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The Last Paradise


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Posted (edited)

 

Spoiler

By dawn, Lii’dra, the hive of unity and mind had fallen. Dead warriors and laser-cauterized pieces of warriors littered the streets and bridges of Illuau'tia, the carnage leading into a subterranean crystal palace. The flame choked sun rose slowly over its phoron spires, flushing the sky red and pale purple, gleaming off the broken glass canopy that once divided its insides from the burning sky, casting its color to the gore underneath. Reclaimer Ka, wading into the midst of the detritus, carried the bodies away. The dead, victorious and defeated alike, all went to be recycled together.

 

The plasteel gates into the palace hung warped and melted on their hinges. The inside echoed, empty, threatening. The first to set foot on the foyer’s metal floor had been disintegrated.

 

Za Ibten of Lii’dra and her liege, the fugitive lesser queen Ta Xutr’yaki of Lii’dra, were long gone. Some of Zoleth'akeh’s progeny hoped their quarry—Xutr’yaki, the believed last living Lii’dra lesser queen—was hiding somewhere in the palace, sure to be flushed out. Most knew better. Lii’dra soldiers had fought even with the inchoate hive mind that still connected them with a desperate furor and single-mindedness of those who knew themselves dead. They’d been fighting to buy their true queen time to escape, not to save their own lives. They’d succeeded, and their ranks—brave, brainwashed, and dead—lay in unflinching testament to the cost of Xutr’yaki’s contingency plan.

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High Queen Lii’dra overviewed the grim scene from dull monitors, resting her respectable bulk on a plasteel platform in a plasteel room barely large enough to fit her and the platform. She held in her lower appendages encoded keycards to the palace, running them through her digits idly.

 

She knew that no one would find this panic room, the simulations within the cephalon indicated so. She could stay here until starving, with the scent of her rotting corpse the indicator that would beckon the warriors of Zoleth, who would worm through the palace to her hiding place.

 

The simulations had foretold that this place was safe. They had not foretold, however, that she would be abandoned by her own progeny in the end. Perhaps she should have simulated it given the computational powers she had at her command, once.

 

What she hadn’t done was to simulate the war. This fear compounded upon itself in the end. She knew better than anyone the dangers of simulacra, and the sweet half-truths it can reveal. In a way, viewing a future could make it happen and in many cases, especially in defeat, it was better not to look.

 

Of all the ways she could die or be executed, there were few that stood out in her mind. Long ago, she had been struck by a marring acid attack. A filthy smellmute assassin had nearly succeeded in making her infertile, a death sentence for any Ta, even a queen. The attack left her physically marred, and in a fit of irony, it was later discovered that such an attack only took place because a simulation indicated it would be successful and undetectable.

 

Despite this attack, Lii’dra was a queen born from two ancient legacies before her. She did not shy away from fate. She could have run from Illuau'tia without her children, but the acid would find her, sooner or later. Instead, she made the best of her situation and ruminated in her mind, rather than within a cephalon.

 

Without a doubt, her children had created a marvel of the future, Virtual Reality, actualized and indistinct from the reality she was now trapped within. With it, a panoply of worlds opened up to her children, and they populated it with infinite variations of simulacra.

 

From this discovery, her children gifted Virtual Reality to the rest of her species and called this new shared simulated reality the First Paradise. Unbound of all hives, of all castes, intermixed in worlds of their own creation, made possible by the dreams of the cephalon’s. This great equalizer broke through caste and hive barriers, seeing the most embittered of enemies join to experience the places, people, worlds and forces that they had made.

 

It was perfect, but with the foresight that only hundreds of years can instill, Lii’dra knew that it would not last. For, only two months after its release, Queens regulated its use amongst their progenyThey saw in it nothing more than another avenue of attack, or a potential weakness to be exploited if left unregulated.

 

And so, the First Paradise ended, as each hive excised their unbound from the collected network. The dream ended as quickly as it began, the sleeper none the wiser. If only she had realized then the events that were set into motion.

 

Spurred by the Court and the dissolution of Paradise, her daughters directed their children to create a network that could not be partitioned, a locus of thought that would bring back the dream of what was. These orders, carried out in secret to minimize risk to the entire hive, ultimately caused the war to follow.

 

In a way, she supposed, her daughters were right to keep it from her. For every hive soon retreated into their own digital fantasies, the Lii’dra included. The caste system that Paradise circumvented, returned. And why would it not? It predated most hives and had come to define them all. In her long life, she never thought to challenge this system, but her younger daughters were not so burdened with the weight of years or sting of failure.

 

The experiments continued, and it would be another eighty-five years before their work bore fruit. It began as disappearances, small hives and their crop queens vanishing throughout the Illandus plate. She remembered the reports vividly, answering her Za and their investigations in the very chambers she now viewed upon antiquated technology. She cast her gaze across the screen, a voyeur to the sulfurous yellow blood that coated the Wi’gang silk that draped her platform, itself surrounded by a chased crystalline slab that met the wall in their bloodstained facets where it once held her above the floor of the room.


 

The experiments eventually birthed the thing that was and was not her children. Though, if she is truthful upon both of her hearts, it was more of a composite. The digital mind that puppeted the crop hives, and the few Lii’dra connected could be at any time, any one of the people connected to it, but the thoughts of such a being was nothing more than an aggregate. From these few, it spread like wildfire, consuming the facility, then surrounding communities.

 

Thinking about it, Lii’dra couldn’t be sure when it had entered her own brood, or why, the hive mind had ultimately spared her from its oneness. She supposed it could have been lonely, or perhaps that even under the pain of their closeness, her children still cared enough to keep her separate. Whatever the case, she soon found herself no longer in control of her own hive.

 

She was still their queen, and the amalgam of her children responded so, if only as a token gesture to keep appearances to outsiders that would visit her court. She was removed from the activities of her hive, no different really than the corpses that now plastered her city and palace. Lii’dra was not detritus, however. She would not passively hand herself over to the eight-legged Ka reclaimers. Even if she could not save herself, she could avenge herself.

 

Lifting herself off of the platform she was placed so carefully upon by now dead drones, she skittered to the exit. She had no weapons to defend herself, besides those that came naturally to her. She didn’t know what exactly she would be facing, but she did know who.  Zoleth'akeh, the ‘Herald of Scars’ had promised to kill all who sheltered enemy hive Queens. Zoleth would never spare her life, and it was too late to escape her forces.

 

No matter what, however, she would not rot in this room.

 

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By midmorning, the Za technicians had disarmed the worst of the traps within the central part of the crystal palace, in its foyer and main hall. Zoleth’s troops had filled it, and the leading Za was briefing Zoleth herself on the traps that awaited their teams in the rest of the house.

 

In the midst of all the clamor, Zoleth stilled and turned her head. She held up her left two hands to quiet the technician, then stilled herself. Practiced, augmented eyes scanned the thresholds just beyond view, with her blood-red carapace reflecting light from the ruined tangle of glass that littered the entire wreck. Beneath this, her armor was stained in the blood of her enemies from the battle hours prior.

 

As she looked, silence spread outward through the people in the hall.

 

Lii’dra emerged from a door hidden in empty space. All of her hands showed, but one of them was full of keycards. She walked slowly and purposefully towards Zoleth, her feet clicking across the worked stone.

 

A font of pheromones from Zoleth made her Za hang back as the two queens drew together.

As they neared, their bodies automatically released pheromones that signaled from Zoleth of a battle hard won, and from Lii'dra, a secret sorrow for her forced complicitness.  When she reached Zoleth, Lii'dra carefully knelt, spreading the access cards on the stone ground before her.

"Zoleth'akeh of Zo'ra, I gift to you the keys of my home, and surrender myself." Lii'dra said, the timbre and smell of her voice strong as she looked up from the ground where the remains of her dead children lay.

Zoleth's chitinous head crest marked her as a queen, yet the scars across her face plates were  those of a warrior. She was small for a queen, well proportioned and augmented for combat. One could almost mistake her for a warrior, were it not for the withered egg sac of her lower abdomen, however, her smell left no doubt as to her caste.

The Zo'ra around her clicked in silent amazement, having never dreamed of seeing the Lii'dra high queen at all, let alone seeing her kneel on the floor.

"It is claimed by the Weavers that the Zo'ra never lie, and you have proclaimed that you will kill all who aid the enemy queens. As a enemy queen myself, I have aided my daughters. I know that, by your recokening my life is forfeit. I come to you as in the old means of surrender because I still have my life to give, it has not been claimed by the digital mind of my progeny."

"My daughters have taken my hive from me. The last of them fled with a few thousand, and left me here, knowing that you would break in and kill me." ribbons of discordant sound colored  Lii'dra's pained admissions to this fact, threatening to upset her resolve, but, she continued onward.

"I do not ask that you spare my life as you have already issued the order for my death. Because it is your word, it is final. You did not say when it should be carried out however. As part of my surrender I ask that you delay my execution. As long as I remain alive, there is yet hope to undo the damages that my hive has wrought. I will serve in this capacity in any measure, save that I will not harm the remainder of my hive."

Zoleth was silent and smellmute, considering her proposal. 

All of the other Zo'ra simply stared. They had wondered about Lii'dra throughout the entire war. Much had been assumed of her disappearance according hive spy intelligences. 

Beyond them, the city of Illuau'tia lay in silent pause. Upon every street corner bodies lay where they were slain. Blood covered andesite rock dwellings latticed with rivulets of veiny metal made up most of the cities facades.

From the streetsides, visible from anywhere in the city,  great columns of heterogeneous rock rose to the ceiling. It bridged the span between, with still more dwellings upon the column itself. 

Towards the palace, the streets of Illuau'tia were paved in basalt, thick slabs of volcanic glass the work of artisans, its surface still shining beneath the gore that covered it. 

Along this road, hollow statues of crystalline phoron and imported bismuth lined the streets. Within them rest the frozen corpses of past lesser queens, their bodies on display with long rotten or forgotten tokens of remembrance left around each of the statues bases.

From here, one could see the warriors of K’lax as they went from building to building, triple checking their contents for bodies not yet found. They hauled the slain into the open, friend and foe alike so that reclaimer Ka may work unimpeded.None of them slowed or stopped, covered as they were in the viscera of battle. In truth, they paid little heed to their grisly work, the fires of righteous vengeance quelled in their souls as the battles high wore away.

They had come here for one reason and one reason only, to see their enemy ended. Now that their mission was accomplished, the hollowness of their remembered loss was the only thing on their mind. For they lost more than any hive in a mere span of days once the Ka’omat barrier fell to the Lii’dra hoard. 

It was said that the reflecting eyes of numberless Lii’dra shown beyond the Ka’omat, outnumbering the stars themselves. Atomic fire battered the surface of Ka’omat, a stars fury unleashed in minute counterpoint to still more explosives volleyed upon the K’laxan barrier as the earth above and below heaved to roiled against the gravity tethers that held them.

But Ka’omat did not fall the first day or the second. For three days the wall held, its hundreds of thousands of automated coil guns, once able to pick off a target from every bit of the 16 miles excavated around it, barrels were either melted from their use or empty of ammunition. 

The Ka’omat fell, and the hoard slaughtered everything to the last from there to their own high queen's palace. Were it not for the aid of other hives they knew in their hearts that their current positions may have been reversed.

Back within Illuau'tia  palace, Zoleth paused as she consulted the networked queens. Allied hives and Zo'ra stared at her, seeing beneath the grime of conflict a visage worthy to birth a hive of her own making, should she choose. In the battles Zoleth  held to her name, countless hives had honored her as they drove back the Lii'dra legions. They named her Ki'lishmag'an Sc'theth, the Warcrowned Queen of Light and Fire or Van'atkar Sc'Ba'rlazo'kon, Lord of the Four Chasms, as well as other titles known to the survivors across the planet. To the Lii'dra however, she only ever held one name and one name only. Ad'ytk  E'Itshka'lok " The Herald of Scars"

As they looked, calm emanated from Zoleth's scent,  a sign of a decision reached.

 

The first part of a story that captured me while I was writing some lore drafts. I'll continue it if interest is high.  Some context, Its told primarily from the point of view of the Lii'dra High Queen. The story takes place at the end of the first hive war, but before the sinking of Illuau'tia. Illuau'tia is a Lii'dra city.

Edited by Bygonehero
Posted

I'll also say that while this is moslty internal dialogue it's nice to hear Vaurca speak/think plainly.

Although, that's probably just bias from my time spent dealing with them as Tokash. 

Posted

Small update adding a bit to the story, for those that just want the new parts- here

 

Spoiler

 

A font of pheromones from Zoleth made her Za hang back as the two queens drew together.

As they neared, their bodies automatically released pheromones that signaled from Zoleth of a battle hard won, and from Lii'dra, a secret sorrow for her forced complicitness.  When she reached Zoleth, Lii'dra carefully knelt, spreading the access cards on the stone ground before her.

"Zoleth'akeh of Zo'ra, I gift to you the keys of my home, and surrender myself." Lii'dra said, the timbre and smell of her voice strong as she looked up from the ground where the remains of her dead children lay.

Zoleth's chitinous head crest marked her as a queen, yet the scars across her face plates were  those of a warrior. She was small for a queen, well proportioned and augmented for combat. One could almost mistake her for a warrior, were it not for the withered egg sac of her lower abdomen, however, her smell left no doubt as to her caste.

The Zo'ra around her clicked in silent amazement, having never dreamed of seeing the Lii'dra high queen at all, let alone seeing her kneel on the floor.

"It is claimed by the Weavers that the Zo'ra never lie, and you have proclaimed that you will kill all who aid the enemy queens. As a enemy queen myself, I have aided my daughters. I know that, by your recokening my life is forfeit. I come to you as in the old means of surrender because I still have my life to give, it has not been claimed by the digital mind of my progeny."

"My daughters have taken my hive from me. The last of them fled with a few thousand, and left me here, knowing that you would break in and kill me." ribbons of discordant sound colored  Lii'dra's pained admissions to this fact, threatening to upset her resolve, but, she continued onward.

"I do not ask that you spare my life as you have already issued the order for my death. Because it is your word, it is final. You did not say when it should be carried out however. As part of my surrender I ask that you delay my execution. As long as I remain alive, there is yet hope to undo the damages that my hive has wrought. I will serve in this capacity in any measure, save that I will not harm the remainder of my hive."

Zoleth was silent and smellmute, considering her proposal. 

All of the other Zo'ra simply stared. They had wondered about Lii'dra throughout the entire war. Much had been assumed of her disappearance according hive spy intelligences. 


 

 

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted (edited)
Spoiler

 

Beyond them, the city of Illuau'tia lay in silent pause. Upon every street corner bodies lay where they were slain. Blood covered andesite rock dwellings latticed with rivulets of veiny metal made up most of the cities facades.

From the streetsides, visible from anywhere in the city,  great columns of heterogeneous rock rose to the ceiling. It bridged the span between, with still more dwellings upon the column itself. 

Towards the palace, the streets of Illuau'tia were paved in basalt, thick slabs of volcanic glass the work of artisans, its surface still shining beneath the gore that covered it. 

Along this road, hollow statues of crystalline phoron and imported bismuth lined the streets. Within them rest the frozen corpses of past lesser queens, their bodies on display with long rotten or forgotten tokens of remembrance left around each of the statues bases.

From here, one could see the warriors of K’lax as they went from building to building, triple checking their contents for bodies not yet found. They hauled  the slain into the open, friend and foe alike so that reclaimer Ka may work unimpeded.None of them slowed or stopped, covered as they were in the viscera of battle. In truth, they paid little heed to their grisly work, the fires of righteous vengeance quelled in their souls as the battles high wore away.

They had come here for one reason and one reason only, to see their enemy ended. Now that their mission was accomplished, the hollowness of their remembered loss was the only thing on their mind. For they lost more than any hive in a mere span of days once the Ka’omat barrier fell to the Lii’dra hoard. 

It was said that the reflecting eyes of numberless Lii’dra shown beyond the Ka’omat, outnumbering the stars themselves. Atomic fire battered the surface of Ka’omat, a stars fury unleashed in minute counterpoint to still more explosives volleyed upon the K’laxan barrier as the earth above and below heaved to roiled against the gravity tethers that held them.

But Ka’omat did not fall the first day or the second. For three days the wall held, its hundreds of thousands of automated coil guns, once able to pick off a target from every bit of the 16 miles excavated around it, barrels were either melted from their use or empty of ammunition. 

The Ka’omat fell, and the hoard slaughtered everything to the last from there to their own high queen's palace. Were it not for the aid of other hives they knew in their hearts that their current positions may have been reversed.

Back within Illuau'tia  palace, Zoleth paused as she consulted the networked queens. Allied hives and Zo'ra stared at her, seeing beneath the grime of conflict a visage worthy to birth a hive of her own making, should she choose. In the battles Zoleth  held to her name, countless hives had honored her as they drove back the Lii'dra legions. They named her Ki'lishmag'an Sc'theth,the Warcrowned Queen of Light and Fire or Van'atkar Sc'Ba'rlazo'kon, Lord of the Four Chasms, as well as other titles known to the survivors across the planet. To the Lii'dra however, she only ever held one name and one name only. Ad'ytk  E'Itshka'lok " The Herald of Scars"

As they looked, calm emanated from Zoleth's scent,  a sign of a decision reached.

 

 

Heres the newest part

Edited by Bygonehero
  • 3 months later...

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