The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Four

That hunt had cost him his dearest comrade among his kind. A sister, though not a biological relation. Ha'akmar and his strike unit had mercilessly run her to ground and killed her, with a dozen others, even though she had surrendered, reluctantly, to their custody. He had committed a murder, though no one among the Star Legion or the Emperium's military command would ever have seen it as such. Murder was something that happened to living beings, not to artificially-designed, programmable, synth-genetic robots. Ha'akmar had passed judgment on her and others and summarily executed them. It wasn't personal. He was simply fulfilling his orders.

Staurqe could still recall the reverence and wonder on her face whenever she had stared out at the disc-shaped moon's horizon.

And he remembered the flat emptiness in her blindly staring, colorless eyes as they had dragged her corpse away across the wreckage-strewn ground in the shadows of the Forge-Enclave science center. Debris, she and the others were little more to the soldiers than debris, to be taken off the field of battle and quietly and covertly disposed of at the earliest opportunity. How could such work be that of soldiers? To Staurqe's mind, how could a thinking being sworn to uphold the moral concepts of Justice and Equality coldly effectuate a series of orders to commit harm upon those who only crime had been to proudly emerge from out the shadows of secrecy and shamelessly declare their independence as citizens of the very society responsible for their creation? How could the fact of their existence so clearly run counter to accepted societal norms? Was it not the duty of those soldiers who invaded and tore down the Forge-Enclave to liberate and provide comfort for those new members of the greater society they served?

No, in very short and brutal order it became quite clear that was not their mandate. The Emperium would not permit Synthetics to be given their due. And so the Children of the Silicon Helix met a ruinous, and quite bloody, end.

But Emaris Staurqe, and those like him, yet survived. They persevered. They endured.

They remembered.

Supreme Battle-Marshal Manduryus Ha'akmar of the Centaurius Emperii Primilion. This occasion was, indeed, a manifestation of cosmic synchronicity -- and Staurqe would make the most of it.

Emaris Staurqe impatiently waited for the signal, any signal, from the Knight, D'Spayr, that would indicate he was in-position, having reached his destination inside the walls of The City. He watched the encampment with barely repressed dissatisfaction at the general lack of activity among the troops erecting their billets, inventorying their equipment, and cleaning and prepping their weaponry as sentries posted at the camp perimeters oversaw battery-powered electronic surveillance detection monitors. Ants, they were a small colony of ants, structured and orderly, and their fussy attention to routinely-defined and scripted procedures made them boring to observe.

A massive, jagged crack of obsidian light, silent and yet impossible to ignore, abruptly appeared in the skies immediately over the military base camp. The blackness emanating from the barbed and spiky gash in the sky was so paradoxically brilliant it forced him to squint his eyes against the stygian glare. The darkness of that giant ebony bolt of energy radiated a heat that made Staurqe's skin tingle, as if he were being flash-fried and developing an angry sunburn. Simultaneously, he could feel a polar chill wind, smelling faintly of burnt metal and rotted meat, energetically rushing down on and across the panorama of gravelly dunes. Staurqe's boredom vanished in a heart's beat. He did not know what anomalous phenomenon it was he was observing, but he recognized it was both important and quite likely dangerous...

He didn't know it, but he was witnessing the cross-cosmic arrival of Quhr, the Invoker of Judgment, First among the Void-Gods, into the planet Teshiwahur's Plane of Reality.