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++ Turpe Et Dicere ++

Hyaenidae

By Hyaenidae
in + AGE OF DARKNESS +

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Brother-Chaplain Kage Venerable Brother

Brother-Chaplain Kage

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Thanks, everybody. :D

 

For me, writing something like this is difficult because I have a hard time knowing if the tension and the atmosphere I'm trying portray is successful or not. It also took me a while to figure out how to make the Terran VIII Legion frightening without using the same bloody, torturous methods of the Nostraman Night Lords. From your comments, I think I was successful on both.

Hesh Kadesh Veteran

Hesh Kadesh

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Posted

Currently rereading the damnation game, which is why i thought of it. Well, I say reading, it is about 4 pages before I pass out XD. (Through tiredness, not a general squeamishness, I am MAN *punches wall*).

 

I find him superior to Steven King, although that is a contentious debate possibly not for here!

  • 5 months later...
Brother-Chaplain Kage Venerable Brother

Brother-Chaplain Kage

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http://i.imgur.com/lkSPexJ.png

 

-- Chapter 3.1: Piercing the Veil --

 

 

 

    Beyond the Sea of Rust and the monolithic bones of a long-dead hive sat the black fortress of the King of Oxitania, Ylan Gotha. Known as Tul Zuvar, it was a flat-topped pyramid three hundred meters to a side that stood one hundred meters above the irradiated surface, and descended over a thousand meters beneath it. The glossy black surface had a smooth outward appearance, but hidden gun emplacements containing advanced laser and plasma weapons long since lost to most of Terra lined the exterior, able to deploy, lock onto a target, and begin firing within seconds. Since the bombs fell over a thousand years ago, few warlords had considered trying to take the wasteland of Oxitania as their own. Tul Zuvar was proof against those who felt otherwise.

    Buried deep below the surface, just above the sections that made up his private laboratories and surgical rooms, King Ylan Gotha sat in his recovery throne, watching a video feed through his ocular implants. Connected to an array of sockets in his back, numerous tubes carried away biological waste and the byproducts from the miniature fusion power plant in his chest, cycled the coolant for his power plant and numerous cybernetic systems, and refilled his internal biochemical enhancers and nutrient stores. For two hours, his seneschal and highest-ranking officers had been trying to contact him, but he dismissed each alarm or message request as soon as they popped up in his peripheral vision.

    For those two hours, he had been watching the footage of the massacre at Arterial A102, marveling at how the enemy scout team, clearly visible on the playback, had walked right by his men without them ever noticing. They had infiltrated the Arterial at the shift change, sneaking through as men going off shift chatted with men coming on - while holding the inner bulkhead doors open. Even the monitor room fell to the same lack of protocol, with Allard Marchion chatting with the previous chief for several minutes with the security door open, allowing an enemy soldier to pass right between them unseen.

    Hours later, when the scouts finally began their attack, one of them had spliced into the radio system and began broadcasting the “We have come for you” messages. The scout inside the monitoring room, who Gotha took to be their leader, stood in the back of the room, unmoving and only barely visible to one of the two cameras, signaling his men to begin with an unknown silent radio code. Unsure how they were undetectable to his men, it took Gotha several replays to figure out it was a psychic camouflage and that the leader in the monitoring room was the only one who could have been doing it. He surmised that the man had stood unmoving so long not for reasons of stealth, but because of the amount of concentration it was taking him to shroud his entire team. After he killed Marchion, the leader removed his helmet to expose skin as pale as alabaster, dripping with sweat, and proceeded to rub his temples and the top of his hairless head for several minutes before his men joined him.

    They spent the next ten minutes destroying all of the camera footage stored locally, completely unaware that the massive date piles of Tul Zuvar --stored three floors above where Gotha currently sat -- kept backup recordings of all camera footage. When Arterial G009 went dark two weeks ago, there had been a malfunction in the signal lines and the data never reached Tul Zuvar, but that far out into the borderlands, maintenance of the signal lines had not been a priority. Gotha and his advisors had believed the destruction of the data was more of the scare tactics of this Eighth Legion, but he now realized it was merely to cover up the weakness of the psychic camouflage as anyone actively watching the feed while the psyker was maintaining the shroud wouldn’t see them, but any future viewers would. With a short delay set between the cameras and another monitoring station, this weakness could be exploited, but it was a one-time surprise that had to be sprung at the right moment. Although he could see the massacre for what it truly was now, Gotha couldn’t help but be impressed; their scare tactics had been flawlessly executed and were brutally effective. The men in Arterial A102 had experienced absolute, mind-numbing terror in their last moments of life, knowing there was no escape or hope of rescue for them.

    While ruminating these last several minutes, Gotha had absently let the video feed continue playing longer than he had previously. After the enemy scouts finished destroying the video footage and leaving their bloody message on the monitor bank, their leader glanced up at one of the cameras for a few beats and then donned his helmet again. Backing the feed up, Gotha froze it on the man’s face, admiring the beauty of his chiseled features, as if it were a marble statue of old Roma come to life. More importantly were the thin, dark lines running vertically over his face and the top of his head. With how precise and straight the scars were, they could only be laser scalpel incisions. Behind his respirator mask, Gotha smiled.

     With a mental command he ordered the recovery throne to retract the tubes plugged into his back and he stood, marveling at the convergence of his desire to see his child again and the emergence of this new threat. A lift set into the near wall carried him down ten floors, the doors opening to reveal a half-circle room one hundred meters in diameter. The rounded wall was  lined with upright cryogenic caskets, the shell of each made of a clear and durable polymer. The inhabitants stood upright, each locked into an apparatus similar to his recovery throne. The air was sharp with cold and a thin fog shrouded the floor. The only sound was a low hum from the cooling system. These were his finest creations; soldiers more machine than flesh, made hundreds of years ago with technology that could no longer be reproduced.

     Forty-five caskets lined the wall, but his eyes were fixated on the one directly ahead of him. The clear casket shell responded to his mental commands, unlocking and rolling back into the wall, releasing the fog that had obscured the form within. Gotha reached a hand up, gently tracing his fingers over the thin, dark, laser scalpel lines that divided her perfect female face vertically in quarters, as if her skin were as delicate as blown glass. He smiled again, knowing that the super-hard alloy that made up the majority of her body could withstand heavy weapons fire with barely a mark. He placed his hand on an identification panel to her left, letting it verify who he was before linking with the casket's systems and initiating the awakening procedure.

     Her name was Pandora; the first woman and the guardian of hope.

    Eyes that had not stirred for centuries opened slowly, the ocular implants barely visible behind the irises shifting as they focused on him. "Father?" she asked. This early into the awakening, her voice sounded more machine than flesh.

     "Rise, my child," he said, offering his hand. "The time has come for you to hunt once more."

 

* * *

 

 

No new pictures with this or even any guarantee that more material will be coming anytime soon, but this part of the story has been kicking around in my head since the last installment and I had to get it out.

Soldier of Dorn Venerable Brother

Soldier of Dorn

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Posted

AN UPDATE! PRAISE THE SUN, AN UPDATE! \ [T] /

Haven't even read it yet, but still! I needed to get that out of my system! Just read it, and it is glorious. Perfect balance of technology and the arcane in the Oxitanian hierarchy, perfect amount of creepiness in the fact that King Gotha keeps his "child" (is she actually his daughter? Seems somewhat unlikely to me) locked up in cryogenic chambers for centuries at a time, and lovely amount of foreshadowing as to what's going to go down when Pandora goes out on the town.

Hallelujah! The sun is shining (well, not really, it's half past 1 here,) the flowers are blooming (not that either, complete wrong time of year,) and all is right in the world (well, not that either, but you know what I mean. msn-wink.gif) Thank you for the update, Kage. smile.png

  • 6 months later...
Brother-Chaplain Kage Venerable Brother

Brother-Chaplain Kage

Posted
Posted

A new post, yes, but unfortunately no new story. However, the good news is that there might be shortly because I stumbled upon an old draft of the next part of the Cancer of Nord Merica  that I thought I had lost. Knowing my history with deadlines, I'm certainly not going to give an ETA of when it might happen, but I do want to get it finished, cleaned up, and posted. Soon-ish.

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