to seek out the wisdom they whispered from their unquiet grave.

It was he who had guided the Cult of the Defiled One through the trials of the Malevolent Universe to come out wiser. It was he who had devised the trials that had opened the Cult's minds to secrets none could comprehend. Dalvanak was not originally from this universe. He had been implanted in a servitor's belly two universe's prior. He had fought survival in briny spawning pools, then emerged as a small creature that immediately had to defend itself from those who had crawled from the pool before him.

He had clawed, plotted, planned, betrayed, and fought for his very survival through the heat death of one universe and the entropic death of another. His chosen specialty had been time itself. Something the others had derided him for. The manipulation and research of time was an endeavor for the intellectually stunted or immature. He had ignored the mocking of others. Then, his people had discovered this universe. The first expedition, Dalvanak was too lowly and without patronage to join.

It had ended with the occupants of the universe, known to his people as the Herd Lords, scorching an entire hyperatomic plane. The few survivors regrouped in the universe Dalvanak's people had harvested to almost nothing. The next expedition had expected to proceed just like the first. Dalvanak had estimated that over a hundred million years had gone by. Any species that still existed from the time of the first expedition would have forgotten about Dalvanak's people. About the Atrekna.

The invasion was carefully planned. A known system of resources that interdimensional lensing had shown to be still intact. And better yet, still full of slavespawn. The Atrekna had prepared for thousands of years before launching the attack from their dead universe. In the beginning, Dalvanak had been just like all the others. Sure that the New Universe would be nothing more than a full banquet for the Atrekna's new ending hunger.

That the life forms in the New Universe would be nothing more than slave, servitors, and food. The Atrekna had sent an expedition to the New Universe with full confidence it would be just like all the other times. Instead, it had ran into what became known as the Mad Lemurs of Terra. Face first. The Mad Lemurs of Terra were resistant to every strategy and method of attack the Atrekna had ever devised. Some strategems only served to strengthen them. Then, the Atrekna made a move out of cold logic.

Dalvanak called it "The Fatal Miscalculation" in his methodology of discovering how the past had led smoothly to the future. He called it historeogology. He invented it. The Atrekna had deduced, with logic, that the Mad Lemurs of Terra were some kind of warrior servitor to the Hive Lords. They had looked into the past and seen where the Hive Lords history had intersected with the Mad Lemurs of Terra. And found it.

An obvious complete subjegation of the Mad Lemurs of Terra that taken place when the Hive Lords had glassed the Mad Lemurs planet of origin. The genetic modification had occurred soon afterwards, within a few centuries. The Atrekna had taken the vast pool of power they had gathered. Phasic power, temporal power, and other esoteric methods and powers, reached back into the past...... and undid the genetic engineering that the Mad Lemurs had undergone.

Utilizing the esoteric discipline that Dalvanak had trained himself in, known as Pattern Recognition (He had invented it), it was obvious to the Dalvanak that the initial assumptions were in error. True, the majority of the Mad Lemurs of Terra fell down dead. Including the one that had been busy ripping big chunks out of Dalvanak's flesh. But the remainder fought even more ferociously. Their allies picked up the banners of the Mad Lemurs of Terra and used them to beat the Atrekna to death.

Even dead, the Mad Lemurs of Terra fought. Phasic shades and reanimated corpses harried the Atrekna at every turn, flooding across Atrekna strongholds as the phasic shades moved through the very phasic network that the Atrekna used to communicate through space and time. When the dust had settled, only the Cult of the Defiled One and the Children of the Matron of the Damned remained. Thousands of years went by, and Dalvanak led the adherents of his tenants as they delved into the mysteries of the New Universe.

The New Universe gave up its secrets grudgingly, oftentimes with deadly results. Even discovering an answer often just led to more mysteries. The investigation of temporal mechanics was more indepth than it had been in the Old Universes. More complicated, more esoteric, and never with any concrete answers. Just the act of observing some things led those things to chasing the observer while shouting "COME BACK! I JUST WANT TO HURT YOU!"

The Cult of the Defiled One learned to be careful looking into the past or future. The simple act could alter outcomes. And it was always for the worse for whomever did the alterations. Sometimes it was as simple as that being exploding into mist. Other times strange accidents, such as tripping, falling, and jamming a crystal through an eye and into the brain. Still other times, the being simply ceased to exist. Dalvanak could faintly hear the amusement of the Malevolent Universe in each case.

The iron clad rule of the Cult of the Defiled One was to never attempt to alter time. Never attempt to bring forward things from the past. Never attempt to send things to the future. Those that did, died horribly. The Cult of the Defiled One was careful not to reveal themselves to outsiders. After all, they and they alone knew a secret.

Dalvanak himself had divined it, using the secrets of Pattern Recognition and Predictive Analysis (which he invented), to look into the future, not with temporal mechanics, but with sheer logic and chains of cause and effect. An esoteric discipline, of which Dalavank was the undisputed master of. The Mad Lemurs of Terra were not truly gone. Some were in hiding, biding their time in the darkness of space, hidden from sight.

Some where asleep, a deep dreamless sleep that hid then even from meditations of those who communed with the Malevolent Universe. The rest were dead, yet marching forward into tomorrow with the trod of dead boots onto today. As implacable and unstoppable as the tides of time. That knowledge is what had led Dalvanak deep into his redoubt to consult both the Cavern of the Starry Night and the Oracles of the Enraged Lemurs of the Grave.

He was surrounded by several of his oldest, most powerful, and wisest of his disciples. On his left was Sees Through Liquid, who was wearing a tux and tail ensemble encrusted with phasically active gems that he had applied himself through the mysterious and wondrous device known as a "Bedazzler". He was carrying a can of Liquid Hate, old gym sock and raspberry flavor that he had already guzzled down two of.

On the other side was the Mistress of Blades, wrapped in endosteel and battlesteel strips, bladed wings folded up behind her, with phasic crystals orbiting her head. She wore a Substance-W mask engraved to look like a lemur skull. Behind him was The Ancient One, a washed out gray Atrekna whose eyes, like Dalvanaks, burned with fire. The Ancient One was clad in an elegant and sophisticated dress with ornate stitching, with a veil to hide his fire filled gaze. Slouching along behind them was The Hunter.

An anomaly among Atrekna. He was naked except for crossed bandoleers that held hand forged knives, spear-heads, and the skulls of defeated enemies. He held a spear made from wood with a Mad Lemur bayonet on one end.

"Free candy," the Hunter whispered.

"Indeed, old friend," Dalvanak said, his voice carrying through the Cavern of Starry night.

"You are sure you saw it," the Ancient One asked, his voice raspy from his eternal torture from being cast into the Burning Metaplane.

"I am sure," Dalvanak said.

"Without a doubt." He moved to a single gem, set apart from the others. It was the one closest to the wide expanse of glittering gems, the first in a string of three that led to a thin wedge of gems. The three stars that formed a bridge between the Cygnus-Orion Galactic Arm Spur and the Scutum-Centaurus Arm. Dalvanak reached down and touched the pistol that rode on the sash of his fabulous attire. DIE SPITTING BLOOD!

the enraged roar was loud enough that even the others could hear it vibrate over the phasic frequencies as Dalvanak touched the heavy pistol that he had taken from the still warm dead hand of a Mad Lemur of Terra. Having centered himself by touching the rage contained in the pistol, he reached into his satchel and withdrew a polished skull that had been decorated appropriately. Gems around the eyes, replacing the teeth, larger crystals formed of blood and phasic energy to replace the missing eyes.

Paint had been carefully applied, flush with the blood of Atrekna who had donated the blood after riding the horrible torturous contraption. It had colorful feathers off the sides that had been carefully placed in precisely drilled holes. The phasic crystals immediately brightened with phasic energy. Not purple or lavender. Bright, angry crimson. The color of lemur blood.

"Prepare yourself," Dalavank warned. The others tensed, fortifying their formidable psychic defenses. He held the skull up until it almost touched that single gem hanging in the darkness. The effect was immediate. It roared out through the Cavern of the Starry Night, echoed through the passages, until it broke free on the surface to echo across the planet. HEAVY METAL IS HERE! Dalvanak turned to others. Like them, he was bleeding slightly from his eyes and could taste iron and copper.

"It is almost tomorrow."