nihil
The world twisted and bent beneath the heel, like everything always had. From one glassed orb to another, the Shai Domain moved with reckless disregard upon the spoils that were left in reach. Wayward celestial bodies, stranded and derelict vessels in the black, and planets with inferior or absent defenses. Dominoes, toppled one after another, when forced to flee the once developing ancestral home of the Legion Yun’Do. Selvaris, a forgotten bauble in the crown of the now dead One Sith, stowed away and mutated to fit whatever purpose was required. And in the crumbling of his grasp, the World Devastators turned inward to the Core - leaving nothing but obsidian and earthly glass to mark the remains of a once prospering foothold.
On another world, a new world with no acclaim, the largest Grashal vibrated and churned. The nautilus shell of its exterior quivered and belched, releasing yellow fumes into the burning orange sky. It had been a cerulean beauty in days passed, like an ocean of blue and white spread across the sky of a healthy world. A healthy place, reeking of weakness bred from the protection of the void, where conflict could not reach it. Until they came, planting Gramutek seeds in the depths of the woods, in the recesses of their great and open sand plains, and in the deepest hearts of bogs long abandoned. Incubation took what time was needed, what resources were required, to begin the long change. With pain and forced panacea, apotheosis would soon follow. Such elevation rose from the otherworldly and atmospheric spewing, converting resources towards the reshaping in fits of red light and rusted lightning, erupting from the bulging peaks of the World Devastators. With each seismic slap from the base of the Gramutek, creatures spilled out. Villages were born through the forming, with lambent fields and nutrient bogs taking over for primary land use.
But the effort was far from complete as Vongforming always began with the slowest of pace. It was perfection, baked into the process, to infect the world with such emotionless precision, that those who once inhabited the world would not know the change before it took them. Slowly and with certainty, cities of duracrete and durasteel would be overwhelmed by an ocean of flesh and biots, sweeping across the metropolitan blemishes with exacting purpose. It was unending and relentless and would never stop. Not until the remnants of the past were excised, until the world had become stronger in the removal of everything that once represented a place lessened by its own prosperity.
“Shall we try again.” Words slipped from the shaper's lips like the song of a snake; drawn out from a visage that was twisted and carved to fit the form she wished to see in the Grashals reflective interior. She wore nothing but the scars and piercing trinkets of her profession and passion, resting against a bed frame that had been fashioned from a variety of converted creatures of this world, digested and formed in the stomach of the Grashal. With crimson eyes that spoke of hunger and desire, a blade of cartilage ejected from her wrist, coated in a dripping ooze. “To remove it?” Her serpentine tongue showed for the passing moment, quickly concealed behind a row of sharpened teeth, as her eyes drifted down to the tattooed flesh of the ternion below the figure’s bellybutton.
A warlord for a time, a supreme commander dedicated to the expansion of their place in the universe, he had been reduced and concentrated into something more. A patchwork man, the Legion’s Paica Ajil’khün, ripped and torn and stitched back together. He had been a man once, slowly rising through the ranks of the universe, until there was nowhere left to go but down. And it was in Hell where he found everlasting comfort.
“No.” He replied curtly, fixing his Mqaaq’it on her form and the scars that defined her. She was, from his singular perspective, walking perfection. And as her eyes dulled from deep red to sulfur, he knew his answer had upset her. “It is muted here, silenced by distance and cold. But the tie to them…” To
Aver Brand
and the other. He felt a pang of emotion, a foreign and disruptive thing, and quickly pushed it aside. “Is not so easily severed. No matter how much we try.” Approaching the Master Shaper, the blackened arm of the Voxyn al’Do lifted to drag poisoned finger nails against the flesh of her cheek, carved and accentuated in rows of bone grafts and piercings. “You can still hurt me, we do not need any other purpose.” Her eyes shifted back to deep red.
Passage of time led to a meeting, orchestrated by the war council in the legion Ganadote. The massive biot shifted and hummed as the members of the war caste moved about with purpose. The beast had repurposed itself, forming endless rows of stomach chambers and organic valve doors. The primary chamber was reformed intestines, shaped into padded flesh tables and seats, with a roaming tongue that served as podium.
“The Dhuryam has communicated some unexpected traffic.” A commander spoke in the tongue of the Hrosha-Gul. “We are subjugating the planet, after all.” Another commander answered. “Do we expect the cities to have called for aid?” The original commander responded. “No.” Reverence replied quietly from his seat, looking around the room. He held no current physical seat of power and despite the shift in the leadership, those around the room still respected him for his battle knowledge and foresight. When he had turned Selvaris against them, many had initially resented him for his treachery. But time and struggle had re-forged their perspective - it was for their betterment.
“How do you know that?” The Supreme Commander spoke, pressing his foot into the soft stomach floor as the tongue podium retracted back into the surface.
“Because I’ve seen to it. My warship has not been idle and neither have the skippers.” He looked to one attendant sitting nearby, hooked into a cognition hood. “Prime the Gramutek defenses. I’ll meet whatever has come to interrupt our progress.” The man stood and without waiting to be dismissed, moved to leave the Ganadote.
Tag: Warmaster Nyâsh
