Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Return To Mobius. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Locked Topic
The Longest Winter
Topic Started: May 28 2012, 06:45 PM (39 Views)
Fran
Member Avatar

Posted by: Cosmo Aug 23 2011, 01:37 AM
The war was ending.

The planet was dying, and there would be nothing to war over, after that.

Her armored knights matching her pace to either side, Earthia stepped down from her skyship. The knights awaiting her on the ground fell into place behind her as she moved quickly into the palace, towards the Council chambers, the shouted words of the other Lords and Ladies reaching her well before she arrived.

"They care not for how many we kill! No matter how efficient our weapons become, they always have more soldiers to throw at us. Our technology has never advanced so quickly, and still it is a close race against their sheer numbers. They have worn us down to our roots." The voice was tired, worn from both age and heartache. Lord Bracken was old for a seedrian, but until recently he had always spoken with such a wise and gentle strength, like the deepest roots without having ever rooted himself as a treedrian. That strength was wilted by the loss of almost his entire Grove, ancestors and young alike, but anger and despair still lent him volume, it seemed.

"No! All this time, a distraction! That blasted worm they buried in the shell of Verdant decades ago has been what is weakening us. We yet have a hope of destroying that, ending this threat at the source!" A younger lord countered.

"It is too far advanced and now resists all damage. We obliterated the Narcine continent and STILL it lives. Perhaps had we identified the true threat sooner-" Lady Nasturtia's hesitant tone had not changed, anymore than her words had, through all of these Councils. She could only repeat and repeat the thoughts that circled her hopelessly.

A brash voice broke through, one that Earthia knew too well, and she almost broke into a run. "We have something more powerful than nuclear weapons now!" Oak... how changed he was from the man she once knew. How much they both had changed.

"My own husband died this morning, following your words. He slew many, but he perished with them. We can't become as our enemy, we die with them." Cress had not been married more than a season yet! Anger gripped Earthia at the doors to the room, and her retinue waited with her, unquestioning.

"The technique is imperfect, yes, but with more power we could extend how long the beast form lasts! In it, each of us would be as powerful as the legend of the Black Wind himself!" Old Bracken argued.

"Their soldiers are endless, the Worm is the threat!" So much fighting.

"We can still fight!" Oh, Oak...

Nasturtia's voice trembled like a leaf in the winter wind. "Do we even understand why they fight, unafraid to die? Perhaps they are truly immortal."

The old Lord answered with a verbal shrug. "They are mindless animals, they care not that they use up a world. They came to ours when their own was devoured."

"We still don't know that. So long a war, and still so ignorant."

Cress sighed at Nasturtia's unchanging trepidation. "Even when we cause damage to the Worm, it restores itself by drawing still more life from our planet. To continue to fight means only to hasten our own destruction."

"We can't give up! Our elders are already withering, their ageless wisdom reduced now to whispers of nightmare! Our whole world-"

Earthia did not let Oak finish. The large doors swung open loudly, striking the walls of the round chamber like a bell. The flowering knights flanked the entrance and raised a salute as the seedrian queen swept in, petals swirling around her ankles.

"Earthia!"

"The Green Council is still in session. You will address me as Lady, Lord Oak."

The violet-haired male curled his lip and slammed the table with a heavy fist. "Damn it, Earthia, there won't be a Green Council with those filthy animals overrunning our planet! We have no more time, you must-"

"I must preserve our people!"

The lesser Lord swept his hand away, casting down his eyes in reluctant show of respect. "Then tell me why you refuse to let me further the one work that might still save us, High Lady?"

Earthia's intense eyes took in the room, every other face turned toward her, anxious to hear. This was not the first Council to circle arguments. The situation was dire, with every day, every passing moment, they could feel their hope wilting. "What of the elder wisdoms? Did Demetre finally speak?" another Lady asked.

The white-flowered seedrian hesitated, overcome for a moment, her hand lifting up to her throat. "Demetre... has also left us."

Beneath her hand, a large red heart-amber was made visible. There was a tense silence in the room, the other seedrians trying to comprehend the death of even their strongest treedrian elder, the very mother of many in the room, and Earthia herself. They waited until she could speak again. "What is left of our world will also perish. The Worm that feeds upon the life of Verdant is not merely a weapon. Our fertile home was chosen as its incubator."

Bracken's words were heavy with unspoken questions, eyes sharp. "What... do you mean?"

"The Novax wish for this worm to mature. It grows ever larger, already it is a behemoth, but it shall birth behemoths capable of traversing the stars themselves. We were only ever a farm, their sights were never on us ourselves. They care not that we perish, the only thing they want from us is our lives." The room erupted. Earthia shook her head. "There is nothing else we can barter with."

"Barter? The time for peacable negotiations ended when they took the sacred Groves of Narcine for mulch!"

"Are you so rootless as to speak of the Groves in that way, Oak?" Earthia demanded.

The Lord's eyes flashed as he threw back his head to meet her gaze again. "Now will we both speak freely? These are truths, and why we fight! What treachery are you speaking? To give up, without fighting? We die either way!"

"So even you know that your fight is hopeless! A gesture only of spite." Earthia shook her head and spoke again before he could argue. "The Novax devour our world not because they cannot plan for a future, but because they do. We cannot stop them now. But we can follow them to this other world, on the other side of the heavens."

"What!?" came the cry from many.

"Our own Verdant is lost. No more seedlings wake up in the spring, the die in their winter husks. The Novax have use for us, base and evil as it is, and that use would assure our survival to this far off world."

"You... you..." Oak stumbled a pace back, reeling at the thought. He was not alone, there was a trembling of leaves and petals throughout the room, as if a cold wind had picked up across a grassy field.

"Use? You don't mean..."

"I do, Cress. Dear sister." Earthia closed her eyes.

"You mean to barter the end of this war with our lives, literally?" the other Lady prodded further.

"I don't mean to. I already have."

Oak roared and threw himself across the room far quicker than his size should have allowed, rage empowering him. "TRAITOR!!!"

Two knights stepped forward, brushing against Earthia's sleeves as they intercepted his leap and caught the male, forcing him back against the table with a crash. One of the other Lord's assisted when Oak's struggle seemed too much even for them. "Traitor!" he spat again. "Better to die on our feet as free plants, than to live on our knees as food for filthy animals!"

"You may still fight to the death if you wish," Earthia said quietly, and closed her eyes as if in reverie a moment. When she opened them again, he thought that he might have never seen the woman before, so changed were those eyes by sorrow. "But I will not sentence all of our descendants to die with us. What they do with their lives, however wretched, should be their choice. We must survive. If you insist on taking us all with you into oblivion, you are a traitor."

Oak almost broke free then, and more of the Council went to stand between him and Earthia as she took the amber from her throat and placed it at the head of the table. The token gesture; she had made her decision, and by the authority of the rooted wisdoms of their ancestors, Demetre's own heart amber, her voice would be the last to speak on the matter. The Green Council was closed; she strode from the room with her remaining knights, the others escorting the still-struggling Lord Oak to the cells for traitors.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The maturity of the worm, that the Novax so fittingly called 'the Malignancy', would eat the planet hollow like any worm in an apple, until only the rind remained. No longer a fruit, the green planet of Verdant had become an egg, hatching a beast.

The hollowed earth cracked open, and it had been not even a month since that last Council, the last time that she had seen Oak. Wherever he'd gone. The bloated worm pushed its limbs out from the depths of the planet, birthing crystalline flies with fat wings. Each one the size of a city, a mountain of eyes and scaly flesh. These were the 'ships' that would cross the galaxy, that the Novax tended as a parent would dote on children, that they revered as angels that would carry them to their terrible god on the far side of Heaven. A deity that drove them to such furious and fervent activity, that they had no name for but 'Overlord'.

The hivelike flies shed their wings as they left behind the dead and broken planet, a still-smoldering ember of a world. Their scales melted into hardened armor, shells better suited to space than to sky, Chrysalises protecting the vulnerable lives within. Earthia sank her own roots deep into the body of the Chrysalis dubbed 'Archangel', the horror of the living ship as bitter from within as it was grotesque from without. Her treedrian body immobile, she reached out with her mind for the frightened minds of her companions, rooting elsewhere in this Chrysalis and in others, and recoiled at the alien and overwhelming screeching that was the mindless Chrysalis itself. The Novax had some communion with it, their own psionic minds symbiotically able to move with and through the ship, guiding it and one another, yet to a treedrian it was like trying to walk through fire.

The treedrians were alone, each alone, divided from one another either by the void of space or by the din of the Novaxian droning. The animal hive they inhabited now was nothing like their world. No soil, no sea, no sun. Everything that had made up their world and held meaning to them and to who they were as children of Verdant was lost, but Earthia rallied herself. The hope of the alien Novax must become her hope now, the world they sought a real and living world with sky and rain. Space was a near-endless road, but not quite endless, and she looked to the distant end.

Seasons passed without the familiar constellations and bends of the twin suns to mark them, and the treedrians bloomed and seeded, and new generations of seedrians that had never known life on the Green Planet were born. Earthia placed her hope for them into the names she gave them, Nebula and Stella and Astra.

Life was not kind, but her children knew no other. She told to them the stories of their homeworld, the lost voices of the intertwining rooted ancestors that she had never known herself from experience, yet had listened to as a once-Queen of her people. She tried to tell them what the suns were like, moons, stars that twinkled through an atmosphere, the smell of the wind off the sea, of rain on naked earth, what horizons looked like. Of the grand cities they had once built, not with walls that blinked at you and gills that breathed air for you. Of songs and stories. Of things she desperately hoped they might have again someday, in her place.

More seasons passed. Other treedrians lost hope and withered, their dying felt even through the din of the Chrysalis-mind. Their despair and sorrow pierced Earthia more deeply than the barbed tongues of the lesser Novax, drinking her sap. They had followed her, and this was their end. The seedrian children too were the sustenance of their masters, and when they died they were harvested like ragwood rather than people. They lived, they toiled, they told stories among themselves and wrote new songs when the tiring voices of the treedrians failed them, they celebrated their mothers and fell in love and raised their sibling seedlings, but they could not truly know how much they had lost. The memories that kept Earthia alive, that gave her hope she had not chosen wrong.

She kept her heart turned to space, the dark starlit road whose end she could not see but believed must still exist. The Novax did as well. Their hopes were bound, and though treated this way, the seedrians sustained their captors as much as they were sustained. The mutual need, the plants and animals dependent on the other to survive this long journey, was a point of bitter bride for the treedrian mother. Her children were not weak, they would endure, and someday, they would be free.

The journey was harsh for the Novax as well. As the centuries passed, other Chrysalises fell from contact, energy spent and falling into whatever nearest planet or sun came near, to either perish or to begin the nightmare again if the world might be alive enough to feed another worm. New treedrians rooted in the ships as elder ones died, bled dry of sap and hope both, and as time wore on, they too withered and were replaced. Earthia remained, and in time, Archangel was the only Chrysalis still star-worthy, and Earthia was the only one of the planet-born treedrians left, remembering sun-kissed Verdant, remembering a life not of the Chrysalis.

Hope dwindled, and Earthia withdrew, the drone of the Chrysalis too much for her heart. She surfaced less and less often to speak with her offspring, unaware of the rites they continued to perform and the honors they continued to shower her with as she became a symbol for something none of them could possibly imagine anymore. Like Archangel, she was growing weary, her energy spent. The seasons came slower, time and its passing harder and harder to remember aboard the unchanging Chrysalis, and each season brought forth fewer fruits from her branches.

Galaxina was so much like her mother in appearance, and spirit. She led her season like a young queen despite being a slave, spoke the words of hope strongly to her sisters and brothers and cousins that Earthia could only manage to whisper now. She had come again to the roots of her mother, her sparse handful of siblings waiting.

"What are you carrying?"

"She was the only one of the seedlings to survive."

"Our mother won't be able to seed again, all of her energy is gone."

A collective sorrowful sigh.

"Will the Masters come for her now?"

"Don't say that!"

"Bad luck around a baby."

"Yes, we still have her! This little one needs a name."

From deep inside her dimming dream, Earthia stirred, an unfelt breeze rustling her autumnal branches, casting fragmented shadows in the yellow light given off by the ceiling's eyes. "...Cosmo."

"Mother!" her children gasped in astonished delight, a few of them never having heard her speak yet in their lifetimes.

"Name her Cosmo. The last of my children... the last of my last hope..."
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Join the millions that use us for their forum communities. Create your own forum today.
Learn More · Register for Free
« Previous Topic · Far Away Complete · Next Topic »
Locked Topic

Etavarium Theme created by Zeus00 and converted by Wolt of the ZetaBoards Theme Zone