Ilshar Ard’sabekh


The opening of a row of bemused eyes met Flux’s facetious question about particle shields. Did it look as if they had one? A laugh was all well and good here, this far from the battlefield, but Ilshar found that how humorous one found anything involving high explosives tended to drop sharply the closer one was to the detonation point.

“No, and that is why I’m asking,” he tapped over the upper joints of his armour, checking for warpings from the last operation. Finding a loose link once in the vacuum would have been an unpleasant surprise. “Burning your way through half the station to retrieve us will have been a waste of time if we’re incinerated because you hit a bulkhead too close. And me, I don’t intend to rejoin the folds of the Nexus yet.”

Unfolding beady organules continued to eye the scielto warily. Ilshar was not sure if he had asked about the faith in earnest - the question was not a meaningless one, for a layman - or was making light of it. Did their worm-kind even understand what it meant to know beyond knowing? Much as they sometimes styled themselves with ethereal trappings, he had never heard of any putting any real stock into it.

“Worms are born from the loam, and so they are of it, like we are of the rotting Spiral. But they are not the only thing that returns to mulch. The cosmic maw awaits us all. Be careful.”



It had been one thing to see Sargasso in the sterile light of a projection and sweep through quantified etheric readout data. It was another entirely to see it, to feel it in person. Noxious ripples of immaterial fallout pervaded what to some might have been empty space. The soundless drone of innumerable life-threads, corroded and parasitizing, radiated from no particular direction, echoing from its own folds. The place itself was alive, not just as a hive swarming with scavengers and murk-dwellers, but like a corpse whose putrescent flesh becomes a receptacle for new life.

A strikingly apt comparison, Ilshar thought as he steadied itself on the outside of the decaying space station. The insulation of his vacuum-suit shrouded his body, limiting the angles at which he could extrude sight-organs. Between it and the ambient energy sending his Chasm-attuned symbiotes into a stir, even just standing there was slightly disorienting. It would probably help to get moving.

“Maybe the hatch is not suspicious enough,” he commented as the squad advanced towards the least ominous of the ingress points, “It’s what thinking, material boarders would use. We might not be the first.”

Still, it might have been the safest option regardless. Pirates, junkers or whatever other dregs might await within were a concrete enemy, one that could be shot or stabbed. With the Chasm, things were not always so certain.

Ilshar walked in the middle of the squad, eyes kept in all directions as far as his armoured suit allowed. The ulvath would have been unwieldy in cramped quarters, besides running the risk of puncturing something, and so he kept it slung at rest. He held his piercer gun in his left hand, while the right, empty, rhythmically wriggled its fingers. He could feel the material feelers of the worm-host stirring within his forearm, ready to burst out. Perhaps it would be sated soon enough.