On the day they came, the sky lit with a beautiful fire.It folded through the sky like the aurora of the polar tundras, and reached to the furthest corners of our world. We did not know it when we turned our eyes to the heavens, but it would be the last beauty, the last moment of joy that most of us would ever know. They did not have ships, but instead fell upon our fields and cities in great coffins of black chitin, like the skin of some terrible insect. We could see them falling like a swarm, tearing down the sky as they came in clouds of rain which burned like acid; they were death even before they touched the land. Where they fell, they did not slow, did not pause, but instead their vessels smashed like meteors, ravaging anything they touched. At first, we thought that our defenses had been overcome by some terrible storm of space debris; a year before, many of our satellites had reported breaking up a rogue glacier moon at the edge of the system, and its shards had been rendered too small to be a threat, but we had no idea that the black shards of ice hosted a deadlier threat than we could have imagined. So it was that when they first began to bombard us, we thought them to be little more than a horrific natural disaster. Then, from their smoking pits of devastation, the shells began to crack open, and they hatched forth in a storm. In some places, those with more curiosity or authority has already begun to creep up onto the wreckage of their cratered homes and devastated lands, and these were the first to die. What they saw, what WE saw, would burn in our nightmares for time unending. Seams of light, glittering in rainbow hues, cleft the bodies of the fallen tombs, and their shells spread wide like beetles wings, and from within our invaders first set foot on our world. Though we had never seen their like, our nightmares had warned us of their coming: The Locusts of Darkseed. The demon in the pit I first laid sight upon was a strange thing to behold. It walked on two legs, upright, and bore only two arms, but its skin was like the shell of its cradle: black, insectoid, glimmering with hues and colours hidden beneath a veil of polished lacquer that served only to make the bristling spines and soulless visage all the more menacing. It ducked its head under the arch of the crypt and, seeing us at the edge of the wreckage, it gestured with an arm ridged with exoskeletal definition. Behind it, a cloak of blue light flickered into life, hundreds of points at a time until they numbered in the tens of thousands. In the next moment, those tens of thousands of lights belched out of the crater in a swarm of stinging death. The field workers fell to these more readily than the guardians, like myself, their uncovered flesh and soft skin an easy target for the scarabs. Seeing them overrun by the blur of queer, twisted creatures was a painful thing to watch; these were our wards, our servants, and they depended on our protection. Wherever the creatures stung quickly swelled into glowing blisters, pustules of poison which, shockingly, erupted into gouts of flame when they burst to devastating and gruesome effect. So distracted was I by the sight of such disturbing brutality that I had failed to attend the monster that had unleashed it. When next I saw it, it was in the midst of tearing one of my shardkin into pieces. I watched, stunned, as the monster pounded my brother to death with blows well beyond what I could imagine to be natural. I watched as compressed gasses vented through the gill slits on its exoskeleton, and realized that somehow these creatures had evolved some sort of natural pneumatic enhancements to their musculature. I wondered if, like their natural insect counterparts, they were in fact nothing but compressed fluids, ready to be crushed under heel. I lunged at it with a brutal, monstrous rage as I watched it utterly destroy my shardkin with its bare fists. As his body collapsed into the pit, I caught his murderer with a jackhammer blow that sent it careening through the air like the crypt it had arrived on. It struck the top of its dropship with such force that it knocked the ship out of the molten stone cooling beneath it. The whole thing collapsed on top of the demon, pinning it under tons of space-honed technology. With a bellow of rage, I leaped into the pit on top of it, further embedding the twisted device into the soil. Even the feel of it was disturbing to touch, but that was distant from my mind when I reached down to try and haul it off of my trapped prey. I did not expect the whole thing to rise up and hit me in the face. As I pried one edge of the ship out of the cratered earth, the thing underneath it launched it upward with overwhelming force and a pungent jet of compressed gas from its haunches. I stumbled as I felt the outer shell of my armor shatter, cracks permeating deeper into my core. When I regained myself, it was just in time to catch the creature like a cannon to the chest. I bowled over as though I were a mere toy, and only in that moment did I truly conceive that this deadly menace was a bare fraction of my size. Its fist blasted into my face with a power I had never felt, and my vision kaleidoscoped when my faceplate shattered. The creature rode my body into the ground like a crumbling mountainside, and I felt a queer, dizzying disconnect as my head bounced with crushing force off of the hull of its ship. There was a crushing, cracking sensation, and my body lurched once, then lay still, beyond my power to control; I was crippled, conquered. I could do nothing but feel my own helpless agony, and watch as my murderer finished me off. Perhaps it was the blow to the head, but the attack that would have inevitably finished me off didnt seem to register to me. As I watched, chitinous fingers with taloned points tore into my chestplate with vicious and ruthless efficiency. The creature obviously had some familiarity with our species, because it tore through the protective plating in my chest and pulled my corestone out whole. Synapse veins snapped with metallic twangs, and I winced, mentally, an instinctive sympathetic reflex to having my heart ripped out. Even though I could no longer feel it, I knew it meant the end of me; without the ambient power of the corestone, the complexity of my synapse grid required too much power to function: soon enough, I would die. While I watched, the creature held my corestone up to its face. Compound eyes glinted evilly, and a laser projection glittered off of the surface of the crystal in its hands, scanning it for something. I looked on in disgusted fascination as the creatures maw gaped open wide. Rather than consume my corestone, however, something even stranger happened. At the edges of the pit, scarabs swarmed over the corpses of the fallen, leaving the two of us isolated at the crash site which apparently gave my murderer the confidence to unmask. Beneath its bug eyed mask, pale and sickly flesh was marred by coarse, dark bristle, jeweled eyes replaced by flat, dewey pits. The entire effect was utterly disgusting. Activating something on its arm, it barked gutterally into a glowing console, which responded in kind. Reaching into the wreckage of its landing pod, it pulled a container of some sort from a side panel and dropped my corestone into it. Planting it on the ground, the device glowed for a moment before exploding into a brilliant beam of blue light, launching its payload into the sky. All around us, I could see similar pillars launching up into the storm that raged across the heavens, and somehow I was revolted to be find myself struck by the beauty of it all. It was only when the monster pulled the hood of its skin back over its face and began to crawl out of the pit that I realized something was truly wrong. Although I couldnt move, although my corestone was now being blasted to some unknown fate, I couldnt feel myself losing consciousness. In fact, I couldnt feel any loss of essence at all; something in the way I was killed had gone wrong, and my synaptic network was stabilizing. I realized that, unless something drastic interfered, I was doomed to survive this attack, trapped alone with my own mind, cradled in the tomb of my assailant. I would be the silent witness to the end of my world, and the our failure to protect it. Perhaps, in time, it would be my dreams, my nightmares, which would tell the eulogy of the death of my world. Perhaps, if the sky ever stopped burning, the sun would rise on my grave, and I could, in time, grow a new corestone and rebuild my body. But as I felt the crater begin to fill with water, and the itching burn of acid rain to eat away at the stone of my remaining flesh, I knew it more likely that my horror would only echo through the under-dream of death, to give the next world in their path the nightmares of their undoing, nameless, empty warnings of the worldreavers which, like our own world, would go unheeded until the host fell onto another darkened world. The Locusts would strip our world of its flesh, its bones and its spirit, and only the darkness of its absence would serve as a warning to the empire that the end was coming. And the worst part of it all, I thought, as the water rose to consume my vision of the heavens set aflame, would be the overwhelming beauty of the end.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:01:12 +0000
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