Black Sun: What you hide finds you 1

It was supposed to be easy. A small little planet out on the edge of the galactic arm, whirling around  a star no one had claimed or seemed to care about. The six of them would land, snatch up some slaves and pop back out again. No hivequeens would be implicated since they were all ‘exiles’ and couldn’t be traced back to any of the Merchantilians. The locals were supposedly bipedal, with prehensile tails that could be used like a third arm and relatively sharp senses that would make them valuable for guard work once properly conditioned. Hesthet had taken the job after doing her usual research. The money was in mineral wealth, rare metals that could be traded in half a hundred systems. It all seemed perfect.

They’d landed fairly easily. The natives were just figuring out how to use steam, namely because they were so well adapted to their environment that technology had only started developing out of pure curiosity and had no real selection pressure backing it up. Sleek, smooth skin with hundreds of iridescent denticles lining it, they glowed faintly in the amber light of their day. The first four had been easy to catch, they’d walked right up to the ship. There wasn’t much on the planet big enough to eat them. They didn’t fear anything, their huge black eyes blinking curiously as they used their eyelids like strobes to see the ship in UV. Hesthet found them haunting, beautiful as she seized their minds with a thought and forced them to walk into the stasis deck. They were not active – they had no mental defenses – but she could feel the horror in their bright, eager, adaptive minds and it told her that they could probably be broken. Some hive queen somewhere would be getting herself some quality slaves.

“Hest.” Her second, Mrevket, walked around the ship. He was large for a male, with long lean limbs and a lanky face, dotted with fine hairs no matter how often he shaved. Which was often, as she found body hair annoying. “We haven’t heard back from Tren, Nirren or Klahet.”

“I can’t imagine they’ve run into trouble. These things barely understand how to hunt local game.” She pointed to one of the hopping fuzzballs, which was as near as they could tell the most numerous prey item on the local menu. “Unless those three somehow got spooked off of a cliff, they should be fine.”

Just a general “Head’s Up” because I haven’t been using this site or really doing much of anything lately. The Holidays really depressed me, as did my annual No ideology, no matter how positive or negative it is, can be accurate swirling depression. It wasn’t helped by getting into the usual binary internet argument where someone argues not with you, but with a straw man they constructed and makes statements that indicate you can’t realize that all of human society is constructed by humans and thus not truly accurate, in terms of pure truth, without immediately going to live in a cave. I can recognize the limitations of human cognition and reasoning and understand that all ideologies are ultimately invented by humans to give their lives meaning without immediately abandoning human society. Understanding my own limitations doesn’t make me immediately want to abandon my wife and my cats.

Anyway, yes, monstrously depressed, completely in full fledged rejection of every -ism as being ultimately inaccurate, constructions from a limited perspective that do not see the world as it is and never can, and ultimately just tools we use to get through the world for good or ill.  This of course leaves me with the question “What, then, is the right choice of action” in a life very poorly equipped to answer that question. One could argue that the only correct course of action would be to engage in the search for truth while always admonishing oneself that truth cannot be found by a limited intellect that will live at most another 60 years or so, but my word that’s a depressing and exhausting notion. Live your life engaged forever in a struggle you can’t possibly complete searching for a concept that doesn’t actually exist, and which you can never define anyway. Yeah, that sounds like a party.

It’s strange that I feel humans are essentially all self-deluded hoisting flags and banners for whatever causes they favor, all of them wrong. Is that what I’m doing? If it is, what flag am I unfurling? Am I just bitter that I never found one with a really cool border?

Just a man

I wish sometimes that it was like the movies. I hit the wall and stop and feel the back of my head smash into solid, screeching pain. Both my eyes tear up and I can’t hear. It’s my sense of smell that tells me he’s close before he’s on top of me. Rank, sour, wet fur smell. I let my knees quiver out from under me and slide down the wall just enough, and splinters arc in the moon’s light.

I keep falling forward. Now it’s controlled, desperate. I kick off as I drop and slide right between his legs, black fur, soaked from waiting outside for me. I didn’t have anything prepared for this. Naked except for a poorly fitting pair of jeans with blown out knees, the wind and rain stinging my face from the ruined window. He snarls as I kick the back of his knee a lot harder than I should be able to.

A clawed hand tries to disembowel me. My body does the work of getting me out of the way and up to my feet while I can feel blood running down my neck from where I hit. My eyes still won’t clear. Everything is dark, the light from the moon between clouds. There’s no time to do anything fancy. He, or she, hard to tell, drives in that black muzzle and tries to bite my throat out.

I grab it by the neck and lift it squirming off of the floor. Even with my bell rung, I can tell it didn’t expect that.

“I once broke the neck of the Lone-created Bull. I culled the verdant one, and sent back those that death refused.” I’m croaking, which completely ruins the effect. Irritation makes my fingers dig in deeper, flesh squeezed between them, black coarse hairs like spines. “You tell her that I’m insulted. A werewolf? One werewolf? I killed the Wild Hunt and defied Attertag to his face and she sends one werewolf?“

I turn and throw him out the wreck of my window. It’s three floors down, so he won’t really be hurt by the fall, unless he lands on something silver. Does silver actually work? I’m not sure. If I knew where my Lewis Spence was I could look it up. I touch the back of my head and pull my hand away sticky. The back of my head feels like tenderized meat.

Every year I hate this holiday a little more.

Black Metal 2

Running in darkness, even darkness lit by moonlight, can easily end in a loss of balance. Running in darkness on a mountain can easily end in a loss of life. Yet she hurled herself onward, trusting in her feet to find purchase, following the sound ahead of her and the flickering of an obvious cooking fire glowing like a coal ahead. Her breathing, her heart hammering drowning out much of the sounds around her.

One lunged into her path, barely visible, a blur of moonlit warts and yellow teeth. She dropped her shoulder and rammed herself hard into its chest, bringing the mace haft-first into its gut and letting the impact push her back, bowling the creature over. It bounced in her path. She used the momentum to spin herself around, sliding her hands up to grip the mace and bring it up and then down. The head caved in from the blow and flattened into the stone, bone crushed. The kick she dealt it wasn’t even necessary.

Leaving the bodies in her wake slowed them down. They stopped to eat their own. Despite their fearsome appearance, hideous mottled skin, claws like razors and teeth like a mouthful of broken glass, they were easier to kill than a man for her. Oh, they were stronger, faster, but there was nothing about them that inspired hesitation. Nothing that made her remember that these were someone’s sons or daughters, nothing she felt any sort of sympathy for.

Sympathy for her required some ability to feel kinship, and she refused to feel that. Not for them.

Pseudohistory 1

I would not be lying if I told you I do not know much about the history of the Alronian Empire. For one thing, it’s not an empire. The nation most Etreans call Alronia doesn’t exist, as such. There are hundreds of city states within the borders of Alron, each ruled by different means. Nazreal, for instance, is governed by a council elected from her citizenry, determined by wealth. If you pay over 100 talents a year in taxes, you get to be on the council. The Nazreans keep the ancient custom of the broken shard alive, meaning that if you get too above your britches, they’ll break some pottery, write some names on it, and throw it all in a pot. If your name comes up, you are exiled. Even the most powerful Nazrean citizens can be so dealt with, which to some degree keeps them honest. To a greater degree it keeps assassins occupied to make sure no pots get broken.

However, none of these cities can truly be said to be masters of more than its own borders, and all pay tribute to Alron, the Ringed City, on the banks of the Enethyri Ocean. Alron rules half the continent by virtue of its ruthlessly efficient military, its vast wealth earned via trade and domination of the Enethryri (called the Alronian Lake in some quarters), and most importantly its ability to make cooperation with it more valuable than battling against it. If all the little kings, princes, potentates, pontiffs and diverse other self-styled rulers of various cities ranging from towns of a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of souls all rose up at once, Alronia might be able to hold onto its power. It would definitely be a near thing, however.

Black Sun: All Alone Together 2

“You are not here.” Belan’s voice cut across her, adrift in memory. Elizabeth turned to look up at her, really looking at those faintly yellow eyes. Unlike her, Belan’s eyes glowed naturally and almost all of her people could access the zero point to some degree. Belan called it “Elsewhere” but the principle was the same. Having never seen another of Belan’s people, she always wondered if they all looked so ethereal. It was like talking to an elf sometimes. An elf made of dark brown wood.

“I’m sorry. Just remembering.”

“Khayyin brought you here?”

“Yes.”

“If he was then as he was when I knew him, he took you immediately to Oldest. Always with theatre, that one. Everything he does is a performance.” She smirked, and it was such a human expression that it took Elizabth back to see it. “Oh, he thinks he is so straightforward, but he plays a role he invented for himself. Make no mistake. His grief is real, but his manner is feigned.”

“If his grief is real …” Floating together a few hundred feet off of the ground, the two women presented contrasts. Elizabeth’s frame was taut, muscle over bone with pale skin, while Belan was lean and languid in manner and dark as rich soil. Elizabeth’s jagged stripes of red chain lashed across her naked skin while Belan’s graceful waves of blue formed arches and curves. Belan flew in a gentle blue aura while Elizabeth’s crackling red caused the air to shimmer around her in heat distortion. “I don’t follow. He seems genuine enough to me.”

Black Sun: I Bring You Death 3

If you have not killed a world, it is difficult to understand.

He drifted in the void a few hundred thousand kilometers away from the planet and watched its methane ocean burn. Watched its atmosphere glow with the heat. The ‘holes’ he’d opened between the molten iron core and the basins that held the methane oceans were now closed. They weren’t necessary any longer: the jets of molten iron tunneling through otherspace, passing through dimensions to ignite the planet, had created the chain reaction and even now were seething columns of superheated slag floating to the surface. Quakes from the loss of stability, of matter below the surface sent surges of burning liquid in waves that drowned and burned the lattice cities of the metal spiders.

He forced himself to watch it all. To watch them, uncounted multitudes of them, burn. Their cities, the masses of them drifting in what to them was a birthing matrix, a liquid womb from which their species was born. The planet was a mother to their kind, and it was dying at his hands. So were they. They had other worlds, older worlds, younger worlds. There would still be Taklarsaza, not metal spiders, in the universe after this day. But there would be many, many dead ones on this world.

He was a killer on a scale few could possibly understand. He had never killed anything a few scant days ago, and now he was genocide’s handmaiden. So he made himself watch. He opened his senses to the electromagnetic spectrum, and he made himself hear their shrieking pulsations, flares of static, ululations of x-rays.

It took a very long time.

He did not leave until it was done.

Black Sun: All Alone Together 1

She lay sleepless in darkness and watched the fire crawl along her naked body, remembering.

She had a hard time keeping track of years, considering she had never been back. She knew it had been many, but how many? Twenty? When aging slowed, and life became mission after mission, did it even matter how long? Every time she closed her eyes, she was back in dead Edgersall and they were coming through the door. She lay on her front and applied tension to her shoulders, feeling the pain where her neck pulled against the taut muscle of her upper back, and closed her eyes. She wasn’t going to sleep.

She didn’t really get hungry anymore. She just felt sick when she tried to live too long on energy pulled from the zero point instead of eating. She could go days without food, without sleep, longer if hunting. She wished she was hunting now, instead of laying in a dark room trying to force herself to sleep while memories spun around inside her head.

The room itself was sparse, made of white material most likely spun out of a zathrak’s crystal glands. She hated to admit it, but the zathrak still creeped her out. Too many limbs, with two huge carapace-like structures on either side of their bodies. It wasn’t their fault they looked like her nightmares. She was supposed to be better than that.

“Lizabeth?”

She opened her eyes, and knew they were glowing like banked embers. She forced herself to breathe, to calm her pulse, to let the fire recede. She knew the voice.

“Belan.” Her neck craned up to look at the woman she shared a room with. “Back from wherever it is?”

Black Sun: The Orphaned 4

It was simple. She held out her hand, and he took it. One of the burning trails on his skin slithered down onto her, and as it wrapped itself around her wrist it left him. With it came pain, as the skin on her arm registered the intense, fluid heat and for a moment began to burn.

Then she knew how to not burn, as thoughts, memories, lives upon lives showed themselves to her. She did not live them. they merely clawed their way into her and were there in her mind. She didn’t even scream, just shuddered as the shape on her arm melted and resolved from a tendril into a chain. Many chains, thick red and black shapes, lashing around her limbs. She could feel raw heat climbing down the skin of her back and could hear hundreds of voices explaining that the path of flame was a metaphor. A means to an end. A way of using force, of approaching the cosmos. She didn’t care. In that moment only the body on the ground staring up with dead eyes held any reality for her.

A black stone body pushed itself up through the ground, dust and grit clinging to the spinal lobe in the center of its elongated disc body. She imagined the chains on her arms lashing out, and that’s exactly what they did, crashing down on its body and cutting it in molten halves. Her teeth were bared, her swollen lower lip bleeding and staining her teeth. She’d bitten it. Her hair whirled around her head in the updraft from her own body, and she knew she was covered in fire. She was fire. She hated, and the hate was a bright burning up and down her spine.

More of them were coming out of the hole that had been tunneled out of the ground near her feet. She could vaguely feel something from the grey man who had touched her hand, but she wasn’t focused on him. He could do whatever he was going to do. She was going to burn.

And so were they.

Black Sun: The Orphaned 3

He had a name, but he had not used it nor heard it used in so long that he didn’t casually remember it. It would have taken an effort, and he didn’t expend it. The Blue One had called him The Orphan, back when he’d been pledged to learn the Path of Water. He had not learned it. He’d meant to, but while he had the aptitude, he did not have the desire.

He pivoted his body in a form he’d learned long ago, when he’d first traveled to Biv. Snaking ropes of fire rippled off of his skin, slashing out at the terribly silent blackness. They did not reflect the lights aimed down at them so much as they ate light so thoroughly that you could tell where they were by how much darker it was. Looking at them caused his eyes to water and twitch. Horrible static emitted from the mass of them, a thousand scraping nails down shale. If they thought at all he couldn’t hear it.

He made a fist. Above him, a fist of pure seething red-orange plasma appeared and crashed down into the mass of them. Even as their figures tumbled and melted from it, more came up. It was pointless. He backed away, contemplating his next move. Flight was an option, if destruction couldn’t be successfully achieved and containment seemed improbable. He had no idea how many living things were on this planet. If it were heavily populated, it should have been like a beacon in the dark and the zero tunnel should have been easy to establish. Instead, he’d only found it by pure accident, following a trail of dead worlds that should have or could have supported life.

He could feel the radio emissions that suggested life, or at least intelligence, perhaps artificial. But the life itself was hidden. If he had not left the zero tunnel up he might have been trapped there. If these things had already killed off the world’s native life he had no reason to stay. Six tendrils of fire lashed out from his shoulders, striking in great sweeping arcs to clear tendrils composed entirely of the smaller black ovals. Scattering them in molten stone spraying backward, glittering trails of red hot rock and severed oval bodies.

He prepared himself to ascend when he felt coherent thoughts behind him. Someone was alive.