“Don’t trust your eyes…” I whispered. A little girl holding a small bear by the hand. Her soft, young innocent eyes gazed at us, eleven in the gear of the Judicators, one in ancient style of power armor.
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The heat sensors in my helmet pinged again, I was still detecting no heat from her, yet the light playing across her returned optical data to my brain that she did indeed exist, even though all other sensors said we were staring at empty air. That was pretty much impossible, well, at least improbable.
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“What am I looking at?” The Judicators leader, a general of some kind she’d introduced herself to be earlier asked me through the grill of her helmet.
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“Unknown, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say it’s a projection of some kind, put in our path to test us, see what we do.”
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“If we fail this test?” She asked.
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“We undoubtedly die.” I responded matter of factly. “In a way, she’s the only thing between us and all the monsters out there.”
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“So what do we do?” Asked the Judicators Sargeant, a man whose name I had not caught yet.
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“I’ll take point on this.” I said. “Rule number one, trust your gut, and I got a gut feeling about this.”
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“Just don’t let your gut get us killed.” The general replied.
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“Yeah, I’ll try not to.” I said as I broke ranks and moved ahead of the group to stand just in front of the little girl.
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“Hello.” I said.
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“Hi.” She said, looking right up at me with the most innocent clear blue eyes I’d ever seen.
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“Hey, um.” I stalled for a moment before my mind came up with something to say. “We’re looking for something in here, can you help us find it?”
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“Yes.” She said, nodding. “I can do that.”
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There was an awkward pause as we all stood around before something occurred to me. “Will you help us find something here?” I asked.
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“Yes.” She nodded, her smile widening. “What are you looking for?”
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“A book.” I said. “A very specific book, the Akayo, do you know where it is?”
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“Not offhand.” She said, “But it’s probably in the library, most of the books are there.”
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“Will you take us there?” I asked.
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“Yes!” She replied cheerfully. “Follow me!”
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With that she turned on the ball of her foot and began to prance into the darkness, I made a point of keeping up with her and cursing as they did so the Judicators broke their formation to keep up with us. When the general did so she cursed at me, something about a throne of bone, whatever that meant. “What are you doing?” She finally asked. “You can’t trust that thing!”
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“That thing…” I said continuing to search for heat traces around us and finding echoes of some on occasion, indicating that something had passed this way recently. “I think is keeping us safe, I think it’s this place's interface mode, an artificial intelligence if you will, that recognized we weren’t monsters and as such hasn’t activated this place's defenses against us, and hopefully, should the need arise, will activate them in our defense.”
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The general’s helmet turned away for a moment and I could just imagine it screwing up sourly. “When we first met, the things you said… you said you had no idea what world, empire or galaxy you’d landed in, what exactly did you mean by that?”
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“Exactly that general.” I replied. “I don’t even know if I’m in my own galaxy for sure at the moment, things get pretty screwy in the Reality Zone, I got dumped onto your world because it was a stepping stone to the next one and I am ever thankful for your assistance but I did warn you back there accompanying me through the door we walked through might mean you could potentially never see your world again as we took another step, went through another gateway. Once more, I don’t really know where we are, but if I had to guess, I’d say we are at the footsteps to the ruins of the Brechtal Fortress, home of the once Great Library of the Archangilius Empire and one of the last remnants of their existence and goodness knows, one of the few places in all time and space the Akayo might still exist.”
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We were silent except for the trodding of boots, power armored and otherwise over ancient and pitted deck plating of what I was indeed sure was a fortress of some kind. We were breaking through the normal architecture of fluidly smooth spires reaching up to support balconied second, third and fourth levels looking down on us to a wider area where I glimpsed what actually might be a sky through ruined buildings, crashed ships and the skeletal remains of millions, most of which still in remnants of the ancestral armor of their home, each hanging by the neck as they’d been captured and executed for no other crime than simply daring to defend their home. I’d known some of them personally, but I chose to put that from my mind as we were now hurrying up the pitted and damaged steps of what I dared to hope was the Great Library.
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The little girl kept up an unrelenting pace that was starting to take its toll on a few of the Judicators, my suit, despite its age, was designed to do this work for me and did an amazing job of it, I barely felt the distance we’d traveled on my body, but I knew if the Judicators were to remain in any kind of fighting form they needed to not be exhausted, so I simply made an inquiry to the projection of the small child.
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“Ahem.” I cleared my throat. “Can we reduce pace? I feel this one is a bit straining.” I neglected to mention who I felt it was straining for, I didn’t want to risk offending any of the Judicators who were indeed having a hard time of it. The little girl giggled a bit but did indeed slow down
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“Sorry.” She said over her shoulder. “It’s been such an age since anyone sentient has been here, I’m just so eager to help you.”
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“We are very thankful.” I said with all earnestness.
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A moment later as we approached the top of the steps I heard the general clear her own throat. “Hmm, um, excuse me.” She said with all possible awkwardness. “But where in the name of the Bone Throne are we? How can we have simply stepped through a doorway and ended up on an entirely different world?” She asked, I could hear the strain in her whispered voice, low enough, hopefully, that her men could not hear her.
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“The gateway system that I used to travel to your world general is a complex one, especially since the network, at least in my galaxy, is damaged and unstable.” I said. “I stepped blindly through a gateway and ended up on your world, now you’re on one of mine. I truly hope I can get you back to yours but as I said before, I make no guarantees that we’ll even live through this, let alone get you home. Now steel yourself, for you are about to step into a place of knowledge and you know what they say about knowledge.”
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“Knowledge is power, guard it closely.” She replied.
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I frowned. “In your world, the ending to that phrase may be correct, but here, that’ll kill you.” I said as we entered a vast chamber that was hundreds of feet tall with vaulted ceilings and ancient statues of warrior and scholar alike, many depicting individuals who had been both. “In this universe the phrase ends with “Use it wisely.” If you are unwilling to use and use wisely the power that is given you then you are as surely damned as those who seek your destruction for no other point than to slake their bloodlust.”
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She was quiet for some time after that, I genuinely wondered what she was thinking about but I resisted the urge to read her unfiltered surface thoughts.
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As we proceeded to follow the little girl into a rubble-strewn main hallway of the building I realized I didn’t really remember the general’s name, I could dredge it up from my memory but decided it might ease things just to ask her for it again.
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“By the way, what was your name again, General?” I asked.
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She glanced over at me, the black visor of her helmet revealing nothing of the expression beneath. “Just call me Arthris.” She replied. “Not my true name but I prefer to keep that to myself for now if you don’t mind.”
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“Don’t mind at all.” I replied.
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I let the silence stretch out, feeling her own curiosity growing before she spoke up. “What do I call you?” She asked.
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“Just call me Enkir.” I replied. “Short for my full first name.” One of the Judicators stumbled over a pile of rubble, his shield coming down hard into the broken stone as he used it to catch himself, I flinched as the sound echoed through the darkness and for a split second I felt somethings attention turn towards us from deep within the dark before the feeling faded, but in my gut I knew that while this place was most certainly a tomb, it wasn’t an empty one.
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“I suppose I shouldn’t bother to ask what Enkir is short for.” She said after her squad had regained cohesion and momentum.
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“About as much as I should ask what your real name is.” I said by reply.
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At this point we broke into a wider, much more spacious room and for a moment it took my breath away. Books of every variety, of every kind, lined every wall, scaling up in every direction.
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“By Terra…” Arthris breathed into the darkness. “What is this place?”
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“I told you.” I whispered, the sound emitters on the outside of my helmet relaying my voice almost perfectly in that near silent tone. “This is the Great Library, a lost place, it cannot be found directly, you can’t just pick the place in the stars that it is and expect to get there, you have to travel by different roads, skipping to one place, than another, until finally you happen upon it in your travels, and this room, vast as it is, is but the tiniest speck in the sheer size of this place.”
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“Speck?” She whispered incredulously. “You could fit a Engirion War Engine with room to spare in here!”
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I looked about the room, at its sheer size. “I take it those things are big.” I said.
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She looked over at me sharply before slowly nodding her head. “I keep forgetting you aren’t one of us. Yes, they’re big, standing at full height one would almost reach that ceiling above us.”
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I looked up again at the distant ceiling of the vast room. “Yeah, that’s pretty big. What on Earth did you use them for?”
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“Well.” She said as we skirted a ship of some kind that had crashed through some distant window and carved a long furrowed path through the ground to reach its final resting place here. Its inverted wings pointing forward reminded me of a bird of prey about to strike upon its soon to be kill. “Engiron War Engines were more symbol and statement than actual instruments of war. Such things are utterly impractical in a realistic war yet we both made and maintained them as a statement of our martial might, to remind our enemies of our dominance by the presence of a mere one of the Engines alone.”
I nodded. “Reminds me of some of the war machines we had at the end here, but most of them weren’t built up to spec, they were ramshackle, with slapped on armor and just about any weapon we could think of strapped onto them. About the only thing on them properly built was the targeting computers and we didn’t even bother with engines, they just became emplacements, to fire on foes from afar. If we’d had a Legion of your Engines, maybe we could have held the line for a few years longer, gave the enemy pause to evacuate more of our people before the end.”
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“Before?” She turned to look at me again, I could almost picture a raised eyebrow from her questioning tone. “Engines are mastercrafted pieces of machinery, each centimeter of them devotedly constructed to reap destruction upon their foes, they have layered shields able to soak up damage from even ships in orbit, depending on the class of ship anyways. One blast from one of their main cannons can wipe out an entire army. To have even one is to change the face of any war.”
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“I don’t doubt it.” I said. “But how many armies can they wipe out? When this place was on the verge of falling our foe was numberless, even as the last of my kyn fought within these very halls, holding the line as long as they could to save as many of our children as we could, the skies themselves were still choked with our foes. In the end the Banishment Protocol left our world drifting in unknown places, only to be found by the lost, the wanderers or by seekers such as ourselves. All who were still upon this world when the banishment took place either died here, or left to wander many of the same paths I have wandered to get here.”
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A long pause drew out as we approached the far end of the room. “How did you survive?” She whispered.
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“I commanded the seventh Dread Legion.” I replied. “We weren’t here, we were defending one of the last outlying bastion fortresses, it overlooked a valley holding billions of our people, our guns held the enemy at bay for eight months when the world siege first began, but the line was breached at the third bastion when a flaming enemy ship fell intact from orbit and decimated that once great place, from there our enemy made landfall with their innumerable ships, what was left of the city the third bastion had protected fell overnight and the plague spread from there. Eventually we were absolutely surrounded and save for one intact gateway within the city that couldn’t evacuate more than ten thousand people a day we were utterly cut off. Our ships flew harrowing sortie after harrowing sortie, our guns fired until the magazines were dry and the energy stores spent or until our barrels melted from the heat of it. In the end the battle took to the very streets of the city, within the very halls of the bastion. It was at that time I’d resigned myself to death, mind you, before then I’d been very sure I was going to die, but at that time there was this feeling, an acceptance of a death you have staved off for so long it’s unbelievable you’re still alive, let alone fighting. That was when the Arendelft arrived.”
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I let the silence stretch out once more as tears gathered at the edges of my eyes and I blinked them away despite the fact no one could see my face.
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“The Arendelft?” Arthris asked, obviously intrigued by the unusual name.
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“Yes.” I replied. “One of the Arkanarius ships, built to literally evacuate entire planets.”
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“What?” She scoffed. “The sheer size a ship would need to be able to evacuate an entire planet is…”
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“Astronomical.” I replied. “Well, maybe not astronomical but still, one million, twenty three thousand, four hundred, fifty three meters from end to end is still very large.”
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“WHAT?!” She staggered over a piece of rubble and almost fell but I reached out and caught her flailing left arm and corrected her balance with barely a thought. “Thank you.” She said as she gathered herself. We were now passing through yet another hallway, this one was filled with a great deal of bodies, friend and foe alike from those distant days. She broke the silence again. “I’m sorry, but you must be exaggerating, a ship that size would, well, it wouldn’t be feasible, the resources needed to just build the thing! Let alone crew it! The technology required for it to not simply tear itself apart with the slightest maneuver...” She whispered that last sentence in a strangely somber tone. I decided to puzzle over that later.
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“The Arkanarius class was a dream right up until the last great war, then it was a dream realized as we knew that for there to be any survivors of that war we would need to make our dreams a reality, every last one, or all would be for nought. A galaxy spanning civilization that was crumbling at the foundations pitted every last resource it had to build four of these great ships as a last hope, a final dreaded hope.”
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“Dreaded?” She asked.
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“Hope…” I whispered the word. “You can hunt it, smother it, crush it, spend all the fire in the galaxy to seek its destruction, yet hope adapts, it lives and thrives in places where it has no right to. The Arendelft, the first of the Arkanarius class to ever live, it was hope incarnate, and what a terrifying hope it was. The first battle it ever participated in had been a one sided fight against us, we were losing it hands down. Then it arrived and in the blink of an eye hundreds of enemy ships were debris in space as it just appeared at the center of the enemy fleet, Dawn Drive, precision in travel technology that can be very bad if you get your coordinates wrong but the Arendelft’s navigational computer systems were above and beyond state of the art, they were more advanced than anything dreamt of before that time, like pretty much everything else on board to be honest. There was hardly a single piece of technology on board that ship that wasn’t a mastercrafted feat of engineering that, to this very day, has yet to be surpassed. It took all of seven minutes after the Arendelft appeared in that battle to end it and not one enemy ship escaped, all of them were destroyed, no survivors to speak of the Arendelft and what it was capable of.”
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“I’m betting that left the enemy more than a little unnerved when one of their fleets just up and vanished.” Arthris said.
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“Not really.” I replied shrugging. “In those early years, they had us constantly on the run, they had so many fleets, so many ships, they were winning through sheer numbers, there was no real tactics behind any of it, when the Arendelft first started to cut through them like a knife it took a long time before it had made enough of a dent for them to take notice, but when they did, they really, really took notice. They began to be more careful, started to actually employ tactics, advance more cautiously, though they were, to us, innumerable, the Arendelft put a number on their lives, to it, they had a number, and it was ticking quite a bit off that clock with every engagement. When it arrived in that most dire of moments as we, the seventh Dread Legion held our scattered last stand, it drove a sword right through the heart of the enemy fleet in orbit, its Dawn Drives left tens of thousands of tightly packed ships in the high orbital lanes burning as atomized debris and it’s guns gave no mercy to countless more. It had many, many other technologies which would take days to describe that gave it edge after edge but the most potent to mention here were the Celestial Light Particle Pylons, these things required an atmosphere to distribute their lethal barrage but once they had one to work with, well, it left our foes wanting. The very atmosphere of our world, for a time, became toxic to their existence, the sickness that drove them, fueled them, corrupted them, it was now used against them as the Arendelft saturated our entire world's atmosphere with the Celestial Light Particle and before you ask, it would take the better part of… well, a very long time to describe how that particular technology works, suffice it to say to those who allow themselves to become slaves to darkness, it is absolutely lethal. Our foes died within minutes of the Arendelft’s arrival, died in the streets, the halls, everywhere, and they did so messily, not a good way to die.”
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“After this was done the Arendelft used its formidable weapons to help keep our skies clear for precious days as it orbited our world, keeping our atmosphere saturated and giving the enemy great reason to fear. You see, with a ship like the Arendelft, you practically can keep the enemy held at bay, no matter their number…”
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“But…” Arthris said, sensing what was coming.
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“But…” I said, nodding. “It’s only one ship, one ship in a very, very large galaxy, it’s arrival allowed us to become organized once more, but it couldn’t evacuate even one soul from our world, for you see, saving us wasn’t even it’s purpose in arriving, it had thought our world was still a safe staging point to evacuate refugees from other worlds and had arrived with the purpose in mind to do so, it’s holds were to the bursting point with literally billions of people, it’s supplies running low to feed so many. A large reason it stayed as long as it did was to take on supplies from us if you can believe it, to feed the many it held. Luckily this was feasible as we had whole cities emptying of people, vast amounts of food storage for said people were going to do little else besides rot in their absence so the Arendelft took them, still, this did little but to stave off starvation for the people in its holds for once it had taken all we could spare it’s Commander had little choice but to then leave and we bid them farewell with fire in our hearts, for they feigned weakness in the final moments before their departure and a large enemy fleet tried to pounce upon them as they lit their Dawn Drives up once more and burned away yet thousands upon thousands more vessels. That bought us precious more moments that we used to prepare, but it took only an hour after the Arendelft’s departure for our skies to become clogged with so many enemy ships that we could not even see the light from our own sun once more.”
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“How long did you last after that?” She asked.
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“Three months.” I said, shaking my head. “The longest and shortest battles of the entire battle for this world took place then, for what we didn’t know was that the enemy had been saving their best for when the Arendelft left, creatures born in the darkness of the void descended on us then, whole cities went dark overnight with nought but screams and desperate final pleas for help and mercy to be heard over the comms. It was then that oftentime, as a final resort, commanders of the bastions would self-destruct the energy cores at the first sign of those nightmarish creatures. This gave the enemy pause, it slowed them down, forced them to be more cautious. They stopped attacking the outlying bastions with those elite troops and focused all of their intent upon the internal cities, this place being in one of those cities, for they knew that, with these places holding our greatest gateways allowing us to evacuate the most people we would never risk a self destruction here, for if one city were to die in that kind of flame, the others would be in danger." I paused momentarily, gathering myself before going on.104Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiKVWssFQlg
"So, as they assaulted the inner cities with their most elite troops they sent innumerable army after innumerable army upon the outer bastions and once more we fought tooth and nail to survive. I myself, after leading an insanely stupid but ambitious counter offensive against the enemy that destroyed one of their main landing platforms, was wounded, grievously so, I had honestly thought my time was up, but after passing out from the pain and blood loss I was denied death, instead I awoke off world. My kyn, my family, my Seventh Legion of Dread ordered me to be taken through the gateways with the civilians to a place where my wounds could be bound and healed properly, to become the last and only survivor, I, their commander, forced to live on with not a single one of those I had commanded alive to stand at my side.”
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