Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

Part 13, "...We Sing These Dreams of Holocaust."

Once long ago and far, far from the world of Authoritarchs and Nebulancers and Aingylls, when she was only a young Offspring Warrior-Adept, her aging Battle Preceptor, named Venarkim Q'rothe, had warned her that her curiosity and wanderlust would be her undoing. He had said that, despite her best efforts and most careful planning, she would eventually become embroiled in a dangerous clash she had no chance of winning. Her boundless courage, despite her distaste for lesser biological species, and her sense of Righteousness would not allow her turn away when someone who could not protect themself needed her help. He worried she would sacrifice herself in the service of strangers who, though they would greatly respect her, would not be capable of truly loving her. He had expressed his sadness predicting she would die alone, die violently, among aliens, away from her Clan, from her friends and from her nation. When at last she came of age to leave her home, and to leave the Battle Academy where he'd shaped and honed her skills to the point she was a living weapon, where he'd raised her with the attentiveness a father would show his only daughter, Venarkim Q'rothe made her promise him one thing... and one thing only.

That she, as an Anistrophic Morph-Elf assassin, would meet her doom without regret and with her head held high.

She had assured him, nearly half a millenia past, that this was something she could -- and would -- do...

That promise loomed large.  It was beginning to look like today was the day she would finally fall.

She watched, staring past the immediate targets in front of her and she saw them descend from the inky deepness above the atmospheric band that delineated mere "Sky" from "the Great Beyond", eclipsing the illumination from the cold sun nearest the TimeSpace interval cuboid that comprised the area's group uncertainty facet. A raining torrent of alien humanoid foes. Something was very not right about all this... The War-Drones came on in wave after vicious wave, seemingly without end. There were easily three or four times as many of them as there were Aingylls in the Horde. Where would such a multitudinous force be billeted? From what massive warehouses and armories were so many troops equipped? And there was no trace of the mighty war vessel that would be needed to transport them across the Metaflow. How could that be? Before she had unexpectedly sacrificed herself, Qassudei Chyald had put several dozen of them to the sword, and she knew for a certainty that she herself had slain three or four dozen of them after that. Yet still more of them came, each drone a replication of the one before it, next to it, following it, all identical, and yet each one attacking with individualistic mannerisms that separated it from the others around it. The same, but not the same. And all the while, the pallid, gnomish androgynous, non-human Thing continued to watch inscrutably from its rocky perch... How could that be?

There was a sudden break, an unexpected interruption, in the oncoming surge of the bloodthirsty tide confronting her. The army of Sarkaufygan War-Drones momentarily relented, ceasing their rabid assault and shifting the somewhat chaotic configuration of their front line, the first three rows deep of them stepping away from the outermost edge of the Wall of Dead she had created. The act ran counter to the behavior she'd come to expect from them. The War-Drones were savage and wild creatures, not at all disciplined in their fighting strategies. They weren't soldiers. Neither were they trained mercenaries as she'd first expected. No, instead she'd discovered that they were a legion of homicidal psychotics, slaves to the impulse to vomit their limitless anger outwards in battle, loosely driven by some technological or telepathic extrasensory set of commands that overrode their free will. They were a swarm of wasps driven wild, attacking anything that did not look like it was a part of the hive. Whether they lived or died was inconsequential, they were a mass of bodies to be throne upon a pyre fueled by rage and hatred. It took her a long, confused moment to realize that what they did, they did en masse, as if possessed of a singular mind ---