by Norman Oro
It was then when a friend from the distant past unexpectedly appeared to help the Allies unravel the mystery of what had happened in the Steppe. Just decades earlier, Cley children had been born who could see beyond the Alliance’s most powerful sensors, and almost instantly solve problems that confounded its greatest minds and most advanced computational systems. As they grew into adulthood, their gift of near-omniscience only strengthened. Soon the Cley realized that they were the answer to the great wish they’d made some fifty thousand years earlier. They became known as the Owghen.
Having grown desperate for answers, the Central Development Ministry asked a small group of Owghen to determine what had happened in the Steppe. They adjourned to a conference room within the Braf for three days, neither eating, drinking, nor sleeping. They emerged noticeably troubled; however, they had the ministry’s answer. Another species, more powerful than even the Allies, had murdered those races. They were called the Grell; and could take over the abilities of any other species then use them for their own purposes. Almost exclusively, that purpose was to extinguish them; and it was only a matter of time until their domain began targeting the Alliance. When asked if they could be defeated before that happened, the response was swift: No.
Coincidentally, at that very moment, in a building on the opposite side of Ohnz’s central square, Allied Intelligence was briefing the Alliance Council president, Aiden Hower, about a race it had been investigating for centuries, the Scourge. Long before the first Owghen was born, the Allies had established a vast network of spies and listening stations stretching well beyond known space to identify and defend itself against possible threats. Millennia earlier, they’d learned of a species rumored to be the embodiment of Death itself. Many regions called them the Wraiths, while others knew them as the Divinities, the Scourge or the Trial. Though the names varied, the rumors all bore a similarity the Allies couldn’t ignore. They spoke of a death with immaculate white hair and eyes darker than any midnight sky. Fearing the Scourge would one day turn those eyes towards the Alliance, an all out effort was launched to locate them; and after almost a millennium of investigation, operatives finally got hold of coordinates for their homeworld.
The Allies then called upon the Fris, a race capable of siphoning memories from any being they came into physical contact with. Belying their well-known reputation for caution, the Cley orchestrated a daring covert operation that enabled a cadre of Fris to make contact with several officials in the Scourge high command, albeit for less than a blink of an eye. Fortunately, that was just enough. Allied Intelligence immediately transferred what its operatives had absorbed into the Hall of Memories in Ohnz; and were soon poring over every second of it, trying to glean some insight into Death’s mysterious emissaries. Unfortunately, their memories proved insidiously difficult to separate from those of the Fris, rendering most of the intelligence unusable. The agents themselves had difficulty understanding what they’d absorbed; however, they found what little they could comprehend disturbing. At their urging, all covert activity around the Scourge homeworld was soon forbidden. It wasn’t until decades later, after the Owghen developed a technique for parsing memory strands, that the Allies fully understood what they’d gathered. Living through snippets of those memories, their intelligence analysts soon learned that all the myths were true. The race they’d spent centuries chasing across the cosmos was indeed Death incarnate. However, the name they had for them was wrong. They called themselves the Grell and the power of their domain was indeed beyond even the Alliance’s capabilities to defeat.
After receiving reports from Allied Intelligence and the Owghen, Aiden Hower knew the Allies would need to prepare their defenses immediately. He also knew the situation warranted something that hadn’t been called upon in tens of millennia. Chilled by the prospect of confronting an invincible race that was as much a predator as they were explorers, the Cley voted a few days later in favor of the proposal they found awaiting them in their global consciousness. The next day, just before sunrise in Ohnz, all of them, almost one trillion strong, joined together to voice the second great Cley wish. They asked for an end to the Grell threat.
War
Soon thereafter, every Owghen was summoned to Ohnz, materializing in its central square from over two hundred Allied worlds. There they saw several detachments of Eternals, an elite fighting unit from the planet Tol. Moments later, they heard something that had grown to be a rarity, the sound of a Cley voice. It was gentle yet stern and came from Aiden Hower. He spoke to them in Ohnzdeytsch, a language that ironically had rarely been heard in Ohnz for thousands of years. Each of them listened intently as he called on them to unite and contribute their unique gift of near-omniscience to aid Halcyon in overcoming her greatest adversary. Although the Alliance constitution gave him the authority to do so, he explained he wouldn’t compel any of them to set aside their personal ambitions to devote the coming years to the defense of their people. Instead he called on each of them to do so voluntarily. The next day, all one thousand seven hundred and sixteen Owghen arrived in a heavily guarded temporary annex to the Braf to begin devising countermeasures to a Grell attack.
Though all the Owghen concurred that the Allies wouldn’t be able to defeat the Grell in the foreseeable future, they also agreed that this didn’t preclude their survival. Within a few months, they’d drawn up a plan that ensured the Alliance would go on in some form. During their subsequent centuries of preparation, the Owghen worked tirelessly with each Allied race to strengthen its ability to thwart being taken over by the Domain. Although the level of resistance each race ultimately developed varied significantly, the Owghen deemed it sufficient to allow the rest of their counterattack to succeed. Soon they shifted their attention to what was arguably the centerpiece of their plan, the construction of a world that would one day be home to the entire Alliance.
Although using Van der Weg field abilities for terra-forming had by then grown commonplace, building an entire planet was widely considered beyond any race’s capabilities. Nevertheless, with the Owghen overseeing the project, scouts were dispatched to the periphery of known space to identify a suitable location. They eventually decided on a region in a nearby galaxy in the opposite direction of Grell expansion where sentient life was relatively uncommon and awakened worlds were non-existent. It was in an unremarkable six planet system, which was also perpetually shielded from the Domain’s line of sight. Within two millennia, the planet was finished. Not coincidentally, it bore a striking resemblance to Halcyon. The Allies named it Onav, after a god from Estreshan mythology who it was said tore down heaven and earth every evening then built them anew while the Cley slept.
Twenty years later, an Alliance citizen from the planet Tess stumbled across a probe on a mining world at the edge of the buffer zone encasing the Steppe. Realizing it wasn’t of any design he’d ever seen, he immediately displaced himself, but not before sensing an immense presence slice into his connection with the Tessite global consciousness. And so, the Grell invasion began. As news spread of millions of Tessites materializing in the void of space and in the heart of their sun, Aiden Hower immediately ordered the Alliance counterattack. Billions were spared as the Grell turned their attention to urgent reports of something that shouldn’t have been possible. Celestia, the star in their largest home system, seemed to be dimming.
The Grell watched mesmerized as the sky on their sacred homeworld, Prime, began turning a deep crimson. Some thought it beautiful. Before they could grasp what was happening, Celestia went nova, engulfing six homeworlds and over thirty billion Grell in fire. A feeling they hadn’t known in millennia then began inundating their global consciousness: Terror. Before it subsided, a dozen more stars flashed out of existence, incinerating thirty-three more homeworlds and claiming another two hundred billion souls. Already reeling under the Alliance’s offensive, quantum charges then began materializing and detonating all around what remained of the Domain, vaporizing many of its cities.
Wh
en the Grell finally located the Ally responsible, the reprisal was equally merciless. It took much longer than usual to slice into their collective consciousness, but within an hour the planet Tol, home to the Alliance’s invincible race of warriors, the Kek, perished as the Grell commandeered their mastery of time then used it to age their world into a lifeless husk. They then began seeking other collectives, hoping to extinguish the Alliance one race at a time. However, there was no other shared consciousness to be found. There was only silence.
Suspecting a ruse, millions of Grell fighting cadre were displaced, armed and prepared for battle, throughout the Allied worlds. Instead of an ambush, however, they materialized only to find the source of that profound silence. It was death. Every battle group reported cities full of men, women and children lying in quiet repose across thousands of worlds. It was as though every one of the trillions of beings within the Alliance had chosen to take their own life rather than be defeated at the hands of the Domain. Among the countless races they’d extinguished through the millennia, the Grell had never seen such a gesture of defiance.
Although the Allies had indeed perished, their immortal essence lived on. Just years earlier, the Owghen had perfected a technique for separating the Van der Weg field from the being who generated it. Unfortunately the process was invariably lethal and irreversible. It was the harshest of decisions: Be murdered by their own abilities or forsake for eternity their physical selves to keep alive some hope of ultimate victory? For many, the choice was obvious. By the time the Domain’s battalions started materializing in Ohnz herself, what came to be known as the Great Migration was finished. The Van der Weg fields of trillions of Alliance citizens had been transferred, residing undetected on Onav. There they waited, searching for some sign that the second Cley wish had been answered. Hundreds of millennia later, two travelers from an unawakened planet called Earth arrived who generated Van der Weg fields with properties the Allies had never seen before. Intrigued by what they might represent, the Cley asked Ide Meadow to call out to them…
3
The Kek
Thirst
Dr. Rys opened his eyes to find himself still floating in the Onavean sea. For a moment, he was himself again, his mind filled with memories from what felt like innumerable millennia spent as a Cley. With an eye-blink, though, he became someone else entirely. He was Thusla Reparaha, a warrior from the Keel Empire on the planet Tol. His battalion had just raided their rival to the north, the Lau Dominion, as part of a dispute over his world’s largest freshwater lake, the Parthean Sea. Thusla’s people, the Kek, had always been high-spirited; however, they were also practical. In his eyes, the conflict over the Parthean was foolish and he hoped that pragmatism would carry the day. He had his doubts, though. Property rights for water had already been settled throughout Tol, yet something seemed to always thwart agreement on the Parthean. At the risk of sounding foolish himself, he would almost say that some hidden force wanted war. Unfortunately there were powerful factions within the Empire and the Dominion who were all too eager to accommodate that. As an Eternal, a Kek who’d stopped aging after his thirtieth year, he was revered for his fighting prowess; and what he said therefore carried a great deal of weight within the Empire. He’d joined his brother and sister Eternals to repeatedly turn back the voices calling for war; however, he secretly feared that they were fighting against fate, against the very essence of the Kek.
Like most conflicts in his world’s turbulent history, when war did come, no one knew who truly started it. However, like a dam that’d burst, not even the Eternals could hold back the passions of their people once they’d been aroused. Priests began singing the ancient battle songs that evening and by early morning, their voices had been joined by the entire Empire, sanctifying the war as good and just. Any life given winning the Parthean would immediately be rewarded by an eternity in paradise. As Thusla joined in singing the old songs, he couldn’t help but think that several thousand miles away, the Lau were reciting their own war chants promising the same rewards for fidelity and courage.
Battles with the Dominion had always been fierce; however, technological advances brought new scope to the act of killing. Brackish colored clouds now floated over many battlefields, leaving mile-long swaths of corpses in their wake. Explosives existed that could kill an entire battalion without leaving enough behind to bury. Each side had cannon that could shell an enemy entrenched several miles away. They were all used mercilessly and to devastating effect during the Parthean conflict. As an Eternal, somehow the bullets, explosives and poisons never hurt Thusla. However, there was talk that a new kind of weapon existed, one which could level an entire city and kill even an Eternal. Rumors like those had circulated for decades; however, the weapon now had a name. It was called the pulse bomb.
When Thusla witnessed the Empire’s first pulse weapon detonate over Fosa, a city containing most of the Dominion’s munitions factories, he finally understood why people spoke of it in tones usually reserved only for myths. Watching its massive umbrella-shaped cloud rise into the sky, he could have sworn it was the Shlees, the machine prophesied to one day end the world. Soon it was the Empire’s turn to feel the machine’s wrath. Nahf, a critical administrative center and home to over eleven million people, effectively ceased to exist the next day. As the rumors foretold, even the Eternals fell. In some ways, those killed within the blast zone were fortunate. Many who were miles away and thought they’d escaped the weapon’s fury survived only to grow sick then pass away weeks later, writhing in agony.
A few months afterwards, the emperor summoned all the remaining Eternals to Vos, the imperial capital. From there, they were brought to a place they thought only existed in legend. It was Sherm, an entire city built into the heart of Zegranantha, Tol’s highest mountain. An immense agglomeration of iron ore deposits and stone, the Empire’s scientists believed that not even a pulse weapon could breach it. If Tol died, the Eternals would help to repopulate it. And there they waited, their invulnerability and fighting prowess made useless by the greatest weapon the Kek mind had ever conceived. After Nahf, all the ancient customs shielding non-combatants disappeared. As pulse bombs rained down from the skies, hundreds of millions died and almost half of Tol was rendered uninhabitable before both sides realized that a meaningful victory was no longer possible. Five years after it began, a treaty was signed finally ending what would be known as the Great War.
Thusla and the other Eternals emerged from Sherm to find their world in a shambles. Vos, with its proud thoroughfares lined with ancient temples and palaces, was gone; and only a handful of the cities left standing were fit to live in. Being a people who held their world sacred, a profound sadness fell over the Kek, which even their indomitable fighting spirit couldn’t dispel. Bearing an almost incapacitating sense of despair at having betrayed the world they’d been entrusted with, the survivors began rebuilding.
Eternals from both kingdoms, over ninety thousand strong, immediately fanned out all over Tol and spent nearly a decade searching every corner of it for more survivors. Not only did they find that they could travel unprotected into even the most poisoned of regions, they also proved to be immune to the intense cold that seemed to have gripped their world. Meanwhile, a survey was begun to determine how many people were still alive; and by the time the Eternals returned, the tally was complete. It estimated that just over one billion Kek remained. A staggering three quarters of their people had perished. Receiving that news in a world that seemed to grow colder and more desolate every day deepened the already pervasive sense of gloom surrounding Thusla and the rest of the survivors. When it at last lifted, all it left in its wake was an all-abiding hatred of war.
Beyond Courage
It took two thousand years to repopulate Tol and restore it to a semblance of what it once was. The skies were no longer choked gray with ash and the years of seemingly endless winter did in fact end. It even had begun raining again. Thusla spent those millennia working alongside his fello
w Eternals, going into the most forsaken parts of their world to salvage them and restore the rule of law. After he returned, he lived in the rebuilt capital of Vos and served as the Eternals’ representative to the Tolen Assembly, which governed the planet.
On the day commemorating the twenty-first centennial of the end of the Great War, reports began trickling in of people disappearing in their sleep then awakening elsewhere, sometimes many miles away. Thusla was serving as the assembly’s president at the time and despite the overwhelming responsibilities of the office, there was no ignoring the disappearances. He didn’t believe it at first, but his contacts in the police bureaus assured him it was true. What started as a trickle became within a few weeks a torrent. Each day seemed to bring twice as many cases as the day before; and soon objects began disappearing, as well. Reports then started surfacing of crops withering overnight and soil becoming depleted at many times its normal rate. As the strange occurrences continued to mount, the Kek responded as the high-spirited people they’d always been and would probably always be. They wanted to fight. However, what would’ve once triggered a barrage of recriminations and quite possibly armed conflict didn’t. The Kek had changed.
