The woods were quiet. This was nothing unusual - it was rare for anything to make much of a racket when someone was around - and, indeed, that was what was good about it. Nothing unusual meant everything was going smooth.
And still, there was an unease in that silence that not even years of familiarity could dispel. Perhaps they even made it worse, as one who knew this quiet was well aware of how often it was just waiting to be suddenly broken. No matter how long one spent in it, it never got really predictable. Sometimes you would expect a shuffling to roll out of the undergrowth all of a sudden, only to go for the entire day without hearing a sound of anything alive, while on other days you could think you were having a break and could well make it to sunset without being noticed, and be sent running by a shambling just by your elbow. You never could be sure of anything anywhere, yes, but out in the woods it was at the worst. And the further you went, the worse it got.
Of course, most of the time the silence was not really all that. As long as you kept walking, whether you wanted it or not, you would keep hearing yourself. Birds still sang, somewhere overhead well out of sight, and sometimes forest streams gurgled loud enough to tell which way they were. It was only when you came close to an old place that these sounds would start fading, little by little. There were no streams in sight of the collapsed walls or toppled towers, and the birds never seemed to come very close. The old places were dead, and only a grave-worm would stir them up now. But then, if you got to live by being a grave-worm, it was a pretty good trade. Or so Red found, at least.
The squat, hirsute man edged his way past a low-hanging branch, weighed down by a mass of yellow leaves, and vaulted over a shallow burrow in the ground without taking his eyes away from the snippets of grey that peered out from between the overgrown limbs of a fallen tree some way ahead. A glance with the bottom of an eye now and then was enough for the forest floor, but the ruins, those were what was worth watching from as soon as possible. Not just because it was best to get an eyeful of what they were like early on so he did not have to mill about them longer than needed. No, he just liked the feeling of taking them in, grim and slightly unsettling as it was. A small cold jolt to the stomach at the sight of those enormous carcasses, almost like seeing an ugly corpse and thinking that something like that had been alive earlier, and maybe still was somewhere. Not quite like that - there was nothing ugly about an old place, really - but thinking of what was dead and what was not, it turned out, was almost always alike. It was good for taking his mind off of sore feet, too.
The hollow bulk he was looking at now was almost as imposing as he had ever seen them. It had to have been a castle or something like that once, with huge walls of thick stacked blocks, still marked by the jagged remains of collapsed turrets. As he wound through the last stretch of forest around it, he turned his head down more and more often, running his eyes over sparse large stones and pieces of ground-corners that still held together in spite of age. The massive had obviously not stood alone in its prime, but that had been so long ago that the wood had all but reclaimed the last traces of its hangers-on.
The place itself, though, was too big for that. Weeds had spread over its wall like rot on a proper corpse, but it would be a long time yet before they pushed anything loose. The trees near the crumbling mouth of the gateway were still thin, and the dead leaves under them mostly came from the older, taller ones he was still not quite out of. Just as much as one could not tell how long it had already stood there, it looked as though it would keep standing like that for a time that was lost far beyond the day-to-day future that everyone knew these days.
Something rustled in the distance behind his back, and Red tore his eyes away from the colossal ruin. From where he was, he could not see what had made that noise, nor the next one when it came, or the one after that. It could have been the wind, though the leaves around him looked still. He spat on a finger and held it up, feeling the air. Not even a breath. Something rustled again, closer, heavy. He strained his eyes in the direction he thought it came from, hard to tell as it was. The brush and fallen branches moved a few throws of a stone away, and bleak, swampy shapes pushed their way past the yellowing growth. The air was too still to really feel much, but even so his trained nose picked up the stench of Filth. A lot of them.
As quietly as he could, putting his feet down heel-first, Red backed behind the cover of a thick old tree. He knew well enough by then that this did not help any, since the fuckers, he was sure, did not see or maybe even hear, but felt things in some terrible way they had. Nevertheless, the gesture itself made him at least feel safer, a show less for them than for himself.
It was by far not the first time he had run across Filth like this, by day or night. He had always hidden when there was room to, though he knew that what saved him was not that, but the thing that he knew - that he was too small and too poor, that he walked too lightly over the earth to be worth their while getting. Some things you learned to remember very early when you were sure that someone knew you did. And now, like always, he less hoped than knew that they would not even nod his way and keep going whatever way they were going. Flies were not afraid when a dog went by, long as they knew for sure they were flies.
The rustling did not fade somewhere to the side. It got louder. Red frowned and peered out from the edge of the trunk. The lead grunt was not stopping or going sideways. It kept coming towards him, right towards him, gathering speed to break into a run. The rest were close behind. No mistaking that. They could not even be going for the ruin; the tree was a little off the way to it.
The grunts pushed off the ground with a foot, like a single body, and rushed ahead, arms grasping forward.
With a “Shit” over an inhaled breath, Red shoved himself away from the tree and burst into a sprint. He grabbed the axe from his belt, but did not stop or turn. To get caught in the open by that many of them would be a wish to be dead soon. The best, and, really, only hope now was the old place itself. While he had never quite seen how well the Filth found their way through something they could not so easily smash down, he had never met any very far into a standing ruin, either. Maybe they, too, lost their way as easily as green scrappers who got in too far, because they could not feel a dead place. No point thinking about that now. He would find out soon enough anyway.
It was lucky he had already been close when they caught up to him. He was still into the first rush when he crossed past the old threshold. He slowed down the faintest bit, quickly taking in the space beyond. There was a small doorway to the right into what must have been a watchman’s place and the rooms behind it, but some large stones had crumbled down to clog it on the other side. That left only the end of the passage ahead, and, pushing his feet to their full strength again, he ran for it. Behind his back, he could hear splattering footsteps and gurgling groans catching up to him. He swore again on another intake of breath.
The light at the further exit from the corridor under the walls came from a large courtyard, overgrown and littered with the broken remains of what might have once been statues or pillars. Between its size and the flash from emerging into the daylight after the short dive through the passageway’s shadows, Red’s eyes were dazzled for a moment, unable to find the closest way out. There was sure to be one in a place this large, but that certainty alone was not much help. All he could do was keep putting as much distance as he could between himself and the Filth, without tripping over the debris lying all about. Easier said than done.
Veering sideways on one foot, he sped along the wall, whose corners had been worn out by time to a soft almost-roundedness. It was a roundabout way, but mostly sure to keep him away from dangerous terrain. When a few blinks focused his sight again, he saw that perhaps it would have been better to take the risk. The grunts had emerged into the courtyard, and the first ones were moving straight ahead to cut him off in the middle of the curve he was turning. The way behind was barred by the rest, and, as if to make things even harder on purpose, the only clear doorway he could see was almost at the other end of the place.
Red could think fast if he had to, but in this case there was nothing to really think about. In a sharp turn, he broke his wall-hugging path and made directly for the doorway, avoiding the largest lumps of worn stone he could see with a corner of the eye. The head grunt, which had been aiming to catch him further away, stumbled to skid to a halt, swinging its abnormally long arms about. He had been ready for that. The head of his axe swept before him and caught the creature in the shoulder, slowing his run but pushing its already unstable footing into a stagger. A rough pull wrenched the weapon from the cloying mass, and he darted again before the grunt regained its balance and the rest caught up.
The last dash to the doorway was a narrow run, but still lax enough for him to make it. Fortunately, it was small enough for only one to pass at a time, or at least had gotten that way with age. Once a few steps inside, he let his dully aching legs and grasping lungs rest, the slightest moment, then turned about, axe at the ready. Just about in time; one of the grunts was shouldering its way behind him, one arm reaching. Another step back - the bulky limb smashed into the stone wall, knocking dust and broken pieces loose - then a lunge, and the axe came down between the beast’s headless shoulders. He pulled it back as soon as he felt the putrid flesh under the blade soften into yielding ooze, and sprang further into the building as the rapidly melting hulk he had left behind was trampled by its fellows in pursuit.
Inside, the ruin had held much better, though only insomuch as fewer doors and rooms were buried in collapsed ceilings. Red did not take the time to check them as he passed, but from quick glances they were mostly barren, except for mounds of dust and mouldering wood that could once have been furniture. Any of them would have been worth rustling over to see if something good was left underneath, but this time he did not have the leisure. What he needed was a place that would do for hiding. He did not go into how that would or would not help shake off the Filth - first he found it, and then he could figure out the rest.
The corridor turned, sometimes split at sharp angles - he always took the right, no point mucking things up now - climbed up steep stairs, slick with wear. It hit him he had not realised how big the place really was from out there, or maybe he had just not expected so much of it to be intact. Rooms, corridors, more rooms, a few huge hallways. The edges of his sight were starting to go dark. He could no longer hear how close the Filth were over his ragged breathing and the thumping of his heart. He was getting exhausted, and the clear spaces showed no sign of giving way to complete ruin. A thought flashed through his dimming mind - he had better make use of that before he was caught in an actual dead end.
A room that looked bigger than the rest flashed ahead along the corridor, and he dove into it when it came into reach. Panting, he glanced around. A big window, he had never broken from the wallside. Dust everywhere, dust and cobwebs. This place had been well-stocked once. His tired head ran through with amazement when he saw in the wall to the right, behind a large grey mound scattered with the rotted remains of ancient planks, another, smaller dark doorway. A long time ago, something had apparently stood covering it, though now only thick webs hung across its frame. So, Red thought. If it had been a hiding place of some kind back then, maybe, it could just as well be one now. The cobwebs meant there could not be an ambush inside. Brushing the dusty threads aside, he edged into the dark space.
By then, he had recovered enough to hear the sounds hounding him again. The heavy, damp-sounding steps were closer than he had hoped, though there were thankfully few of them. Only one. He breathed with relief - they had split up. While that still left him with at least this one on his back, it meant they could not find him all together. Even now, the odds would have been stacked against him. The rooms might have been narrow, but he was run out, and they never got tired.
One was a lot better, but, if he was not careful, still enough to do him in. As the steps approached, he hoped, this time for real, that they would go past the room, further down the corridor. But, as soon as the thought had taken shape in his head, a squat, thickset bulk with long grasping arms trampled through the doorway. They felt, of course. They did not need to see. The grunt moved, with its blind confidence, straight towards the once-hidden opening. That was bad. If he was going to make the best of the obstacle, he had to back away. One step, two, the creature came closer, three -
His back hit something large and heavy. With his attention fully on the grunt, the start was so strong he jumped with a loud “Godsfuck!”, almost losing his grip on the axe. The grunt, either having its senses confirmed or seeing an opening to strike, lunged. It was still too far to land a proper blow, but a club-like hand caught him under the shoulder, sending him careening back. The creature sprang forward to press its advantage, but its broad frame was caught in the doorway - just long enough for Red to regain his feet. A step ahead, then to the side, avoiding another blow, and the axe cut through the pustulent surface the thing had instead of a head.
Breathing heavily, he stumbled out into the light, shoving the liquefying carcass to the side with a foot. He smiled to himself as he noticed a faint grimy, misshapen footprint between the doorway and the corridor. It would have been too much to hope that stepping into that one puddle at the entrance would have been enough for the grunts to leave a complete path up to there, but if something was still visible, it meant that a few hints would be left here and there for getting out or avoiding the others. That would save him a good deal of head-scratching later.
The others, right. He listened, rubbing the dull pain where the grunt’s blow had glanced across his arm, and struggled to pick up the faintest sound over the distant noises of the forest that came through the window. Nothing coming closer. The creatures were sure to still be somewhere inside, and would be for a while, but it looked like he was safe for now. For everything they could be, he had rarely come across Filth being quiet. If another got there, he would know it ahead of time.
Leaning against the dusty wall gave him a moment to think about the whole thing. They had come after him, on his own, for the first time, and a lot of them too. Why was that? He had always been careful not to take anything they would want - his axe and knife were good, but old, and he had been wearing these clothes for years. He had not changed anything about those lately, and everything he picked up he made sure to sell straight away. Right, except-
His hand went to the large bag hanging behind his shoulder. A firm, sharp circle shape poked into his fingers through the leather. Course, it had to be that. Biggest prize in a long while, so big that none of the regulars had the pocket for it. It was not as though he had not suspected that taking the crown back into the wilds would not bring him any trouble, but he had nowhere safe to leave it otherwise - important rule for someone who went around, no such thing as a safeplace - and he for sure had not expected that kind of mob. He had thought of the idea behind crowns, of course, that the ones who used to wear them were just the kind the Filth were after now, but really? A rusty old hoop suddenly mattered more than the kind of folk he had been his whole life?
He chuckled. Did he expect the Filth to see through anything? He was not sure they were dumb, but they sure had never cared for that kind of stuff.
Shaking his head, he turned back to the smaller doorway. The crown had landed him in this shit, but there would be better time to deal with it when he had gotten out of there. For now, he was in a fresh old place, with a hiding spot of some kind right in front of him. If he had ever seen something like a perfect place for finding things, it had to be this one. Besides, he should check what he had bumped into.
Red reached into a smaller pouch at his side and produced a thick tallow candle, already burned out a third of the way through but missing the lines of old molten rivulets, followed by a rag and a small bundle. The rag was wrapped around the candle’s base, old traces of caked tallow bared as he unfolded it, and, as he held it between three spare fingers, the firesteel from the bundle threw a few sparks from between his thumb and free hand. One of them caught the wick, and he held the wavering light into the dim chamber.
Unlike most dark places he had been in, being open to the window in the next room had left the air barely stale at all, and the candle burned well. The thing he had stepped into was a tall mass of wrinkled stone and shadows. He moved closer, holding the flame higher.
An etched face met his eyes with its own stern, unmoving stare. A statue. The edges of its figure were dull and nondescriptly smooth with years, but, inside its little hiding place, it had held much better than most of its kind he had seen before. He could even still see some of the cleverly carved finer lines of a different, fleshier kind of age around its wilful-looking features. Whoever this had been, she had sure gone on looking pretty fine into her older times. Unless, he thought with a smirk, the one who had made this had just been buttering her up this way for some extra coin. Or some special noble kind of favour, he silently added, noticing a crown on the sculpted woman’s brow. It was a simple, almost plain sort of circlet, but a crown was a crown, as even the Filth had proved to him. Besides, with all the work that had to have gone into the face, maybe the artist just could not be arsed to spend a lot of time on a fancier thing.
Impressive as it was, a statue that big was not something he could take, and he lowered his eyes to the floor, sweeping the candle’s glow around the room. Like he had expected, there was not much that jumped out at first sight. What might once have been chairs in a far corner - he smeared the dust under them flat to see if anything was there, but did not touch the wooden heaps themselves; that was sure to be bad luck. A small mound in the other corner did not have anything, either. Strange, he had missed one just by the statue’s base. Not that it was any more likely - no, see. Something dully glistened in the candlelight at his feet.
Bending down with a huff, Red picked up the small piece of metal, fingers sliding carefully around rough stains of rust. A ring, looked too small to fit on his finger, though maybe if he tried… Not with all that rust on it, anyway. It had to be iron. Nothing too precious-looking in that, but the shape was a strange one. It had some pieces that poked out in a spot, like one of those, how were they, signets fancy ones sometimes had. He had never seen any on something as dull as an iron ring, though. It was nothing too fine-looking, either, just a few tall squares. They looked a bit like what houses would be if they would just turn out the way they were meant to. The fact they were not even in size just made them look even more like a row on a street, if a street only got a little taller than the space between a nail and a finger.
With a hum, he slipped the ring into a pouch and cast about in a last attempt to find something around the room. No luck, of course, but he felt he had already found more than enough. It was strange enough for just an iron jewel to have signs on it like that, and he sure as damn did not remember seeing any of that kind before. Maybe something very long ago - nah, unlikely. Either way, he had already been thinking of going to see the folks in Jornoston about the crown. He would keep this other odd thing aside for them, too. They might know what was up with it, and if not, well, they sure would find something better to do with it.
His thoughts went ahead as he stepped out of the room and blew out the candle, frowning. This place was the other side of Kendles, which meant he would have to stop there at least for the night, and he had nothing else to sell. Red leaned against the dusty wall near the window as he wrapped up and pocketed both candle and rag. He would have to go through at least some other rooms and look for smaller things to trade on the way, that was for sure. But not right now. Better wait until the rest of the Filth might have left, or at least a couple more came by there so he could take them out for sure.
the Conflux, the Innumerate Suns, skirol, “maggots”
General Information
Major Belligerent
Overview
The Conflux is ostensibly a liberal and prosperous, if somewhat bellicose and reclusive union of culturally young species growing and developing under the benevolent oversight of the powerful skirol. What the galaxy knows about it and its true nature are, however, entirely different things. Behind its bright and vibrant facade of disinformation, the Conflux is a predatory hegemony where the skirol rule over hordes of mutated grunts and prisoners of monstrous abattoir worlds, and barter with the flesh of sapients degraded to cattle.
History
The history of the Conflux is, belying the truth about its structure, mostly that of the skirol. Once one of many parasitic species plaguing the megafauna of their homeworld, they outcompeted their evolutionary rivals not through symbiosis with their hosts, as many others had tried, but by growing increasingly malignant, large and ferocious. By the time they crawled their way to sentience, they had become the apex of the food chain; and, by the time their disparate civilisations had mastered space travel, the once fertile planet had been mostly scoured of life, not so much by rampant exploitation as by the unfortunately specialised alimentary needs of its inhabitants. Curiously, the skirol never formed a unified planetary government. A generally accepted explanation is that the need for one was obviated by the rarity of armed conflicts and international regulations being disfavoured relatively to case-by-case diplomatic agreements, though many historians believe this to be an oversimplification.
The foundations of the Conflux proper were only laid when the skirol discovered that they were not alone in the galaxy. A prospecting interstellar expedition by the Accord of Theniax, then a relatively minor nation, encountered a pre-spacefaring species in a newly discovered system. The skirol had a difficult time coming to grips with the idea that anything else could be intelligent in the same way as them, something many are still not fully convinced of to this day. It did not help matters that most of the Accord subscribed to the aggressive faith of the Wurm Raslir, whose cosmology left little room for friendly contact. Though inferior in numbers to an entire planet’s people, Theniax had vastly superior technology and the advantage of orbital control. The newly met species, its original name stricken and forgotten, was pillaged, enslaved and processed to be fit for consumption by the skirol. Willing collaborators were “rewarded” by being subjected to experimental augmentation procedures and, if they survived, accepted by a society that thought little of their betrayal. Almost overnight, the Accord became a major player on the market and political scene, which contributed to the spread of the religion of the Wurm until it surpassed many of the previously dominant confessions.
The Reaping of Irret-Thenn, as it became known, gave an explosive new motivation for interstellar colonisation and set a precedent for future contact. The skirol had discovered a taste for intelligent meat, and wherever they happened over the miracle of life, which they were lucky enough to do a few times more in the following centuries, their sleek, spiny ships descended like a hungry swarm, subjugating, harvesting, and uplifting defectors to bolster their forces.
Although their intentions never changed, and indeed have not to this day, the skirol’s first clashes with other spacefaring powers made them rethink their strategy. Faced with prey they could not overwhelm through brute force and fearing that they would face war on all fronts if their practices came to light, their governments, in an unprecedented display of joint effort, assembled to build an enormous masquerade that spanned the entirety of skirol-held space. The Harmonious Conflux of the Hundred Suns, as it was known at the time, was formed as an international organ with sweeping authority to curtail and oversee external communication, projecting an aseptically neutral and rather enigmatic public image. The burgeoning population descended from the various uplifted inductees, now largely mutated and modified beyond recognition, was rebranded as a number of minor protectorates, and the existence of the conquered harvest worlds became a dark secret hidden in the depths of Conflux space.
Nevertheless, the skirol’s hunger for new tastes only grew, and with subterfuge instead of force they had only traded one weapon for another. Where mere expansionism was judged unacceptable, finding more civil pretexts to skirmish with their neighbours, and not only, became a favourite sport. From border disputes over some drifting asteroid to false flags set up by uplift mercenaries, Conflux forces made a habit of sweeping into their targets’ backwater colonial holdings on the flimsiest casus belli, abducting the population and concealing the strange disappearances with massive collateral damage. The conflict was then smothered in protracted negotiations, and usually ended with the offer of token reparations, though this was of little comfort to the captives, en route to becoming the latest flavour on the market. Of course, when the skirol were confident enough of their superiority, formalities were forgone altogether, and small colonies just inexplicably vanished before anyone could tell what hit them. An entire industry sprang up around this sort of raiding, from specialist harvester companies to teams of treaty loophole-seekers, and in time it grew to become one of the main pillars supporting the economy of the Conflux, by then already comprising Innumerate Suns and having spread into a catch-all term for skirol holdings and activities.
Needless to say, the advent of the Ashtar hit it badly. While at first they flatly disregarded the imposition of peace and gleefully carried on with their hit-and-runs, they quickly found that not even their raiding fleets, whose speed and stealth were the pride of skirol engineering, could outrun retribution. Growing furious and desperate as this once hugely profitable niche was choked, threatening their entire market, they struck at the Ashtar directly, sending droves of warships against their response parties, but only succeeded in wearing themselves down.
The worst, however, was yet to come. With as little warning as they did anything, the Ashtar struck at the Conflux’s harvest worlds, bypassing their outermost defensive perimeters altogether. The skirol guards were scattered, their stranglehold over the planets shattered, and centuries of conditioning and forced obedience were undone in a matter of hours, former captives shaking off the constraints of a lifetime. It was a miracle that the skirol's cover held at all, mostly owing to everyone else having better things to keep them busy and what information got out being later dismissed as provocations spread by rebellious subjects. Cornered and heavily wounded where it had never expected a blow, the Conflux gathered the largest warfleet in its history and prepared to attack the Ashtar head-on, regardless of the disparity of forces. Or, at least, it tried. Individual battlegroups were intercepted, gathering points were blockaded, and the final assembled force, mere scraps of its projected magnitude, was faced with the imposing mass of Prevailing Tranquility. Threatened with complete annihilation, the skirol had no choice but to resign themselves to a heavily downsized diet and market, though their resentment grew and festered.
By the time the Ashtar disappeared, the Conflux was starved for fresh meat and on the brink of economic collapse, having been deprived both of its old conquests and the lucrative raids. It is thus little wonder that it was at the forefront when the Great War erupted, looking to make up for lost time by gobbling up as many people as it could, appearances be damned. However, it soon became clear that all its rage had little of a punch behind it; built for rapid and precise tactical operations, its military had never been prepared for sustained conflict. Attrition took its toll, even as its forces were spread thin by the simultaneous effort of retaking the liberated harvest worlds, and when the Madrigasa talks came about the Conflux dragged itself to the table beaten and broken, with few real gains to show for it.
Yet those few scrapings proved vital, giving a brief reprieve for the Innumerate Suns to sustain themselves as they turned their attention inward to sharply reorganise their workings. The Detente saw heavy work on the harvest worlds, which were rebuilt and reshaped into streamlined breeding grounds. In a bold move that many feared would threaten the Conflux’s facade, but was ultimately recognised as necessary, the market was opened to external trade, (supposed) slaves in particular becoming a valued commodity both as imports and exports. Along with offering a much-needed influx of foreign wealth, many saw this as an opportunity to smooth over the skirol’s reputation in at least some corners of the international stage after a litigious and belligerent past.
This period of revolutions had, however, some adverse effects as well. The seeds of radical ideological movements had been sown during the hardships of the past recession, and a changing society brought them to the fore. Rogue underground factions gained alarming power, and their sometimes unsubtle machinations more than once strained both Detente and masquerade to their limits.
Incidentally, those same rogue factions gave the Conflux a convenient excuse when the Message pointed the way to Agdemnar, and officially the skirol force that has dug in on the planet is controlled by any number of extremist groups. Still, the roots of conspiracy have had decades to sink deep into its reconstructed society, and sometimes the brains at high command themselves wonder just how much of that is merely a cover story.
Major Holdings
Vesereth: The homeworld of the skirol, once shared along millennia-old repartitions by their elder nations, has gradually been overtaken by the Conflux’s administration as the organisation’s significance grew, and now serves as the de facto capital of the Innumerate Suns. While most of the old polities maintain a token presence in culturally and historically important places, most of the planet is considered neutral ground. This makes it a favoured meeting ground for settling diplomatic disputes, as well as being the neural center of the Conflux’s activities of communications, transit, market and to an extent military oversight. The planet’s heavily urbanised surface is an amalgamation of architectural styles as diverse as many are ancient, with remains of its peculiar megafauna ecosystem surviving only in sparse reservations.
Giaxil: The Lisrak Covenant has, for most of skirol history, been the largest and most powerful sovereign state to stretch its holdings beyond Vesereth, and in some aspects this still holds true. Though temporary outpaced when Theniax struck it rich with the Reaping, the old money of the Conflux more than recouped its losses with the rise of the raiding industry, and for a long time dominated the niche with its unequaled military might. The post-bellum need for remodernisation only served to cement its position as the strongest pillar of Conflux’s military-industrial complex. The seat of the Lisrak government embodies this role, being a bustling hive of factories, laboratories, military compouds and marketplaces of all calibers. Life on Giaxil is busy to the point of being frantic, but also famously well-paid.
Ur’Theniax: In many ways the polar opposite of Lisrak, the Accord of Theniax never shifted its attention away from its resounding success in the Reaping, instead choosing to capitalise on the practice of world harvesting and its various products. Besides swelling to obscene wealth through careful exploitation of the flesh trade, biotechnological research sponsored by it made leaps and bounds thanks to the abundance of high-quality subjects that were ethically and legally free game, its society was always the most progressive in its acceptance of uplifted Acolytes, and its patronage of the church of the Wurm let it reap the rewards of its cultural primacy. In contrast with Giaxil, its capital of Ur’Theniax is a clean, quiet and photogenic paradise, decorated with ample stretches of unspoiled nature. It is ideal estate for research facilities, elite trading hubs (usually dealing more with stocks than the actual deal), religious centers and luxury estates for wealthy skirol or successful Acolytes.
The Silent Maw: Located at the fringes of Conflux space and the one of the few places in it freely accessible to outsiders, the Silent Maw is one of the most concrete signs of the social restructuring that has pervaded the Innumerate Suns. This vast, well-fortified habitat station, strategically placed at a convergence of several local transit routes, is the greatest slave trading hub in skirol territory, and certainly one of, if not the largest in the galaxy altogether. While maintained by the Conflux itself, the nature of the business that takes place on it such that some concessions need to be made for more legally dubious clientele, and thus, despite standard surveillance and the application of tax rates, transactions can easily be held in complete anonymity.
Kardatt: During the Detente-era industry reforms, the reconquered harvest worlds, the Conflux’s closest-held secret, underwent radical renovations to become the backbone of the now once more insular flesh trade. Kardatt, one of the last inhabited planets to be conquered in the first period of skirol expansion, and thus comparatively less ruinated by rampant exploitation, was the prototype of the chillingly efficient new model, and remains a symbol of the undertaking’s success. Heavily defended and camouflaged, the planet is a hell of assembly lines, breeding pens, cloning chambers and worse, regularly churning out herds of debased beings to sate the skirol’s hunger.
Demographics
Population
Skirol - 78% officially; 56% effectively
Acolytes - 22% officially; 16% effectively
Others - none officially; 28% effectively
Skirol: A species of malignant parasites who grew to exceed the size, strength and intelligence usually held by such organisms, but never lost their voracity and primitive non-dimorphic, worm-like appearance. Their prehensile branching tongues supply to the needs of fine manipulation, though nowadays most prefer to use mechanical prosthetic aid. In ideal conditions, they can live for a surprisingly long time, exceeding several centuries even unaugmented; however, this is generally only achieved by the wealthiest among them. Strictly carnivorous, skirol, in an atavistic throwback, prefer consuming their prey alive, slowly draining it of fluids and externally digested organs before finishing the desiccated body in a few bites of their bone-breakingly powerful jaws. Psintegrat aptitude among them is unusually rare, though those that do show potential can develop tremendous powers.
Acolytes: A blanket term for beings descended from the minorities of conquered populations that willingly joined the skirol. Generations of bio-augmentic tinkering and simply living among their masters have long made every Acolyte unrecognisable as the species their ancestors had once been, their bodies warped beyond nature and their minds overtaken by an alien culture. Having abandoned every vestige of their old lifestyles out of scorn, desire to integrate into the dominant society, or simple convenience, they mostly reproduce through cloning or artificial parthenogenesis. While they can be divided into a number of mostly stable breeds, every Acolyte is a biologically unique entity, shaped by a free choice of augmentations and distinguishing marks of their occupation.
Others: The ones you won’t find in any census or galactic atlas. Despite forming a sizable percentage of the Conflux’s overall population, the inhabitants of subjugated planets are not recognised as sapient members of it. Bred in gigantic factories that were once their homeworlds, they are treated, sold and devoured like cattle by the skirol, and centuries of debasement have indeed left most of them mentally little better than animals. Those that do reach the public eye do so as exotic slaves from allegedly primitive worlds. In late pre-Ashtar times, this category has been expanded to include the victims of abduction raids, who are likewise subjected to the same treatment.
Society
Traditionally, the structure of skirol society has rested on the notion of the trezklin. This word, loosely translatable as “swarm” (though much of its meaning is lost), denotes a large, but tightly bound family unit living and working in close vicinity. Spanning various levels of more or less extended kinship, trezklin are extremely diverse in size; the smallest might count around a dozen members, while the largest number in the hundreds, and in some cases even the low thousands. Those numbers are, naturally, in constant fluctuation as some leave the family web to join another or found their own nucleus, and others are conversely taken in as they come to join a new mate or several. Single skirol living outside a trezklin are not quite uncommon, and are growing progressively less so in modern times, but are still regarded as eccentrics.
The reason for this is that, now as thousands of years ago, by and large it is the trezklin, and not the individual, that is considered the minimal formant unit of society. Jobs have historically been, rather than positions to be filled by fungible appropriately skilled workers, dynastic traditions upheld by the members of the same trezklin over the generations. The staff of a facility, the crew of a ship, an entire military unit; each of these was, and in many places still is, far more often than not a family in addition to everything else. Young skirol were quite literally born into their roles, and raised accordingly. This did not, however, negate social mobility; those dissatisfied with their position could seek membership of a different trezklin, if they were accepted and proved they possessed the necessary aptitudes, and units judged to be underperforming by those higher in the hierarchy (itself a rather complex notion; more details in the government description) could be downgraded to a lower position and replaced.
While this system has held from the birth of skirol civilisation, ever since the species began to expand into interplanetary space its inflexibility and difficulty in adapting to the needs of spacefaring nations became apparent. Assigning jobs to individuals was a completely alien idea which all but the most radical visionaries struggled to even process, but a compromise was found in the shape of what came to be known as anrak-trezklin, or “surrogate” trezklin. Those are typically groups of skirol who join together in order to receive a temporary position, and only remain thus until the term of the job has expired. Although those anrak-trezklin can occasionally develop into actual families, in most cases the relationships holding them together are purely businesslike, with each member still considered part of their trezklin of origin and expecting to return there. A gradual shift has made this model of employment the dominant one on the modern market, though, depending on the place and field, old dynastic trezklin occupations are still common enough, and the progressive integration of Acolytes has made individual work a more widely accepted, if still curious reality.
Despite the enduring rigidity of its structures and the perpetual control of communications by Conflux authorities to ensure the truth about the harvest worlds is not leaked out, skirol society is surprisingly liberal. With no clear division of class beyond disparity of income, the goods and privileges available to any citizen depend exclusively on their wealth, and extreme poverty is, if not completely nonexistent, becoming increasingly rare. Basic commodities are generally affordable to any social stratum, not in the least because, though the skirol enjoy luxury, they can easily subsist on very few minimal necessities, albeit how comfortable that subsistence is can be debated. Nevertheless, a permissive social order and a widespread striving for profit contribute to a rather competitive environment, which results in further entrenchment and insularity of the trezklin - the reason why solitary lifestyles are still discouraged at a distance of centuries.
The position of Acolytes in all this is an ambiguous one. Nominally accepted, they are neither skirol, nor do they have an innate drive to form trezklin. Because of the integrational difficulties caused by this, Acolytes have long remained on the fringes of Conflux society, trying to build their own cultures and communities with varying degrees of success and interacting with the wider macrocosm of the Innumerate Suns in the capacity of mercenaries and hirelings most of the time. Theniax has always been a notable exception, showing itself more willing to accommodate the needs of its recruits by creating professional niches available for individuals. Besides easing the access of Acolytes into society, this has had the added effect of lessening the stigma around solitary living, as this has become a viable choice for skirol as well. Due to this, most of the Conflux’s members have long been reluctant to follow Theniax’s example, though more and more concessions are being made in this direction in recent times given the beneficial results of this policy.
In a society that is, at its core, market-driven, the importance of religion has long been on the decline. Nevertheless, the inherently conservative nature of the trezklin has so far considerably slowed the withdrawal of spirituality from the Conflux, in a personal if not a political way. Among the many ancestral devotions and latter-day cults of the skirol, a majority of which tend to adopt some form of skewed animism, the most popular remains the worship of the Wurm Raslir, which is likewise overwhelmingly dominant among the Acolytes. According to its doctrine, the Wurm, commonly interpreted to be symbolic of the skirol species, is a vast metaphysical entity that parasitises the cosmos itself, taking what it needs and giving nothing in return but the wisdom of its example. If one considers the immense historical impact of its teachings after it was brought to relevance, it is really little wonder that the Conflux should have become what it is today.
Economy
Until the Detente, the Conflux’s policy of isolationistic aggression caused its economy to develop in a self-contained form, with the only, albeit not insignificant, influx from outside coming in the guise of abduction victims. Consequently, while a lack of external stimulation might have prevented it from growing to its fullest potential, the proportionally greater importance placed on self-sufficiency contributed to the formation of a powerful and diverse production base and an active internal market. Where this impetus would have proven insufficient for a lesser nation, the Innumerate Suns’ colossal reserves of territory and xeno-power, as well as the skirol’s physiological needs allowing for problems in sectors like agriculture to be solved in uniquely economical ways, proved a sturdy foundation for an industry of titanic power. An adequate example of this strength needs be sought no further than its performance during the Great War, where the Conflux’s fleets, despite their defeat by the Ashtar and subpar performance in prolonged combat, blazed through most of the conflict almost exclusively through force of numbers. While the industrial complex has not yet fully recovered from that strain, its reconstruction has thus far been steady, partially owing to the market reforms.
Arguably the most important of the latter has been the decision to make the Conflux’s economic scene more accessible for outside trade. Although its stringent information control regulations prevent it from entertaining foreign presences outside the Silent Maw and a few other approved trade hubs, its own merchants are seen abroad much more often, and remote transactions, however laconic, are gaining in popularity. Most notably, the Conflux has spent the best part of the decades of peace making a name for itself on the international slave and bio-construct markets, whether legal or less so - a distinction it finds wholly irrelevant, beyond how it might negatively impact its public image. Beyond having grown to a major actor in these fields, the Innumerate Suns have adopted a more open stance vis-a-vis the exchange of heavy industry products, importing machinery and ship components from relatively cheap corporate sources and selling their own. Traces of the skirol’s notorious insularity remain as entertainment and consumer goods are concerned, however, with most foreign produce being considered confusing and uninteresting for the former, and simply incompatible or superfluous for the latter.
Government
Despite the sprawling size of their territories, or perhaps because of it, the skirol have steadfastly maintained their tradition of not centralising their government into a single organism, instead preserving their political status as several quasi-independent polities. The emergence of the Conflux and particularly its growing importance during the Great War and afterwards might be early signs that, despite all odds, such a centralisation could after all be possible and even necessary at length, but, in the current conditions, it will likely be decades at the least before this ambiguity finds a resolution in either direction.
In terms of geopolitics, the Innumerate Suns are divided into five main blocs of unequal size and influence. The most powerful, monolithic and recognisable by far are the Lisrak Covenant and the Accord of Theniax, nations that have endured since the earliest space-faring days of the species and either never stopped growing or capitalised on individual events of major importance. Despite the occasional (and not very firm) resurfacing of the sentiment that all members of the Conflux are at least nominally equal, it is no secret to anyone that Lisrak and Theniax hold the greatest sway in all matters of common concern, and indeed dictate the course of events outright more often than not. The only meaningful opposition they could encounter, barring an unprecedented coalition of the other three parties, is each other; however, while their ideological disagreements, large or small, are myriad and often incomprehensible to outsiders, their lines for questions of international importance are most of the time compatible enough for overt clashes to be rare.
The third and fourth factions, while a far cry from the two giants in prominence, likewise share a major structurally defining trait, though instead of unity theirs is diversity. The Halypt Conglomerate is a rather tight-knit ensemble of venerable skirol governments native to Vesereth, who, however, never were as successful as their more famous compatriots, and lobbies representing the interests of major corporate bodies, who saw a safer path in entering a formal agreement with state partners, at the risk of incurring charges of commercial favouritism, rather than trying to challenge the two titans on their own. As a result, the Conglomerate’s sizable market presence is disproportionate to its actual political influence, which, while respectable, is still comparatively meager. Some speculate that it could plausibly rival the Conflux’s superpowers were it not for the many conflicts of interest that regularly arise to plague it, condemning it to remain largely fractured and lacking much of a unified ideological direction.
On the other hand, a more harmonious state of internal affairs is in itself not a guarantee for success, as demonstrated by the Conglomerate’s rough counterpart. The Pale Coil, as it is known, is a loose association of younger colonial nations, formally assembled to defend their concerns on the wider stage of the Conflux. Though not comparable to the Conglomerate in terms of wealth, controlling a scant few harvest worlds overall, the Pale Coil is far stronger in terms of individual voices, and, collectively, its heavy industry is a close contender for the second place after Lisrak among the Innumerate Suns. However, any advantages these factors might grant are hamstrung by a very limited engagement in international politics; between its disjointed nature and sparse development in most fields, members of the Coil largely prefer to focus on inward growth, and only really undertake any sort of unified action when they believe their interests to be threatened.
Even more disorganised and invisible than the Coil, to the point of being often disregarded altogether, is the final pillar of the Conflux’s superstructure. The various minor Acolyte societies that exist outside established skirol nations are as a rule too small, scattered and politically inactive to have any true standing. The very archetypal idea of the small Acolyte commune living at the edges of civilisation is steadily becoming a vestige of past times, as more of these groups become integrated into wider bodies. As such, the very existence of a “fifth power” in the Conflux is only recognised in a purely formal capacity, and it is widely expected that even this aspect will disappear before the turn of the century.
Despite their impressive number, the practices of internal governance of those powers are relatively easily described. Skirol governments have a curious tendency towards a sort of convergent development; any society beyond a certain size will be virtually guaranteed to coalesce into certain broad structural patterns. The underlying form of any regime almost invariably tends towards taking the shape of a plutocratic oligarchy, with wealth and income being the main indicators of a trezklin’s chances for upward social movement and the influence it wields in local society. In an environment of stable employment and regularised wages, this system would quickly create a vicious circle of stagnation. However, in the overwhelming majority of skirol economies income is under minimal regulation and tied to a variety of factors, a good number of which are usually outside the control of the employed trezklin’s superiors (for instance, market fluctuations, authorised secondary sources etc.). These factors contribute to the rather paradoxical conditions in which a sluggish institution like the trezklin exists in a social environment with the potential for constant flux, though the immediate effects of this are most of the time less dramatic than this description might suggest.
At the upper echelons of any nation, however, these regularities break down. While in theory there would be nothing stopping a single vastly influential trezklin from instaurating itself as an absolute power at the top of the social pyramid, history has shown more than once that such drastic actions provoke equally drastic reactions, and a family that gathers too much power for itself will be the target of heavy reprisals from rivals, occasionally culminating in outright civil conflict. Thus, the usual solution to such power struggles is the creation of a governing body from anrak-trezklin made up of delegates from the most outstanding lineages. Should any of the latter be supplanted, their members in the government are likewise replaced by their successors, a process that has been bureaucratically refined over the ages to be far less grey and vague than it might sound. At the rarefied tips of the hierarchy, success is impiteously and inflexibly measured in hard quotas. The specific rules and conformations of these coalitions vary between nations, including how the branches of authority are divvied up, but a generally observed basic law is that no participant trezklin may hold an overwhelming majority presence in any organ, no matter the circumstances. If this law should be broken, the other formant families unfailingly take it upon themselves to restore balance, often by drastic means.
Of course, none of the aforementioned structures and factions would be as notable as it is without the intervention of one factor. The Conflux is at one time a coordinating mind, a restraining web and the arena on which they vie for superiority. Originally founded as a focus for projecting an irreproachable image of the skirol to foreign powers via information control, the growing evidence of the impossibility of such a task in the age of mass multimedia information (for a long time now, it has been relying chiefly on the good sense of its citizens to keep quiet and the threat of public denouncement), combined with the increasing number of challenges that had to be faced jointly by the skirol nations, caused it to develop beyond its intended purpose. Nowadays, the Conflux is effectively a supra-national organism with sweeping, rather vaguely-defined authority; its true limits and capabilities are a subject approached as cautiously as a hornet nest, and usually not at all. Its composition is likewise baffling, as while it was once formed exclusively by delegate anrak-trezklin, age has contributed to the birth of more than a few true trezklin among its halls and corridors, firmly tied together in ways confusing for the authorities of the member states. Beneath its crust of assorted paperwork, it functions as a nexus of diplomacy both internal and foreign, in which it crudely resembles a simplistic parliament with all associated structures, and the head of joint military efforts when necessary. If nothing else, the skirol are mostly capable of coming to a mutual understanding in these basic expressions of war and peace.
That said, every system has its deviants, and the Conflux is no exception. Rogue factions are nothing new, with many criminal groups having come and gone since the earliest days of the exploitation of harvest worlds, but the damage caused by the Ashtar and then the Great War has exasperated the existing currents of extremist thought. The number of militant groups owing no allegiance to the Conflux, now resting on mostly ideological bases, has increased, and two in particular have swollen to dangerous size. It is suspected that they can rival established nations, partly thanks to rumoured connections to major official entities. The Omniphage in particular are often associated with the church of the Wurm, despite not conforming to commonly accepted doctrines. This sect believes that it is the divine right of the skirol to not merely prey on other sentients, but hunt and devour them to extinction, that they might be the only masters of the galaxy, and the fanatism of its members is well-supported by strangely abundant reserves of weaponry. Less spiritual, and arguably more dangerous, the Genome Harvesters are usually believed to have ties with the military-industrial complex, and the advanced technology they have proven to possess gives this theory some ground to stand on. Their organisation and goals are more obscure, but speculation has it that they seek the collective genetic records of all species for some nefarious purpose - and that they might really have a hand in the officially renegade expedition to Agdemnar to further their schemes.
Technological Information
The Conflux’s technological development is on par with that of most galactic powers, if occasionally taking different detours to reach similar results. While the diversity of the skirol nations and minimal to no regulation have prevented any overall standard from forming, some principles are universally in use throughout the Innumerate Suns, either harkening back to an age of more densely concentrated populations or having spread by virtue of their sheer superiority over any alternative.
Major Techs
Traction-Core Generator: Conceived in its earliest forms in the early days of space travel, the vacuum-core principle has been a fundamental of Conflux energy production for centuries, supplanting even nuclear sources as the more widespread system of choice. Its main application consists in the generators, large apparati from which obstruents are removed in order to create a partial vacuum. At the center of these structures, usually shaped like cylindrical vats, although spherical variants exist, there is placed a compressed cluster of superheavy matter, typically of the heftier metals, which is then made to spin and generate centripetal traction. The latter is collected by a system of pistons in the form of kinetic energy, which is then converted, through secondary additions to the generators, into the required forms. While the production of traction-core generators is significant, they are physically large and bulky, and were thus traditionally only used in industrial complexes, urban energy plants and aboard large ships. However, recent breakthroughs in miniaturisation have finally made the production of reliable smaller models possible, to the point that even small ships and some atmospheric vehicles can be outfitted with them.
Vacuum Shields: One of the main disadvantages of traction-core generators is that, due to the relative complexity of the intermediary systems, regulating their output is a difficult matter, especially in the cramped confines of a spaceship. As such, typical default production settings tend to be rather high in the event that a sudden performance spike might be needed at an unexpected moment. Naturally, this leaves a sizeable excess margin in normal conditions, a circumstance that has heavily influenced the design philosophies of skirol shipbuilders and is most clearly reflected in the energy shielding systems mounted on their vessels. Rather than projecting a static field, vacuum shields, so named after the source, channel the power fuelling them into a constant outward flux, dissipating and renewing their outward layers many times a second to provide a stable vent for the excess output they receive. Redundant systems ensure that the transitions do not leave the perimeter exposed. Due to their functioning, vacuum shields provide a very effective defense against protracted pressure at relatively low intensity, such as from directed energy weapons; conversely, they are more vulnerable to high-density impacts like those of projectile armaments. The use of vacuum shields is likewise the main reason why Conflux ships only mount energy weapons for short-range point defense purposes.
Vortex Cannons: While the vacuum-core principle is certainly not central to all aspects of skirol naval technology, elements of it have been incorporated far and wide in the field. Ship-mounted weapons are no exception, and vortex armaments have for centuries been the mainstay of spaceborne combat. These devices are effectively railguns that use a non-linear motor, having a propulsion system shaped as a magnetic coil with a central repulsor element. Vortex cannons employ centrifuge force as an additional accelerating factor, increasing shot velocity at the expense of some projectile mass. As such, a vortex cannon will be larger and more ponderous than a conventional mass driver using slugs of a comparable size, but perceptibly more powerful.
Vacuum Warheads: Sometimes, the road from vacuum-core to weapon is not as indirect. Vacuum warheads are little more than missiles mounted with a device similar to a traction-core generator, though significantly less stable and with fewer functional additions. On impact, the device’s outer shell is ruptured, briefly exposing its surroundings to its powerful inward traction before it collapses. The result is an implosion strong enough to deform and tear open starship hulls and armour, exposing the target to the diffusion of any secondary payloads the warhead might carry.
Slipspace Pulse Disruptors: The skirol’s raiding habits in pre-Great War times and the following need to cover up their operations spurred them to innovate in the field of stealth and infiltration. All their achievements with radar evasion and sensor attacks, though, rest on the necessary foundation of the pulse disruptor. Attached to the slipspace drives used on Conflux ships, these machines create a disturbance effect upon exiting FTL. This alters the surge that is the first perceptible effect of the ship entering realspace, and that has throughout history been the bane of stealth designs due to the ostensible impossibility of masking it. Although disruptors cannot hide this pulse, they are capable of curtailing it, funneling the burst into spare capacitors, and scrambling its signature. The result is that any sensors will detect the surge as being produced by a variable number of light ships exiting FTL, none of them intense enough to be equipped for combat. Due to the demands on power and space, disruptors are only used on ships designed for stealth, but a number of them mixed into a battlefleet could throw an opponent’s preliminary calculations severely off-course.
Organomechanical Integration: A staple of Conflux manufacture great and small, the melding of machinery to engineered organic components, usually through surgical synapse attachment, is found at all levels in daily life and beyond. From basic personal devices to vehicles, body augmentics and, more recently, starships, if something is produced in skirol space, chances are it will have a fleshy pulsating mass on the underside. This offers obvious benefits in decreasing production and replacement costs and time, as grown components are faster and cheaper to procure than assembled ones, as well as greater ease in interfacing and comfort in handling (if one has the right physiology). On the downside, integrated devices require more intensive upkeep and, insidiously, are easily prey to planned obsolescence, creating a very profitable market for living spare parts.
Military Information
Military Overview
Prior to the manifestation of the Ashtar, the Conflux, despite already presenting itself as a singular entity, did not have a unified military. Every separate nation relied on its own armed forces for peacekeeping, raiding and conquest, with the divergences in resources and technology spreading the overall picture too wide for any clear standard to be applicable. The occupation and subsequent string of defeats confronted the skirol with the necessity of being able to present a compact front in more than theory. While new military actions were impossible and rearmament was difficult, there was nothing preventing them from restructuring their navy at a formal level as long as no true conflict came from it, and so they did.
The result was a federated force under the command of the Conflux’s Commission for Enduring Harmony, itself partially comprised of representatives of the contributing powers, with every component retaining a large degree of autonomy outside of times of total war. To promote standardisation across the fleets, the practices of circulating blueprints and schematics of crucial systems and collecting common war effort funds were instituted, enduring until the present day. The destruction brought by the Great War and the rebuilding that followed were, among all else, opportunities to further streamline the previous diversity of organisations and approaches, and the most was made of them where possible. Nowadays, while the skirol militaries remain quite clearly varied in their appearances and tactics, they tend to use the same ranges of designs with relatively minor modifications. The eternal exception to this are independent Acolytes, who, being prevalently mercenaries, remain a motley and colourful crew.
Fleet
The Conflux’s fleet is the branch of its military that is attributed the most importance, and the one that has seen the most radical overhauls over its history. Having started out as disparate forces used mainly for raiding and suppression of inferior enemies, the early unified navy sought to capitalise on the design features common among its ships - speed, stealth and offensive capabilities dramatically outpacing their defensive ones. These vessels relied on quickly bridging the gap between them and their opponents, bringing the fight to dangerously close ranges where their weaponry would have room to shine. The tragic results of this approach are reflected in the staggering death tolls of the Great War, where skirol fleets were decimated time and again by more resilient enemies.
The need for greater staying power was keenly felt in post-War times, but the terms of the Detente prevented overt experimentation with warship designs. A solution was found in the once-discarded notion of applying organomechanical integration of machinery at the level of starships. Previously disregarded due to their difficult and laborious implementation funneling resources away from more reliable traditional fully-mechanical models, hybrid craft were devised and put into production with a view to circumventing treaty limitations, especially playing on the parameters on tonnage and armour. The result were prototype lines with less skewed armaments than before, but whose main goal was crippled by the very subterfuge that brought them into being. Organic components, being less dense, were indeed lighter, but also less robust, and the problem of defense lagging behind offense again presented itself.
In the last years, the crumbling importance of the treaty, along with far greater experience in shipwide integration, have finally let Conflux engineers reach something like the fabled balance they were seeking. Melding organic and metallic parts in a much smoother way, last-generation vessels boast defenses unparalleled before in skirol history, along with improved weaponry. As such, when they take the field (which is not often, given how rare they are as yet) they are found spearheading assault formations, followed by the malformed droves spawned by the Detente period. In an ironic reversal of roles, the older ships now form the rearguard, saturating enemy defenses with massed fire to cover the advance of their new, improved counterparts.
Dreadnoughts:
Insatiable: Coming into service in the later stages of the Great War, the Insatiable-class dreadnoughts were an early attempt to correct the deficiencies of Conflux shipbuilding. These imposing vessels are thickly armoured and shielded on several layers, while retaining a heavy array of weaponry. Of course, this aged equipment is far less impressive nowadays.
Sun Devourer: One of the crowning achievements of Conflux industry and development, Sun Devourers concentrate decades of work on shipwide organomechanical integration and improvement into leviathans of plasmid-flesh and metal as deadly as they are immense. These flagrant defiances of the Treaty are as yet few, their existence one more among the skirol’s secrets, and it is not soon that they will fully enter mass production.
Battleships:
Reaper: Once the iron fist of the skirol raiding fleets, Reaper battleships were fine-tuned for the role, being prepared to deal with sparse local defenses through speed and overwhelming firepower. Due to their flagship role, their defenses were nonetheless not fully neglected, and they thus fared comparatively better than smaller lines in the Great War. Compared to modern craft, their once-fabled agility is nothing to write home about, but a lot of guns on a pair of strong thrusters remains a lot of guns on a pair of strong thrusters.
Flayer: Among Detente-era experiments with integration on warships, Flayers are unique in that, instead of having a few components replaced with organic parts, they were mostly built from living tissue instead, an artifice partially motivated by the more stringent limitations on battleship designs. As a result, along with being a clear improvement over the Reapers in terms of speed and armaments, they sport some unique advantages like biochemically-assisted engines, a spontaneously regenerating hull, and amazingly cheap and fast construction. However, this comes at the price of wonky machine systems requiring special instruments and spare parts to work with and rather poor armour under their shields.
World Gorger: Striking a much better balance between organic and mechanical, World Gorgers coopt the strengths of the Flayer design while correcting its weaknesses. Destructive, streamlined and far more resilient, they neatly outclass any of their predecessors in any field. The only obvious disadvantage is that they are proportionally more expensive and slower to produce, which is only further hampered by the secrecy surrounding them.
Battlecruisers:
Invader: Invader-class battlecruisers were rarely part of a raiding force themselves, but nonetheless played a crucial role in those operations. Forerunners of the reaping fleet proper, they were tasked with disrupting the first lines of defense around their targets. Their aptitude for rapid, precise strikes did not suit them well in intense combat, and they took the brunt of the losses of the Great War. Nowadays, they survive mostly in an auxiliary facility, or bought and retrofitted by mercenaries and corporations.
Pestilent: A more typical Detente hybrid design, Pestilents were built around a mostly metallic corpus, with a few organic components mostly inserted only to lighten the tonnage. Sturdier for their class than Flayers, but less mobile and more lightly armed, they were designed to accompany the battleships as support units, providing defensive screening and limited artillery fire support, and, if not else, fulfil that role adequately.
Void Plague: Virtually a direct affront to the Treaty, all, of course, in the name of a balanced peace, the new Void Plague ships are towering juggernauts, packing tremendous firepower and encased in layers over layers of shields and armour. While slower than World Gorgers and still mostly excelling at close ranges, they are nevertheless capable of great offensive flexibility, bombarding the enemy with missiles from long distances even as they inexorably close in to deliver the coup de grace.
Cruisers:
Harvester: The traditional raiding ship by excellency, Harvester stealth cruisers were built to mop up the final layers of resistance during an assault and loading as many captives as they could fit before bombarding their incriminatingly empty cities into dust. This specialisation left them fairly useless from the Ashtar wars onwards, though in present times they have been upgraded and retrofitted in several ways, with variants serving as either tactical stealth ships or dedicated siege vessels.
Flesh Grinder: Supplying to the need for a mainstay combat ship of the line, the Flesh Grinder is a fairly recent hybrid design that has nonetheless surpassed the Harvester as most widely produced cruiser. Respectably armed and armoured for a Detente ship, it does not excel in any single aspect, but is extremely flexible in fleet configurations, and guaranteed to give the enemy a hard time in any circumstance.
Destroyers:
Veinsplitter: Once one of the first prototype hybrid ships, the Veinsplitter has gone through several iterations during the Detente period, over which it has phased out previous destroyer models. Today, it has firmly grown into the niche of strikecraft-killer, though it easily doubles as a predator of corvettes and other smaller vessels. If needs be, it can be mounted with anti-missile weaponry, albeit even then it is rather less effective in that role than dedicated models like the Pestilent.
Corvettes:
Stingworm: The adage of strength in numbers, or, more cynically, quantity having its own quality has always held for the Conflux navy, and Stingworms are the latest example of that mindset on display. Fast and cheap to produce thanks to their hybrid structure, despite making slightly fewer sacrifices in durability than earlier Detente models, these small but hard-hitting craft swarm over battles in vast numbers, seeking out vulnerable spots while the enemy is focused on the fleet’s heavyweights. Modular armaments allow them to carry heavy warheads suitable for attacking battleships as easily as vortex guns to outmatch other corvettes in a straight confrontation.
Strike craft:
Mutilator: Due to the structure and activity of the old Conflux fleet, strikecraft were never given much importance, and this shows in the scarcity of designs. While minor variants certainly existed, the Mutilator was the only major type in use, combining the functions of fighter and bomber in a general-purpose support vessel. Nowadays, they are often found in the possession of mercenaries, who modify them according to their needs on an individual basis.
Ripper: Times change, but design philosophies do not always follow them. In the intervening decades the Conflux navy has still not found much of a role for strikecraft, and the aging Mutilator has been joined by the equally multipurpose hybrid Ripper. The main difference, besides general performance improvements, is a more easily switchable modular component, allowing for easier case-by-case specialisation, but otherwise not much has changed.
Planetary Forces
Given the Conflux’s most recent pre-War history of groundside military activity, one might think that their planetary forces would be similar to the spaceborne ones - light, mobile and fast on their feet. However, this would be entirely wrong. Long before raids became an established practice, the main task of the skirol military was to occupy harvest worlds - primitive and subjugated, but entire planets nonetheless. As such, their armies were built to be enduring, imposing and extremely difficult to dislodge from their positions, a tradition which they continue to follow to this day. Most of the light-footed work is done at the stages of deployment and scouting; after that, one ponderous steel wall follows another.
The backbone of Conflux planetary forces is formed by armour and mechanised infantry. While the skirol can be deadly in close quarters thanks to their bulk and powerful mandibles, they are naturally slow to the point of being barely mobile. Modern diets have aggravated this by making fattening doses more accessible, and even civilians mostly rely on personal vehicles to move about; the military merely takes this to its logical conclusion. All skirol machines are organomechanical hybrids, which eases interfacing on the pilots’ part and allows for adaptive functions like atmospheric filtration.
The biomechanical skirol armies are never encountered without a following of Acolyte auxiliaries. Usually mercenaries or otherwise irregulars, they are a diverse crowd, outfitted with custom weaponry and augmentics to turn them into lethally efficient killing machines. Some go as far as sculpting their body into a form specialised for combat at the expense of everyday utility, a practice only encountered among those most dedicated to the military life and some religious groups.
Hyperdread
Titanic and armed to the teeth, the Embrace of Srynokk is the apex of Conflux fleet construction. An immense project already secretly started in the last years of the Detente, during which its separate components were built at different ends of the Innumerable Suns, the monstrous hybrid ship has recently been assembled into a functioning whole, and its performance has fully lived up to expectations. Despite its proportions, its functional design is rather straightforward, being built to accommodate a staggering number of synchronically working weapons. The only really peculiar part of its equipment are its potent shielding systems, built on layer upon layer of redundant fields; so powerful are they that at extremely close ranges they can become a weapon in their own right, crushing smaller vessels on impact. Furthermore, their radius can easily become a refuge for a small support fleet.
On a sidenote, the ship was originally planned to bear the name Embrace of the Wurm. However, after some resistance from secularist members of the Commission the designation was changed to its current, more neutral one, named after Vesereth’s star.
Reposting finished sheet so it doesn't get lost in old pages.
Harmonic Conflux of the Innumerate Suns
the Conflux, the Innumerate Suns, skirol, “maggots”
General Information
Major Belligerent
Overview
The Conflux is ostensibly a liberal and prosperous, if somewhat bellicose and reclusive union of culturally young species growing and developing under the benevolent oversight of the powerful skirol. What the galaxy knows about it and its true nature are, however, entirely different things. Behind its bright and vibrant facade of disinformation, the Conflux is a predatory hegemony where the skirol rule over hordes of mutated grunts and prisoners of monstrous abattoir worlds, and barter with the flesh of sapients degraded to cattle.
History
The history of the Conflux is, belying the truth about its structure, mostly that of the skirol. Once one of many parasitic species plaguing the megafauna of their homeworld, they outcompeted their evolutionary rivals not through symbiosis with their hosts, as many others had tried, but by growing increasingly malignant, large and ferocious. By the time they crawled their way to sentience, they had become the apex of the food chain; and, by the time their disparate civilisations had mastered space travel, the once fertile planet had been mostly scoured of life, not so much by rampant exploitation as by the unfortunately specialised alimentary needs of its inhabitants. Curiously, the skirol never formed a unified planetary government. A generally accepted explanation is that the need for one was obviated by the rarity of armed conflicts and international regulations being disfavoured relatively to case-by-case diplomatic agreements, though many historians believe this to be an oversimplification.
The foundations of the Conflux proper were only laid when the skirol discovered that they were not alone in the galaxy. A prospecting interstellar expedition by the Accord of Theniax, then a relatively minor nation, encountered a pre-spacefaring species in a newly discovered system. The skirol had a difficult time coming to grips with the idea that anything else could be intelligent in the same way as them, something many are still not fully convinced of to this day. It did not help matters that most of the Accord subscribed to the aggressive faith of the Wurm Raslir, whose cosmology left little room for friendly contact. Though inferior in numbers to an entire planet’s people, Theniax had vastly superior technology and the advantage of orbital control. The newly met species, its original name stricken and forgotten, was pillaged, enslaved and processed to be fit for consumption by the skirol. Willing collaborators were “rewarded” by being subjected to experimental augmentation procedures and, if they survived, accepted by a society that thought little of their betrayal. Almost overnight, the Accord became a major player on the market and political scene, which contributed to the spread of the religion of the Wurm until it surpassed many of the previously dominant confessions.
The Reaping of Irret-Thenn, as it became known, gave an explosive new motivation for interstellar colonisation and set a precedent for future contact. The skirol had discovered a taste for intelligent meat, and wherever they happened over the miracle of life, which they were lucky enough to do a few times more in the following centuries, their sleek, spiny ships descended like a hungry swarm, subjugating, harvesting, and uplifting defectors to bolster their forces.
Although their intentions never changed, and indeed have not to this day, the skirol’s first clashes with other spacefaring powers made them rethink their strategy. Faced with prey they could not overwhelm through brute force and fearing that they would face war on all fronts if their practices came to light, their governments, in an unprecedented display of joint effort, assembled to build an enormous masquerade that spanned the entirety of skirol-held space. The Harmonious Conflux of the Hundred Suns, as it was known at the time, was formed as an international organ with sweeping authority to curtail and oversee external communication, projecting an aseptically neutral and rather enigmatic public image. The burgeoning population descended from the various uplifted inductees, now largely mutated and modified beyond recognition, was rebranded as a number of minor protectorates, and the existence of the conquered harvest worlds became a dark secret hidden in the depths of Conflux space.
Nevertheless, the skirol’s hunger for new tastes only grew, and with subterfuge instead of force they had only traded one weapon for another. Where mere expansionism was judged unacceptable, finding more civil pretexts to skirmish with their neighbours, and not only, became a favourite sport. From border disputes over some drifting asteroid to false flags set up by uplift mercenaries, Conflux forces made a habit of sweeping into their targets’ backwater colonial holdings on the flimsiest casus belli, abducting the population and concealing the strange disappearances with massive collateral damage. The conflict was then smothered in protracted negotiations, and usually ended with the offer of token reparations, though this was of little comfort to the captives, en route to becoming the latest flavour on the market. Of course, when the skirol were confident enough of their superiority, formalities were forgone altogether, and small colonies just inexplicably vanished before anyone could tell what hit them. An entire industry sprang up around this sort of raiding, from specialist harvester companies to teams of treaty loophole-seekers, and in time it grew to become one of the main pillars supporting the economy of the Conflux, by then already comprising Innumerate Suns and having spread into a catch-all term for skirol holdings and activities.
Needless to say, the advent of the Ashtar hit it badly. While at first they flatly disregarded the imposition of peace and gleefully carried on with their hit-and-runs, they quickly found that not even their raiding fleets, whose speed and stealth were the pride of skirol engineering, could outrun retribution. Growing furious and desperate as this once hugely profitable niche was choked, threatening their entire market, they struck at the Ashtar directly, sending droves of warships against their response parties, but only succeeded in wearing themselves down.
The worst, however, was yet to come. With as little warning as they did anything, the Ashtar struck at the Conflux’s harvest worlds, bypassing their outermost defensive perimeters altogether. The skirol guards were scattered, their stranglehold over the planets shattered, and centuries of conditioning and forced obedience were undone in a matter of hours, former captives shaking off the constraints of a lifetime. It was a miracle that the skirol's cover held at all, mostly owing to everyone else having better things to keep them busy and what information got out being later dismissed as provocations spread by rebellious subjects. Cornered and heavily wounded where it had never expected a blow, the Conflux gathered the largest warfleet in its history and prepared to attack the Ashtar head-on, regardless of the disparity of forces. Or, at least, it tried. Individual battlegroups were intercepted, gathering points were blockaded, and the final assembled force, mere scraps of its projected magnitude, was faced with the imposing mass of Prevailing Tranquility. Threatened with complete annihilation, the skirol had no choice but to resign themselves to a heavily downsized diet and market, though their resentment grew and festered.
By the time the Ashtar disappeared, the Conflux was starved for fresh meat and on the brink of economic collapse, having been deprived both of its old conquests and the lucrative raids. It is thus little wonder that it was at the forefront when the Great War erupted, looking to make up for lost time by gobbling up as many people as it could, appearances be damned. However, it soon became clear that all its rage had little of a punch behind it; built for rapid and precise tactical operations, its military had never been prepared for sustained conflict. Attrition took its toll, even as its forces were spread thin by the simultaneous effort of retaking the liberated harvest worlds, and when the Madrigasa talks came about the Conflux dragged itself to the table beaten and broken, with few real gains to show for it.
Yet those few scrapings proved vital, giving a brief reprieve for the Innumerate Suns to sustain themselves as they turned their attention inward to sharply reorganise their workings. The Detente saw heavy work on the harvest worlds, which were rebuilt and reshaped into streamlined breeding grounds. In a bold move that many feared would threaten the Conflux’s facade, but was ultimately recognised as necessary, the market was opened to external trade, (supposed) slaves in particular becoming a valued commodity both as imports and exports. Along with offering a much-needed influx of foreign wealth, many saw this as an opportunity to smooth over the skirol’s reputation in at least some corners of the international stage after a litigious and belligerent past.
This period of revolutions had, however, some adverse effects as well. The seeds of radical ideological movements had been sown during the hardships of the past recession, and a changing society brought them to the fore. Rogue underground factions gained alarming power, and their sometimes unsubtle machinations more than once strained both Detente and masquerade to their limits.
Incidentally, those same rogue factions gave the Conflux a convenient excuse when the Message pointed the way to Agdemnar, and officially the skirol force that has dug in on the planet is controlled by any number of extremist groups. Still, the roots of conspiracy have had decades to sink deep into its reconstructed society, and sometimes the brains at high command themselves wonder just how much of that is merely a cover story.
Major Holdings
Vesereth: The homeworld of the skirol, once shared along millennia-old repartitions by their elder nations, has gradually been overtaken by the Conflux’s administration as the organisation’s significance grew, and now serves as the de facto capital of the Innumerate Suns. While most of the old polities maintain a token presence in culturally and historically important places, most of the planet is considered neutral ground. This makes it a favoured meeting ground for settling diplomatic disputes, as well as being the neural center of the Conflux’s activities of communications, transit, market and to an extent military oversight. The planet’s heavily urbanised surface is an amalgamation of architectural styles as diverse as many are ancient, with remains of its peculiar megafauna ecosystem surviving only in sparse reservations.
Giaxil: The Lisrak Covenant has, for most of skirol history, been the largest and most powerful sovereign state to stretch its holdings beyond Vesereth, and in some aspects this still holds true. Though temporary outpaced when Theniax struck it rich with the Reaping, the old money of the Conflux more than recouped its losses with the rise of the raiding industry, and for a long time dominated the niche with its unequaled military might. The post-bellum need for remodernisation only served to cement its position as the strongest pillar of Conflux’s military-industrial complex. The seat of the Lisrak government embodies this role, being a bustling hive of factories, laboratories, military compouds and marketplaces of all calibers. Life on Giaxil is busy to the point of being frantic, but also famously well-paid.
Ur’Theniax: In many ways the polar opposite of Lisrak, the Accord of Theniax never shifted its attention away from its resounding success in the Reaping, instead choosing to capitalise on the practice of world harvesting and its various products. Besides swelling to obscene wealth through careful exploitation of the flesh trade, biotechnological research sponsored by it made leaps and bounds thanks to the abundance of high-quality subjects that were ethically and legally free game, its society was always the most progressive in its acceptance of uplifted Acolytes, and its patronage of the church of the Wurm let it reap the rewards of its cultural primacy. In contrast with Giaxil, its capital of Ur’Theniax is a clean, quiet and photogenic paradise, decorated with ample stretches of unspoiled nature. It is ideal estate for research facilities, elite trading hubs (usually dealing more with stocks than the actual deal), religious centers and luxury estates for wealthy skirol or successful Acolytes.
The Silent Maw: Located at the fringes of Conflux space and the one of the few places in it freely accessible to outsiders, the Silent Maw is one of the most concrete signs of the social restructuring that has pervaded the Innumerate Suns. This vast, well-fortified habitat station, strategically placed at a convergence of several local transit routes, is the greatest slave trading hub in skirol territory, and certainly one of, if not the largest in the galaxy altogether. While maintained by the Conflux itself, the nature of the business that takes place on it such that some concessions need to be made for more legally dubious clientele, and thus, despite standard surveillance and the application of tax rates, transactions can easily be held in complete anonymity.
Kardatt: During the Detente-era industry reforms, the reconquered harvest worlds, the Conflux’s closest-held secret, underwent radical renovations to become the backbone of the now once more insular flesh trade. Kardatt, one of the last inhabited planets to be conquered in the first period of skirol expansion, and thus comparatively less ruinated by rampant exploitation, was the prototype of the chillingly efficient new model, and remains a symbol of the undertaking’s success. Heavily defended and camouflaged, the planet is a hell of assembly lines, breeding pens, cloning chambers and worse, regularly churning out herds of debased beings to sate the skirol’s hunger.
Demographics
Population
Skirol - 78% officially; 56% effectively
Acolytes - 22% officially; 16% effectively
Others - none officially; 28% effectively
Skirol: A species of malignant parasites who grew to exceed the size, strength and intelligence usually held by such organisms, but never lost their voracity and primitive non-dimorphic, worm-like appearance. Their prehensile branching tongues supply to the needs of fine manipulation, though nowadays most prefer to use mechanical prosthetic aid. In ideal conditions, they can live for a surprisingly long time, exceeding several centuries even unaugmented; however, this is generally only achieved by the wealthiest among them. Strictly carnivorous, skirol, in an atavistic throwback, prefer consuming their prey alive, slowly draining it of fluids and externally digested organs before finishing the desiccated body in a few bites of their bone-breakingly powerful jaws. Psintegrat aptitude among them is unusually rare, though those that do show potential can develop tremendous powers.
Acolytes: A blanket term for beings descended from the minorities of conquered populations that willingly joined the skirol. Generations of bio-augmentic tinkering and simply living among their masters have long made every Acolyte unrecognisable as the species their ancestors had once been, their bodies warped beyond nature and their minds overtaken by an alien culture. Having abandoned every vestige of their old lifestyles out of scorn, desire to integrate into the dominant society, or simple convenience, they mostly reproduce through cloning or artificial parthenogenesis. While they can be divided into a number of mostly stable breeds, every Acolyte is a biologically unique entity, shaped by a free choice of augmentations and distinguishing marks of their occupation.
Others: The ones you won’t find in any census or galactic atlas. Despite forming a sizable percentage of the Conflux’s overall population, the inhabitants of subjugated planets are not recognised as sapient members of it. Bred in gigantic factories that were once their homeworlds, they are treated, sold and devoured like cattle by the skirol, and centuries of debasement have indeed left most of them mentally little better than animals. Those that do reach the public eye do so as exotic slaves from allegedly primitive worlds. In late pre-Ashtar times, this category has been expanded to include the victims of abduction raids, who are likewise subjected to the same treatment.
Society
Traditionally, the structure of skirol society has rested on the notion of the trezklin. This word, loosely translatable as “swarm” (though much of its meaning is lost), denotes a large, but tightly bound family unit living and working in close vicinity. Spanning various levels of more or less extended kinship, trezklin are extremely diverse in size; the smallest might count around a dozen members, while the largest number in the hundreds, and in some cases even the low thousands. Those numbers are, naturally, in constant fluctuation as some leave the family web to join another or found their own nucleus, and others are conversely taken in as they come to join a new mate or several. Single skirol living outside a trezklin are not quite uncommon, and are growing progressively less so in modern times, but are still regarded as eccentrics.
The reason for this is that, now as thousands of years ago, by and large it is the trezklin, and not the individual, that is considered the minimal formant unit of society. Jobs have historically been, rather than positions to be filled by fungible appropriately skilled workers, dynastic traditions upheld by the members of the same trezklin over the generations. The staff of a facility, the crew of a ship, an entire military unit; each of these was, and in many places still is, far more often than not a family in addition to everything else. Young skirol were quite literally born into their roles, and raised accordingly. This did not, however, negate social mobility; those dissatisfied with their position could seek membership of a different trezklin, if they were accepted and proved they possessed the necessary aptitudes, and units judged to be underperforming by those higher in the hierarchy (itself a rather complex notion; more details in the government description) could be downgraded to a lower position and replaced.
While this system has held from the birth of skirol civilisation, ever since the species began to expand into interplanetary space its inflexibility and difficulty in adapting to the needs of spacefaring nations became apparent. Assigning jobs to individuals was a completely alien idea which all but the most radical visionaries struggled to even process, but a compromise was found in the shape of what came to be known as anrak-trezklin, or “surrogate” trezklin. Those are typically groups of skirol who join together in order to receive a temporary position, and only remain thus until the term of the job has expired. Although those anrak-trezklin can occasionally develop into actual families, in most cases the relationships holding them together are purely businesslike, with each member still considered part of their trezklin of origin and expecting to return there. A gradual shift has made this model of employment the dominant one on the modern market, though, depending on the place and field, old dynastic trezklin occupations are still common enough, and the progressive integration of Acolytes has made individual work a more widely accepted, if still curious reality.
Despite the enduring rigidity of its structures and the perpetual control of communications by Conflux authorities to ensure the truth about the harvest worlds is not leaked out, skirol society is surprisingly liberal. With no clear division of class beyond disparity of income, the goods and privileges available to any citizen depend exclusively on their wealth, and extreme poverty is, if not completely nonexistent, becoming increasingly rare. Basic commodities are generally affordable to any social stratum, not in the least because, though the skirol enjoy luxury, they can easily subsist on very few minimal necessities, albeit how comfortable that subsistence is can be debated. Nevertheless, a permissive social order and a widespread striving for profit contribute to a rather competitive environment, which results in further entrenchment and insularity of the trezklin - the reason why solitary lifestyles are still discouraged at a distance of centuries.
The position of Acolytes in all this is an ambiguous one. Nominally accepted, they are neither skirol, nor do they have an innate drive to form trezklin. Because of the integrational difficulties caused by this, Acolytes have long remained on the fringes of Conflux society, trying to build their own cultures and communities with varying degrees of success and interacting with the wider macrocosm of the Innumerate Suns in the capacity of mercenaries and hirelings most of the time. Theniax has always been a notable exception, showing itself more willing to accommodate the needs of its recruits by creating professional niches available for individuals. Besides easing the access of Acolytes into society, this has had the added effect of lessening the stigma around solitary living, as this has become a viable choice for skirol as well. Due to this, most of the Conflux’s members have long been reluctant to follow Theniax’s example, though more and more concessions are being made in this direction in recent times given the beneficial results of this policy.
In a society that is, at its core, market-driven, the importance of religion has long been on the decline. Nevertheless, the inherently conservative nature of the trezklin has so far considerably slowed the withdrawal of spirituality from the Conflux, in a personal if not a political way. Among the many ancestral devotions and latter-day cults of the skirol, a majority of which tend to adopt some form of skewed animism, the most popular remains the worship of the Wurm Raslir, which is likewise overwhelmingly dominant among the Acolytes. According to its doctrine, the Wurm, commonly interpreted to be symbolic of the skirol species, is a vast metaphysical entity that parasitises the cosmos itself, taking what it needs and giving nothing in return but the wisdom of its example. If one considers the immense historical impact of its teachings after it was brought to relevance, it is really little wonder that the Conflux should have become what it is today.
Economy
Until the Detente, the Conflux’s policy of isolationistic aggression caused its economy to develop in a self-contained form, with the only, albeit not insignificant, influx from outside coming in the guise of abduction victims. Consequently, while a lack of external stimulation might have prevented it from growing to its fullest potential, the proportionally greater importance placed on self-sufficiency contributed to the formation of a powerful and diverse production base and an active internal market. Where this impetus would have proven insufficient for a lesser nation, the Innumerate Suns’ colossal reserves of territory and xeno-power, as well as the skirol’s physiological needs allowing for problems in sectors like agriculture to be solved in uniquely economical ways, proved a sturdy foundation for an industry of titanic power. An adequate example of this strength needs be sought no further than its performance during the Great War, where the Conflux’s fleets, despite their defeat by the Ashtar and subpar performance in prolonged combat, blazed through most of the conflict almost exclusively through force of numbers. While the industrial complex has not yet fully recovered from that strain, its reconstruction has thus far been steady, partially owing to the market reforms.
Arguably the most important of the latter has been the decision to make the Conflux’s economic scene more accessible for outside trade. Although its stringent information control regulations prevent it from entertaining foreign presences outside the Silent Maw and a few other approved trade hubs, its own merchants are seen abroad much more often, and remote transactions, however laconic, are gaining in popularity. Most notably, the Conflux has spent the best part of the decades of peace making a name for itself on the international slave and bio-construct markets, whether legal or less so - a distinction it finds wholly irrelevant, beyond how it might negatively impact its public image. Beyond having grown to a major actor in these fields, the Innumerate Suns have adopted a more open stance vis-a-vis the exchange of heavy industry products, importing machinery and ship components from relatively cheap corporate sources and selling their own. Traces of the skirol’s notorious insularity remain as entertainment and consumer goods are concerned, however, with most foreign produce being considered confusing and uninteresting for the former, and simply incompatible or superfluous for the latter.
Government
Despite the sprawling size of their territories, or perhaps because of it, the skirol have steadfastly maintained their tradition of not centralising their government into a single organism, instead preserving their political status as several quasi-independent polities. The emergence of the Conflux and particularly its growing importance during the Great War and afterwards might be early signs that, despite all odds, such a centralisation could after all be possible and even necessary at length, but, in the current conditions, it will likely be decades at the least before this ambiguity finds a resolution in either direction.
In terms of geopolitics, the Innumerate Suns are divided into five main blocs of unequal size and influence. The most powerful, monolithic and recognisable by far are the Lisrak Covenant and the Accord of Theniax, nations that have endured since the earliest space-faring days of the species and either never stopped growing or capitalised on individual events of major importance. Despite the occasional (and not very firm) resurfacing of the sentiment that all members of the Conflux are at least nominally equal, it is no secret to anyone that Lisrak and Theniax hold the greatest sway in all matters of common concern, and indeed dictate the course of events outright more often than not. The only meaningful opposition they could encounter, barring an unprecedented coalition of the other three parties, is each other; however, while their ideological disagreements, large or small, are myriad and often incomprehensible to outsiders, their lines for questions of international importance are most of the time compatible enough for overt clashes to be rare.
The third and fourth factions, while a far cry from the two giants in prominence, likewise share a major structurally defining trait, though instead of unity theirs is diversity. The Halypt Conglomerate is a rather tight-knit ensemble of venerable skirol governments native to Vesereth, who, however, never were as successful as their more famous compatriots, and lobbies representing the interests of major corporate bodies, who saw a safer path in entering a formal agreement with state partners, at the risk of incurring charges of commercial favouritism, rather than trying to challenge the two titans on their own. As a result, the Conglomerate’s sizable market presence is disproportionate to its actual political influence, which, while respectable, is still comparatively meager. Some speculate that it could plausibly rival the Conflux’s superpowers were it not for the many conflicts of interest that regularly arise to plague it, condemning it to remain largely fractured and lacking much of a unified ideological direction.
On the other hand, a more harmonious state of internal affairs is in itself not a guarantee for success, as demonstrated by the Conglomerate’s rough counterpart. The Pale Coil, as it is known, is a loose association of younger colonial nations, formally assembled to defend their concerns on the wider stage of the Conflux. Though not comparable to the Conglomerate in terms of wealth, controlling a scant few harvest worlds overall, the Pale Coil is far stronger in terms of individual voices, and, collectively, its heavy industry is a close contender for the second place after Lisrak among the Innumerate Suns. However, any advantages these factors might grant are hamstrung by a very limited engagement in international politics; between its disjointed nature and sparse development in most fields, members of the Coil largely prefer to focus on inward growth, and only really undertake any sort of unified action when they believe their interests to be threatened.
Even more disorganised and invisible than the Coil, to the point of being often disregarded altogether, is the final pillar of the Conflux’s superstructure. The various minor Acolyte societies that exist outside established skirol nations are as a rule too small, scattered and politically inactive to have any true standing. The very archetypal idea of the small Acolyte commune living at the edges of civilisation is steadily becoming a vestige of past times, as more of these groups become integrated into wider bodies. As such, the very existence of a “fifth power” in the Conflux is only recognised in a purely formal capacity, and it is widely expected that even this aspect will disappear before the turn of the century.
Despite their impressive number, the practices of internal governance of those powers are relatively easily described. Skirol governments have a curious tendency towards a sort of convergent development; any society beyond a certain size will be virtually guaranteed to coalesce into certain broad structural patterns. The underlying form of any regime almost invariably tends towards taking the shape of a plutocratic oligarchy, with wealth and income being the main indicators of a trezklin’s chances for upward social movement and the influence it wields in local society. In an environment of stable employment and regularised wages, this system would quickly create a vicious circle of stagnation. However, in the overwhelming majority of skirol economies income is under minimal regulation and tied to a variety of factors, a good number of which are usually outside the control of the employed trezklin’s superiors (for instance, market fluctuations, authorised secondary sources etc.). These factors contribute to the rather paradoxical conditions in which a sluggish institution like the trezklin exists in a social environment with the potential for constant flux, though the immediate effects of this are most of the time less dramatic than this description might suggest.
At the upper echelons of any nation, however, these regularities break down. While in theory there would be nothing stopping a single vastly influential trezklin from instaurating itself as an absolute power at the top of the social pyramid, history has shown more than once that such drastic actions provoke equally drastic reactions, and a family that gathers too much power for itself will be the target of heavy reprisals from rivals, occasionally culminating in outright civil conflict. Thus, the usual solution to such power struggles is the creation of a governing body from anrak-trezklin made up of delegates from the most outstanding lineages. Should any of the latter be supplanted, their members in the government are likewise replaced by their successors, a process that has been bureaucratically refined over the ages to be far less grey and vague than it might sound. At the rarefied tips of the hierarchy, success is impiteously and inflexibly measured in hard quotas. The specific rules and conformations of these coalitions vary between nations, including how the branches of authority are divvied up, but a generally observed basic law is that no participant trezklin may hold an overwhelming majority presence in any organ, no matter the circumstances. If this law should be broken, the other formant families unfailingly take it upon themselves to restore balance, often by drastic means.
Of course, none of the aforementioned structures and factions would be as notable as it is without the intervention of one factor. The Conflux is at one time a coordinating mind, a restraining web and the arena on which they vie for superiority. Originally founded as a focus for projecting an irreproachable image of the skirol to foreign powers via information control, the growing evidence of the impossibility of such a task in the age of mass multimedia information (for a long time now, it has been relying chiefly on the good sense of its citizens to keep quiet and the threat of public denouncement), combined with the increasing number of challenges that had to be faced jointly by the skirol nations, caused it to develop beyond its intended purpose. Nowadays, the Conflux is effectively a supra-national organism with sweeping, rather vaguely-defined authority; its true limits and capabilities are a subject approached as cautiously as a hornet nest, and usually not at all. Its composition is likewise baffling, as while it was once formed exclusively by delegate anrak-trezklin, age has contributed to the birth of more than a few true trezklin among its halls and corridors, firmly tied together in ways confusing for the authorities of the member states. Beneath its crust of assorted paperwork, it functions as a nexus of diplomacy both internal and foreign, in which it crudely resembles a simplistic parliament with all associated structures, and the head of joint military efforts when necessary. If nothing else, the skirol are mostly capable of coming to a mutual understanding in these basic expressions of war and peace.
That said, every system has its deviants, and the Conflux is no exception. Rogue factions are nothing new, with many criminal groups having come and gone since the earliest days of the exploitation of harvest worlds, but the damage caused by the Ashtar and then the Great War has exasperated the existing currents of extremist thought. The number of militant groups owing no allegiance to the Conflux, now resting on mostly ideological bases, has increased, and two in particular have swollen to dangerous size. It is suspected that they can rival established nations, partly thanks to rumoured connections to major official entities. The Omniphage in particular are often associated with the church of the Wurm, despite not conforming to commonly accepted doctrines. This sect believes that it is the divine right of the skirol to not merely prey on other sentients, but hunt and devour them to extinction, that they might be the only masters of the galaxy, and the fanatism of its members is well-supported by strangely abundant reserves of weaponry. Less spiritual, and arguably more dangerous, the Genome Harvesters are usually believed to have ties with the military-industrial complex, and the advanced technology they have proven to possess gives this theory some ground to stand on. Their organisation and goals are more obscure, but speculation has it that they seek the collective genetic records of all species for some nefarious purpose - and that they might really have a hand in the officially renegade expedition to Agdemnar to further their schemes.
Technological Information
The Conflux’s technological development is on par with that of most galactic powers, if occasionally taking different detours to reach similar results. While the diversity of the skirol nations and minimal to no regulation have prevented any overall standard from forming, some principles are universally in use throughout the Innumerate Suns, either harkening back to an age of more densely concentrated populations or having spread by virtue of their sheer superiority over any alternative.
Major Techs
Traction-Core Generator: Conceived in its earliest forms in the early days of space travel, the vacuum-core principle has been a fundamental of Conflux energy production for centuries, supplanting even nuclear sources as the more widespread system of choice. Its main application consists in the generators, large apparati from which obstruents are removed in order to create a partial vacuum. At the center of these structures, usually shaped like cylindrical vats, although spherical variants exist, there is placed a compressed cluster of superheavy matter, typically of the heftier metals, which is then made to spin and generate centripetal traction. The latter is collected by a system of pistons in the form of kinetic energy, which is then converted, through secondary additions to the generators, into the required forms. While the production of traction-core generators is significant, they are physically large and bulky, and were thus traditionally only used in industrial complexes, urban energy plants and aboard large ships. However, recent breakthroughs in miniaturisation have finally made the production of reliable smaller models possible, to the point that even small ships and some atmospheric vehicles can be outfitted with them.
Vacuum Shields: One of the main disadvantages of traction-core generators is that, due to the relative complexity of the intermediary systems, regulating their output is a difficult matter, especially in the cramped confines of a spaceship. As such, typical default production settings tend to be rather high in the event that a sudden performance spike might be needed at an unexpected moment. Naturally, this leaves a sizeable excess margin in normal conditions, a circumstance that has heavily influenced the design philosophies of skirol shipbuilders and is most clearly reflected in the energy shielding systems mounted on their vessels. Rather than projecting a static field, vacuum shields, so named after the source, channel the power fuelling them into a constant outward flux, dissipating and renewing their outward layers many times a second to provide a stable vent for the excess output they receive. Redundant systems ensure that the transitions do not leave the perimeter exposed. Due to their functioning, vacuum shields provide a very effective defense against protracted pressure at relatively low intensity, such as from directed energy weapons; conversely, they are more vulnerable to high-density impacts like those of projectile armaments. The use of vacuum shields is likewise the main reason why Conflux ships only mount energy weapons for short-range point defense purposes.
Vortex Cannons: While the vacuum-core principle is certainly not central to all aspects of skirol naval technology, elements of it have been incorporated far and wide in the field. Ship-mounted weapons are no exception, and vortex armaments have for centuries been the mainstay of spaceborne combat. These devices are effectively railguns that use a non-linear motor, having a propulsion system shaped as a magnetic coil with a central repulsor element. Vortex cannons employ centrifuge force as an additional accelerating factor, increasing shot velocity at the expense of some projectile mass. As such, a vortex cannon will be larger and more ponderous than a conventional mass driver using slugs of a comparable size, but perceptibly more powerful.
Vacuum Warheads: Sometimes, the road from vacuum-core to weapon is not as indirect. Vacuum warheads are little more than missiles mounted with a device similar to a traction-core generator, though significantly less stable and with fewer functional additions. On impact, the device’s outer shell is ruptured, briefly exposing its surroundings to its powerful inward traction before it collapses. The result is an implosion strong enough to deform and tear open starship hulls and armour, exposing the target to the diffusion of any secondary payloads the warhead might carry.
Slipspace Pulse Disruptors: The skirol’s raiding habits in pre-Great War times and the following need to cover up their operations spurred them to innovate in the field of stealth and infiltration. All their achievements with radar evasion and sensor attacks, though, rest on the necessary foundation of the pulse disruptor. Attached to the slipspace drives used on Conflux ships, these machines create a disturbance effect upon exiting FTL. This alters the surge that is the first perceptible effect of the ship entering realspace, and that has throughout history been the bane of stealth designs due to the ostensible impossibility of masking it. Although disruptors cannot hide this pulse, they are capable of curtailing it, funneling the burst into spare capacitors, and scrambling its signature. The result is that any sensors will detect the surge as being produced by a variable number of light ships exiting FTL, none of them intense enough to be equipped for combat. Due to the demands on power and space, disruptors are only used on ships designed for stealth, but a number of them mixed into a battlefleet could throw an opponent’s preliminary calculations severely off-course.
Organomechanical Integration: A staple of Conflux manufacture great and small, the melding of machinery to engineered organic components, usually through surgical synapse attachment, is found at all levels in daily life and beyond. From basic personal devices to vehicles, body augmentics and, more recently, starships, if something is produced in skirol space, chances are it will have a fleshy pulsating mass on the underside. This offers obvious benefits in decreasing production and replacement costs and time, as grown components are faster and cheaper to procure than assembled ones, as well as greater ease in interfacing and comfort in handling (if one has the right physiology). On the downside, integrated devices require more intensive upkeep and, insidiously, are easily prey to planned obsolescence, creating a very profitable market for living spare parts.
Military Information
Military Overview
Prior to the manifestation of the Ashtar, the Conflux, despite already presenting itself as a singular entity, did not have a unified military. Every separate nation relied on its own armed forces for peacekeeping, raiding and conquest, with the divergences in resources and technology spreading the overall picture too wide for any clear standard to be applicable. The occupation and subsequent string of defeats confronted the skirol with the necessity of being able to present a compact front in more than theory. While new military actions were impossible and rearmament was difficult, there was nothing preventing them from restructuring their navy at a formal level as long as no true conflict came from it, and so they did.
The result was a federated force under the command of the Conflux’s Commission for Enduring Harmony, itself partially comprised of representatives of the contributing powers, with every component retaining a large degree of autonomy outside of times of total war. To promote standardisation across the fleets, the practices of circulating blueprints and schematics of crucial systems and collecting common war effort funds were instituted, enduring until the present day. The destruction brought by the Great War and the rebuilding that followed were, among all else, opportunities to further streamline the previous diversity of organisations and approaches, and the most was made of them where possible. Nowadays, while the skirol militaries remain quite clearly varied in their appearances and tactics, they tend to use the same ranges of designs with relatively minor modifications. The eternal exception to this are independent Acolytes, who, being prevalently mercenaries, remain a motley and colourful crew.
Fleet
The Conflux’s fleet is the branch of its military that is attributed the most importance, and the one that has seen the most radical overhauls over its history. Having started out as disparate forces used mainly for raiding and suppression of inferior enemies, the early unified navy sought to capitalise on the design features common among its ships - speed, stealth and offensive capabilities dramatically outpacing their defensive ones. These vessels relied on quickly bridging the gap between them and their opponents, bringing the fight to dangerously close ranges where their weaponry would have room to shine. The tragic results of this approach are reflected in the staggering death tolls of the Great War, where skirol fleets were decimated time and again by more resilient enemies.
The need for greater staying power was keenly felt in post-War times, but the terms of the Detente prevented overt experimentation with warship designs. A solution was found in the once-discarded notion of applying organomechanical integration of machinery at the level of starships. Previously disregarded due to their difficult and laborious implementation funneling resources away from more reliable traditional fully-mechanical models, hybrid craft were devised and put into production with a view to circumventing treaty limitations, especially playing on the parameters on tonnage and armour. The result were prototype lines with less skewed armaments than before, but whose main goal was crippled by the very subterfuge that brought them into being. Organic components, being less dense, were indeed lighter, but also less robust, and the problem of defense lagging behind offense again presented itself.
In the last years, the crumbling importance of the treaty, along with far greater experience in shipwide integration, have finally let Conflux engineers reach something like the fabled balance they were seeking. Melding organic and metallic parts in a much smoother way, last-generation vessels boast defenses unparalleled before in skirol history, along with improved weaponry. As such, when they take the field (which is not often, given how rare they are as yet) they are found spearheading assault formations, followed by the malformed droves spawned by the Detente period. In an ironic reversal of roles, the older ships now form the rearguard, saturating enemy defenses with massed fire to cover the advance of their new, improved counterparts.
Dreadnoughts:
Insatiable: Coming into service in the later stages of the Great War, the Insatiable-class dreadnoughts were an early attempt to correct the deficiencies of Conflux shipbuilding. These imposing vessels are thickly armoured and shielded on several layers, while retaining a heavy array of weaponry. Of course, this aged equipment is far less impressive nowadays.
Sun Devourer: One of the crowning achievements of Conflux industry and development, Sun Devourers concentrate decades of work on shipwide organomechanical integration and improvement into leviathans of plasmid-flesh and metal as deadly as they are immense. These flagrant defiances of the Treaty are as yet few, their existence one more among the skirol’s secrets, and it is not soon that they will fully enter mass production.
Battleships:
Reaper: Once the iron fist of the skirol raiding fleets, Reaper battleships were fine-tuned for the role, being prepared to deal with sparse local defenses through speed and overwhelming firepower. Due to their flagship role, their defenses were nonetheless not fully neglected, and they thus fared comparatively better than smaller lines in the Great War. Compared to modern craft, their once-fabled agility is nothing to write home about, but a lot of guns on a pair of strong thrusters remains a lot of guns on a pair of strong thrusters.
Flayer: Among Detente-era experiments with integration on warships, Flayers are unique in that, instead of having a few components replaced with organic parts, they were mostly built from living tissue instead, an artifice partially motivated by the more stringent limitations on battleship designs. As a result, along with being a clear improvement over the Reapers in terms of speed and armaments, they sport some unique advantages like biochemically-assisted engines, a spontaneously regenerating hull, and amazingly cheap and fast construction. However, this comes at the price of wonky machine systems requiring special instruments and spare parts to work with and rather poor armour under their shields.
World Gorger: Striking a much better balance between organic and mechanical, World Gorgers coopt the strengths of the Flayer design while correcting its weaknesses. Destructive, streamlined and far more resilient, they neatly outclass any of their predecessors in any field. The only obvious disadvantage is that they are proportionally more expensive and slower to produce, which is only further hampered by the secrecy surrounding them.
Battlecruisers:
Invader: Invader-class battlecruisers were rarely part of a raiding force themselves, but nonetheless played a crucial role in those operations. Forerunners of the reaping fleet proper, they were tasked with disrupting the first lines of defense around their targets. Their aptitude for rapid, precise strikes did not suit them well in intense combat, and they took the brunt of the losses of the Great War. Nowadays, they survive mostly in an auxiliary facility, or bought and retrofitted by mercenaries and corporations.
Pestilent: A more typical Detente hybrid design, Pestilents were built around a mostly metallic corpus, with a few organic components mostly inserted only to lighten the tonnage. Sturdier for their class than Flayers, but less mobile and more lightly armed, they were designed to accompany the battleships as support units, providing defensive screening and limited artillery fire support, and, if not else, fulfil that role adequately.
Void Plague: Virtually a direct affront to the Treaty, all, of course, in the name of a balanced peace, the new Void Plague ships are towering juggernauts, packing tremendous firepower and encased in layers over layers of shields and armour. While slower than World Gorgers and still mostly excelling at close ranges, they are nevertheless capable of great offensive flexibility, bombarding the enemy with missiles from long distances even as they inexorably close in to deliver the coup de grace.
Cruisers:
Harvester: The traditional raiding ship by excellency, Harvester stealth cruisers were built to mop up the final layers of resistance during an assault and loading as many captives as they could fit before bombarding their incriminatingly empty cities into dust. This specialisation left them fairly useless from the Ashtar wars onwards, though in present times they have been upgraded and retrofitted in several ways, with variants serving as either tactical stealth ships or dedicated siege vessels.
Flesh Grinder: Supplying to the need for a mainstay combat ship of the line, the Flesh Grinder is a fairly recent hybrid design that has nonetheless surpassed the Harvester as most widely produced cruiser. Respectably armed and armoured for a Detente ship, it does not excel in any single aspect, but is extremely flexible in fleet configurations, and guaranteed to give the enemy a hard time in any circumstance.
Destroyers:
Veinsplitter: Once one of the first prototype hybrid ships, the Veinsplitter has gone through several iterations during the Detente period, over which it has phased out previous destroyer models. Today, it has firmly grown into the niche of strikecraft-killer, though it easily doubles as a predator of corvettes and other smaller vessels. If needs be, it can be mounted with anti-missile weaponry, albeit even then it is rather less effective in that role than dedicated models like the Pestilent.
Corvettes:
Stingworm: The adage of strength in numbers, or, more cynically, quantity having its own quality has always held for the Conflux navy, and Stingworms are the latest example of that mindset on display. Fast and cheap to produce thanks to their hybrid structure, despite making slightly fewer sacrifices in durability than earlier Detente models, these small but hard-hitting craft swarm over battles in vast numbers, seeking out vulnerable spots while the enemy is focused on the fleet’s heavyweights. Modular armaments allow them to carry heavy warheads suitable for attacking battleships as easily as vortex guns to outmatch other corvettes in a straight confrontation.
Strike craft:
Mutilator: Due to the structure and activity of the old Conflux fleet, strikecraft were never given much importance, and this shows in the scarcity of designs. While minor variants certainly existed, the Mutilator was the only major type in use, combining the functions of fighter and bomber in a general-purpose support vessel. Nowadays, they are often found in the possession of mercenaries, who modify them according to their needs on an individual basis.
Ripper: Times change, but design philosophies do not always follow them. In the intervening decades the Conflux navy has still not found much of a role for strikecraft, and the aging Mutilator has been joined by the equally multipurpose hybrid Ripper. The main difference, besides general performance improvements, is a more easily switchable modular component, allowing for easier case-by-case specialisation, but otherwise not much has changed.
Planetary Forces
Given the Conflux’s most recent pre-War history of groundside military activity, one might think that their planetary forces would be similar to the spaceborne ones - light, mobile and fast on their feet. However, this would be entirely wrong. Long before raids became an established practice, the main task of the skirol military was to occupy harvest worlds - primitive and subjugated, but entire planets nonetheless. As such, their armies were built to be enduring, imposing and extremely difficult to dislodge from their positions, a tradition which they continue to follow to this day. Most of the light-footed work is done at the stages of deployment and scouting; after that, one ponderous steel wall follows another.
The backbone of Conflux planetary forces is formed by armour and mechanised infantry. While the skirol can be deadly in close quarters thanks to their bulk and powerful mandibles, they are naturally slow to the point of being barely mobile. Modern diets have aggravated this by making fattening doses more accessible, and even civilians mostly rely on personal vehicles to move about; the military merely takes this to its logical conclusion. All skirol machines are organomechanical hybrids, which eases interfacing on the pilots’ part and allows for adaptive functions like atmospheric filtration.
The biomechanical skirol armies are never encountered without a following of Acolyte auxiliaries. Usually mercenaries or otherwise irregulars, they are a diverse crowd, outfitted with custom weaponry and augmentics to turn them into lethally efficient killing machines. Some go as far as sculpting their body into a form specialised for combat at the expense of everyday utility, a practice only encountered among those most dedicated to the military life and some religious groups.
Hyperdread
Titanic and armed to the teeth, the Embrace of Srynokk is the apex of Conflux fleet construction. An immense project already secretly started in the last years of the Detente, during which its separate components were built at different ends of the Innumerable Suns, the monstrous hybrid ship has recently been assembled into a functioning whole, and its performance has fully lived up to expectations. Despite its proportions, its functional design is rather straightforward, being built to accommodate a staggering number of synchronically working weapons. The only really peculiar part of its equipment are its potent shielding systems, built on layer upon layer of redundant fields; so powerful are they that at extremely close ranges they can become a weapon in their own right, crushing smaller vessels on impact. Furthermore, their radius can easily become a refuge for a small support fleet.
On a sidenote, the ship was originally planned to bear the name Embrace of the Wurm. However, after some resistance from secularist members of the Commission the designation was changed to its current, more neutral one, named after Vesereth’s star.
Name: Rodrick “Red” of… where’s he say he’s from, again?
Title:Why, Red’s not enough for you?
Age: Somewhere around thirty. It’s hard to tell.
Body
There is, in truth, not much red about Rodrick. His hair and beard, as scraggly and unkempt as anyone’s, though not completely wild, are more of a light brown that could at best pass for a vague russet in poor light. Nor is his skin anywhere near what one may call ruddy; even when heated by drink, its worn, calloused span is of a sallow, almost greyish hue. Indeed, one look at this short, stockily built man will not reveal much regarding the origin of his moniker, nor his age - discolouring tones in his hair and creases on his face betray that he cannot be younger than twenty-five years or so, but beyond that, he could be anywhere across two decades. What such a look would show, though, is that he evidently does not neglect the simple needs and pleasures of the body despite an altogether harsh life. Under his furrows, callouses and mess of a beard, he looks well-fed for someone who wanders the road, stands firmly on his feet and never shakes or fidgets, come cold, rain or uncomfortable silence. Attentive if weary eyes look out from under bushy eyebrows, and when he speaks one almost does not notice the gaps and spots of grime among his yellowed, but robust teeth.
His attire is likewise a cut above the worst of the ragged misery met on the travelling path, consisting of worn and oft-mended, but clearly well-made warm woollen travelling clothes, turned to an indistinct beige by age and use. Covering them are a light boiled leather cuirass and pair of boots that might not be out of place on a soldier, completed by a rigid cap and a belt holding the hem of his tunic doubled-up to shorten it. Tied to it are likewise an axe and a knife, used but well-kept, and a few simple wooden charms, supposedly to ward off the Filth and other misfortunes. What is remarkable about him, however, are the pouches and bags he carries, a full three, capacious and firmly fastened.
Mind
Rodrick is someone who does things most people would rather not for a living, and, in his opinion, that counts for something, both for himself and for the world that has come to see such things. That is not to say that he thinks very highly of himself; used to having no one but his own thoughts as travelling companions, he has learned to see what he takes to be the simplicity of his character with a good-tempered humility. A sign of what times have come to though he may be, he is still the man who genuinely enjoys the rough solace of a bed under a roof every time, and whose desires are no loftier than a cut of roasted lamb and a keg of ale; who holds to superstition and stolid fatalism because he lacks the faith to be truly religious; who went and left behind home and family because he wanted to live more than he believed in whatever they were taking a stand for. All of this he knows and is not ashamed of, for which one may brand him a callous and craven dullard. As long as his pockets are not empty, he will not mind.
For all this, he is not one to avoid company. Quite on the contrary, after his spells of solitude he has come to appreciate the presence of his fellows, and in good fellowship can be a jovial speaker, running his mouth about all and sundry as if to make up for the silence of his expeditions. This gregarious spirit even goes a little deeper than his wind-bitten skin, for, despite not being a paragon of altruism, he dislikes the sight of suffering, and will on occasion lend a hand to those in the direst of straits. However, most of the time the pragmatism of a difficult life and the cloud of mistrust that follows any outsider win over, and, as he has done in the past, he shrugs and walks along. The world has taught him other lessons beyond self-satisfied introspection, chief among them being that in the end, it’s always every man for himself. Like it or not, that’s just the way it is.
Life
What’s there to my story? Sure, I’ve seen things, but everyone has if you ask around. Course, maybe not the kind I mean, not everyone, heh. What, that’s good enough? All right, I’ll start from way back at the beginning.
I’m from a little place way there to the west. What’s it called? Don’t bother, you wouldn’t know it, and if you do, you know why it don’t matter. It had people from a bit all over, but most of them’d come from Jornoston some generations afore. They’d disagreed over something with the head priest, I think. Nobody really knew by then, not even my folks, though they were from that stock too. I’d been thinking I’d go clear it up some day if anyone remembers at all, but you know the trade, all the time goes to moving hand to mouth and back.
Anyway, early as I can recall, there was five of us, mother, Parrel remember her, brother, two sisters. Never seen my father or heard much of him, not even sure he was the same one for all of us. Maybe that’s why I’ve been Red since then, you know. Mother, though, she’s not one you’d forget that easy. Woman damn well held half the place up on her own. Wasn’t the mayor or anything, but you got the feeling that without her things wouldn’t be going half as well. Still had time left to chase us around to do things, too. Taught us that if you stop, you’re good as dead straight up. Only way to make it out there.
The Filth, they came damn near every night. A right proper marvel that the place lasted generations. I think it was ‘cause it wasn’t much of a place to start with. You know how they near don’t care for no-good rags like you and me? Sure, they can’t stand a place where folk live. But I think they just couldn’t be bothered enough about our two mudholes. Never was many of them, and never seen a single big one back then, thank the gods. So, they kept us up at night, tore up a couple folks pretty regular, but didn’t come big enough to straight-up stomp us out. Until they finally did, course.
As luck had it, it was in our time. Lot of us were of age by then, even me, young folks coming up all over. Mother was still holding up strange well for never sitting still a moment. So, before, was always the old folks that thought what to do. Didn’t need much thinking for that, so we sort of got by just like that. But then, there was that fellow Enghard, lived a couple houses from us, near the middle. Couldn’t be much older than my sister Bethe, she’s the first of us. His old man’d been one of those who decided things, and when he kicked over, Enghard got it in his head we needed one proper leader, a mayor like in the Walls. Had to be him, ‘course, and I’ll be fair, he was made of the right stuff. Sharp head, his, but damn was it hard. So he starts saying that we’ve been going good for a while, Filth shouldn’a scare us, we got to start doing better. Now us, me and brother and sisters, and other folks too, old and young, we tell him, Enghard, what’re you thinking, we’ve been going good so far, we don’t need changes. But we can’t get it into that thick head he got, and a lot of the others liked what he’d been saying. Mother too, she liked it a damn lot.
A bit goes by with us talking and nothing really comes of it, and then one day after he’d been out a while with a caravan that went through now and then, he comes back with a few sheep. Everybody asks what’re you going to do with these, we don’t have room for them in here. Well, he answers, that means now we just need to get bigger, right? Now before then the Filth’d been getting angrier for a while, they must’ve known we were up to something. We weren’t that far from everywhere that we didn’t know what happened when a place got big enough to rile them up all fierce. So a lot of these folks that weren’t convinced, they started saying fuck it, we’re not sitting around waiting for the Filth to get full mad at what Enghard’s doing, and they got up and left. And one day sister Bethe gets us together, rest of our families too, some of us had one by then, and lays it out like it is. This keeps going, we’re all dead soon, we better get out too. Everybody agrees, some know places they’d rather go already.
Then we go to mother, lay it out to her too, and ‘course she’s not having it. She’s never been afraid of the Filth in her life, she’s not starting now, going to show the fuckers what good folk can do when they got a mind to it. We go back and forth some, but neither’s getting through to the other. So we say, that’s good, but you know these things never work out good, and we don’t feel like we’d get killed just to show them, we’re going. And that’s farewell. She must’ve been proper disappointed with us, but didn’t really show it, she right was of the good folk. I regret it? A bit, maybe, I’m no Filth to just leave it. But I know, and you know, that there’s no helping things like this. No shame in getting by whichever way goes.
Sure enough, I been back there once. You can’t even tell there were ever people living there. That’s that.
We’re out of the place, then, and that’s where we go different ways. Bethe and brother Johan, they want to go to Jornoston. It’s a big place, safe as it gets, and though they don’t take people in on the usual, since our folks were from there back when maybe they’ll let them stay. Sister Magrett and her man are going down south, where his folks are from. Haven’t heard of them since. Ligdon keep them, but you know what that usually means. Everyone else goes other ways.
And me? I was the last, still young like when you want to see things. The others’d gotten past it already, but not me. So I take up the scraps I had, and I say, gods keep you, I’m going to see what’s in the world. They try to get me to come with for a bit, but at last we say farewells, and I get going. I’ll tell you, I’d no idea really of what I’d do from then. Was a long way to any other place, I didn’t have a thing worth a damn. Then I remember, there’s the old tower I’d heard of a few times, maybe I can go look at that first.
I get on the path and it takes a while, but then I come to it. Got to tell you, there’s something about old broken places that feels just right to me. Not good, just right, like that’s the place I got to do something, see every corner of. Could sit all day looking at one, then get up and look around inside it for another. That’s how it is. And I found that out then. There’s not much left in the tower, but it feels a way that gives little chills, like when you hear the wind and the rain but you’re at home and don’t have to go out. Still remember it now, damn clear.
I get in, and inside it’s a lot more dull, but I think maybe there’s something else worth seeing under all the rubble. It’s heavy and grown over with weeds, but I don’t have a better thing to do, so I get to digging it up. Turned out there really wasn’t much else, but I do find some old scraps. Looks like iron, but isn’t a bit rusted, even after all that time, just dull. Most of it you can’t tell what it used to be, but there’s a knife with some signs of the handle that look real unusual, a kind I’d never seen. I take it up, maybe I can sell it for something. Way I was then, anything’d have been good.
So, then I start towards where the closest place was. It’s a couple days, so I sleep under trees and eat some berries on the way. Damn awful sleeping, that, at first, but you get used to it after a bit. When I’m there, I show it to the smith, see if he can make anything of it. Well, he scrubs it, tries to sharpen it, or whatever he did there, and will you believe it, he’s giving me an almost new axe for it. An axe’s good for a lot of things out in the woods, and for that old thing, it was the best bargain I’d ever seen. That’s when I start thinking, if I keep something like this going, I’ll make a living all right.
And that was how it started. Was tough at first, but you can get the hang of anything if you give it time, you know. I’d go into an old place, dig around, and sometimes I found something that’s worth something to someone. Sounds easy, don’t it? From here, sure, you can talk about it like it’s nothing. But out there, where it’s the real thing, it’s a whole other matter. You walk for days, huddle every night afraid the Filth’ll catch up to you, then you get there, poke around in the dust and stones, huddle again by night, and if you’re lucky you pull out something good before your food runs out. If you don’t, tough break, nobody there to catch you. I’d had a lucky strike the first time, and thrown it away, I found out. Who’d’ve known an old dull knife like that can be worth way more than an axe in the right place? Got a few more rotten deals like that before I wised up. That’s part of the life, too. Know the good places.
Kendles’s where you start, and where it’s over, too, if you can’t keep your eyes open. You won’t be getting good pay for a thing, some assholes with knives’ll want a cut of it, and if you show around too much you’ll end up with empty hands and a stab in the gut. But there’ll always be someone who’ll take anything, even small stuff what other big places won’t have and small ones can’t afford, and it’s easy to spend what you get well. Sleep under a roof a few nights, have a couple good meals before you get back out. That’s why you see me come back here every time.
The Walls, I’ve only been a few times, and aren’t anxious to get back. It’s damn far, and when you get there they don’t even let you in. Sure, if you’ve got good finds, you’ll get a fair trade, but good luck getting anything for their own damn coins in their own damn city if you’re from outside. Not worth the trip, I tell you.
Jornoston’s a special one for me. Remember how Bethe and Johan were going there? When I gone to see, turns out they made it, and got homes there too now. Guess it did count for something that our folks were from there. Anyway, they see me, say it’s great living there, quiet and safe as anything, people done real warmed up to them after a while, got families there now, all this. They tell me to settle down with them too, they’ll make it smooth with the people there. I say I don’t know, I’ve got a thing going now, show them some stuff I thought they’d like, them being all of faith in that place. And they do look right pleased, take me to show it to some priest they had there, bit of a shifty man, but not all that bad when you get talking, you know. Got some loose hands, too, with the trade he gave me. So I keep going there on the regular when I find something godly-looking, and that’s a good time for the pockets. Brother and sister’re still at it, only now they’re just saying I should settle in when I get too old to keep this up. I’m thinking, maybe. Sure, I know what they all say about the place, and it’s true, when you’re there something’s always sort of off in the folk. But I don’t really get better looks elsewhere, and I got family there, so it can’t be as bad as the word goes, you get it?
So that’s how it’s been going for years now. I get out, look, find, get back, sell, live for a bit, then it’s all over again. The better you get at it, the deeper you can go into the old places. The edges’re barely any good, I’m not the first one to think like this, but if you keep going further in, there’s things all right. Not just things you can take, sometimes just seeing them’s enough to make you think a real turn. I’ve been through some stuff in them places now, got enough stories to keep us here ‘til next harvest time. Here, I’ll show you something I got of late. Big one, innit? Got to be a crown or something, you see the sharp bits on the edge here. Course, you can’t tell under all this grime, but if you look at it this way, see how this little spot shines? It’s got to be a right kingly one.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out like that, with where I found it. Was the second time I’d gone that far into any broken place, huge one, was one of their old castles or palaces or something. About half of it’s still standing, walls, rooms, all. Got the usual weeds growing in, and puddles of some kind of scum all around, but no live Filth anywhere, that’s why I went further in. Even got down some stairs under the ground, which isn’t a good thought usually, but this time I sort of knew there had to be something good in the end, you know? Them walls kept standing all this time, it’s got to be worth something. Underground, place’s not that big, though rubble’s closed up a lot of doorways, so you can’t really tell. Kept almost shitting myself thinking it’d start crawling with Filth suddenly, but nothing like that happens. So, deep at the end, there’s a place like one of those grave rooms, and on a carved stone that’s tipped over in some of that dirt, there’s this. Was damn wary about it, but there wasn’t anything else to take, so I nab it up and get out.
And I’ve had the thing since. Weird, but nobody’s cared to bargain for it so far. Why don’t I scrub off the grime? Damn, if it was shining like this all over the whole time, I’d have a crown less and a knife more somewhere in no time. ‘Sides, I’ll tell you, it just doesn’t come off. Tried knife, stones, water, fire, nothing gets it. Strange, you think?
That’s how things are in the trade, lad.
Numera
Physical
Might: 2
Coordination: 2
Fortitude: 3
Psycho
Intellect: 2
Wisdom: 3
Willpower: 3
Craft
Much of Rodrick’s practical knowledge comes from his early years, when he was one of many pairs of hands always needed somewhere. Then, he learned carpentry and mending torn cloth, tending to some meagre crops and fighting off the Filth and other threats. He never came to excel in any of these, but can still do a serviceable job at whichever if called upon. Later, as he settled into his new life, he had to learn skills like living off the land for days or weeks at a time, navigating his way through the most nondescript and labyrinthine of ancient ruins, discern what salvageable objects might be of value, selling them for a price that would satisfy him (if not what they really might be worth) and watching out for menaces to his purse and life, be they human or less so. His simple curiosity and observant spirit have led to him gathering a few tales about how people might have lived in the past, and hazard a few educated guesses of his own thanks to what knowledge he gathers in the field. Frequent talks with his surviving siblings have also given him a smattering of Jornoston’s religious lore, though that is not something he speaks of eagerly, claiming he never could make much of these matters.
Memory
The story I remember the best? That’s a good one, I’ll tell you why. Most every time I’m talking about this, folks’ll think it’s when I got out of the place I lived. Giving farewell to your mother like that, leaving her, they say, that’s got to be something you don’t forget. Well, they’re right, you don’t forget that easy.
But I’ll tell you this. You get what I do to get along? If you’re thinking like that, you don’t. When you go in the old places, you better forget the stuff you think’s that matters out here. Inside, you see the things of a world that’s not there anymore, and if you’re there a long time like me, you start to think a bit like that. What’s it matter how good or bad things are? There was people like you around there, and now they’re dead as good as the stones you’re walking on. If you’re not careful, it gets to you, this thinking. I’d know.
So what’s the worst thing that can happen to you when you get thinking like that? Well, what’s the worst thing out there, plain and simple? That’s right, the Filth. So you know what’d happen if you was thinking like that and you find them? You can’t, you’d need to do it yourself to, but you get the drift.
And still what’s worse, I seen where they come from. Sure, we all know they come from their rings. But how’d you think we know? Cause some folks seen it a few times, and some of them got back to tell. Well, you're looking at one of 'em.
Was the furthest I've ever gone into one of the old places, 'fore then and since. It was big, not the way you usually hear big about. I mean more as right big. Place could've fit the whole Kendles into it and still got room left, and that's just the part as was still upright. Couldn't guess what it must've been like that long ago. I'd gotten there early round noon, and I'd been walking through stone houses bigger than anything in the countryside till it got dark. Not much luck finding things there. Maybe the place was just too big, couldn't've searched the whole of it in a day.
I'm thinking, I'll go a little further, then I'll stop for the night, no good to be abroad when it's dark. I turn around a wall, and it's there I see it. The houses end suddenly like they're cut off, the woods don't start until a good deal further, and about halfway to them, there's it standing, one of those rings. Big one, I don't know how a bunch of rocks this tall shaped like that keeps standing at all. Can't see it clearly from where I'm at, and damn sure I'm not getting closer, but the ground round it looks sick, barely anything growing there.
I stand there, looking like I can't pull a step back to get behind the house again, and that's when I see there's a kind of, I don't know, smoke, fog inside it. Nowhere it can be coming from but the ground, and it's just there, nowhere else around. Then they start coming.
They're not coming out of anywhere, 'cause they weren't inside a thing before. They're getting through the ring, but I can see a bit past it, and damn sure there wasn't anything behind it afore. It's a thing I can't really tell how it is, 'cause stuff like that don't happen, but I see it just like that.
They're coming through, little ones, big ones, I think some weren't even walking but in the air like huge flies. It's like a muddy river, only tall as you are, and with waves, see that roof? Bigger than that. Well, and I'd been walking through the old place all day, remember, and those thoughts I'd told you about, they were getting to me. So, I'm there and can't even look away, and I think, we can't even stop a plain river, how the fuck's anyone think we can keep away something like this? Walls aren't no good, doesn't matter how big, they're so many and they come through a spot what was empty like this. I start getting more of these thoughts. You know if there was a time before the Filth? Must've been? Well, I don't know, I right don't know.
They must've known I was there, I think, that way they know what's around them. They just plain didn't care. You know me, I'm worth two coins to anyone, and for them? I must've been like one of them pebbles I'd been walking over the whole day. Didn't matter, that's that.
I don't remember how I got out of there. Didn't sleep for days afterwards, barely ate, just kept walking. Never gone that place again. Sure, I'm an idiot to get out there at all, but some things get through even to me. It's not just the ring, I know they're everywhere, but the old place's before it. And that one, I've seen them come through it.
Bit of what I've got so far to show that I'm getting something done. If I can stop going overboard with every section I should be done by the end of the week.
Edit: finished and ready for review.
Harmonic Conflux of the Innumerate Suns
the Conflux, the Innumerate Suns, skirol, “maggots”
General Information
Major Belligerent
Overview
The Conflux is ostensibly a liberal and prosperous, if somewhat bellicose and reclusive union of culturally young species growing and developing under the benevolent oversight of the powerful skirol. What the galaxy knows about it and its true nature are, however, entirely different things. Behind its bright and vibrant facade of disinformation, the Conflux is a predatory hegemony where the skirol rule over hordes of mutated grunts and prisoners of monstrous abattoir worlds, and barter with the flesh of sapients degraded to cattle.
History
The history of the Conflux is, belying the truth about its structure, mostly that of the skirol. Once one of many parasitic species plaguing the megafauna of their homeworld, they outcompeted their evolutionary rivals not through symbiosis with their hosts, as many others had tried, but by growing increasingly malignant, large and ferocious. By the time they crawled their way to sentience, they had become the apex of the food chain; and, by the time their disparate civilisations had mastered space travel, the once fertile planet had been mostly scoured of life, not so much by rampant exploitation as by the unfortunately specialised alimentary needs of its inhabitants. Curiously, the skirol never formed a unified planetary government. A generally accepted explanation is that the need for one was obviated by the rarity of armed conflicts and international regulations being disfavoured relatively to case-by-case diplomatic agreements, though many historians believe this to be an oversimplification.
The foundations of the Conflux proper were only laid when the skirol discovered that they were not alone in the galaxy. A prospecting interstellar expedition by the Accord of Theniax, then a relatively minor nation, encountered a pre-spacefaring species in a newly discovered system. The skirol had a difficult time coming to grips with the idea that anything else could be intelligent in the same way as them, something many are still not fully convinced of to this day. It did not help matters that most of the Accord subscribed to the aggressive faith of the Wurm Raslir, whose cosmology left little room for friendly contact. Though inferior in numbers to an entire planet’s people, Theniax had vastly superior technology and the advantage of orbital control. The newly met species, its original name stricken and forgotten, was pillaged, enslaved and processed to be fit for consumption by the skirol. Willing collaborators were “rewarded” by being subjected to experimental augmentation procedures and, if they survived, accepted by a society that thought little of their betrayal. Almost overnight, the Accord became a major player on the market and political scene, which contributed to the spread of the religion of the Wurm until it surpassed many of the previously dominant confessions.
The Reaping of Irret-Thenn, as it became known, gave an explosive new motivation for interstellar colonisation and set a precedent for future contact. The skirol had discovered a taste for intelligent meat, and wherever they happened over the miracle of life, which they were lucky enough to do a few times more in the following centuries, their sleek, spiny ships descended like a hungry swarm, subjugating, harvesting, and uplifting defectors to bolster their forces.
Although their intentions never changed, and indeed have not to this day, the skirol’s first clashes with other spacefaring powers made them rethink their strategy. Faced with prey they could not overwhelm through brute force and fearing that they would face war on all fronts if their practices came to light, their governments, in an unprecedented display of joint effort, assembled to build an enormous masquerade that spanned the entirety of skirol-held space. The Harmonious Conflux of the Hundred Suns, as it was known at the time, was formed as an international organ with sweeping authority to curtail and oversee external communication, projecting an aseptically neutral and rather enigmatic public image. The burgeoning population descended from the various uplifted inductees, now largely mutated and modified beyond recognition, was rebranded as a number of minor protectorates, and the existence of the conquered harvest worlds became a dark secret hidden in the depths of Conflux space.
Nevertheless, the skirol’s hunger for new tastes only grew, and with subterfuge instead of force they had only traded one weapon for another. Where mere expansionism was judged unacceptable, finding more civil pretexts to skirmish with their neighbours, and not only, became a favourite sport. From border disputes over some drifting asteroid to false flags set up by uplift mercenaries, Conflux forces made a habit of sweeping into their targets’ backwater colonial holdings on the flimsiest casus belli, abducting the population and concealing the strange disappearances with massive collateral damage. The conflict was then smothered in protracted negotiations, and usually ended with the offer of token reparations, though this was of little comfort to the captives, en route to becoming the latest flavour on the market. Of course, when the skirol were confident enough of their superiority, formalities were forgone altogether, and small colonies just inexplicably vanished before anyone could tell what hit them. An entire industry sprang up around this sort of raiding, from specialist harvester companies to teams of treaty loophole-seekers, and in time it grew to become one of the main pillars supporting the economy of the Conflux, by then already comprising Innumerate Suns and having spread into a catch-all term for skirol holdings and activities.
Needless to say, the advent of the Ashtar hit it badly. While at first they flatly disregarded the imposition of peace and gleefully carried on with their hit-and-runs, they quickly found that not even their raiding fleets, whose speed and stealth were the pride of skirol engineering, could outrun retribution. Growing furious and desperate as this once hugely profitable niche was choked, threatening their entire market, they struck at the Ashtar directly, sending droves of warships against their response parties, but only succeeded in wearing themselves down.
The worst, however, was yet to come. With as little warning as they did anything, the Ashtar struck at the Conflux’s harvest worlds, bypassing their outermost defensive perimeters altogether. The skirol guards were scattered, their stranglehold over the planets shattered, and centuries of conditioning and forced obedience were undone in a matter of hours, former captives shaking off the constraints of a lifetime. It was a miracle that the skirol's cover held at all, mostly owing to everyone else having better things to keep them busy and what information got out being later dismissed as provocations spread by rebellious subjects. Cornered and heavily wounded where it had never expected a blow, the Conflux gathered the largest warfleet in its history and prepared to attack the Ashtar head-on, regardless of the disparity of forces. Or, at least, it tried. Individual battlegroups were intercepted, gathering points were blockaded, and the final assembled force, mere scraps of its projected magnitude, was faced with the imposing mass of Prevailing Tranquility. Threatened with complete annihilation, the skirol had no choice but to resign themselves to a heavily downsized diet and market, though their resentment grew and festered.
By the time the Ashtar disappeared, the Conflux was starved for fresh meat and on the brink of economic collapse, having been deprived both of its old conquests and the lucrative raids. It is thus little wonder that it was at the forefront when the Great War erupted, looking to make up for lost time by gobbling up as many people as it could, appearances be damned. However, it soon became clear that all its rage had little of a punch behind it; built for rapid and precise tactical operations, its military had never been prepared for sustained conflict. Attrition took its toll, even as its forces were spread thin by the simultaneous effort of retaking the liberated harvest worlds, and when the Madrigasa talks came about the Conflux dragged itself to the table beaten and broken, with few real gains to show for it.
Yet those few scrapings proved vital, giving a brief reprieve for the Innumerate Suns to sustain themselves as they turned their attention inward to sharply reorganise their workings. The Detente saw heavy work on the harvest worlds, which were rebuilt and reshaped into streamlined breeding grounds. In a bold move that many feared would threaten the Conflux’s facade, but was ultimately recognised as necessary, the market was opened to external trade, (supposed) slaves in particular becoming a valued commodity both as imports and exports. Along with offering a much-needed influx of foreign wealth, many saw this as an opportunity to smooth over the skirol’s reputation in at least some corners of the international stage after a litigious and belligerent past.
This period of revolutions had, however, some adverse effects as well. The seeds of radical ideological movements had been sown during the hardships of the past recession, and a changing society brought them to the fore. Rogue underground factions gained alarming power, and their sometimes unsubtle machinations more than once strained both Detente and masquerade to their limits.
Incidentally, those same rogue factions gave the Conflux a convenient excuse when the Message pointed the way to Agdemnar, and officially the skirol force that has dug in on the planet is controlled by any number of extremist groups. Still, the roots of conspiracy have had decades to sink deep into its reconstructed society, and sometimes the brains at high command themselves wonder just how much of that is merely a cover story.
Major Holdings
Vesereth: The homeworld of the skirol, once shared along millennia-old repartitions by their elder nations, has gradually been overtaken by the Conflux’s administration as the organisation’s significance grew, and now serves as the de facto capital of the Innumerate Suns. While most of the old polities maintain a token presence in culturally and historically important places, most of the planet is considered neutral ground. This makes it a favoured meeting ground for settling diplomatic disputes, as well as being the neural center of the Conflux’s activities of communications, transit, market and to an extent military oversight. The planet’s heavily urbanised surface is an amalgamation of architectural styles as diverse as many are ancient, with remains of its peculiar megafauna ecosystem surviving only in sparse reservations.
Giaxil: The Lisrak Covenant has, for most of skirol history, been the largest and most powerful sovereign state to stretch its holdings beyond Vesereth, and in some aspects this still holds true. Though temporary outpaced when Theniax struck it rich with the Reaping, the old money of the Conflux more than recouped its losses with the rise of the raiding industry, and for a long time dominated the niche with its unequaled military might. The post-bellum need for remodernisation only served to cement its position as the strongest pillar of Conflux’s military-industrial complex. The seat of the Lisrak government embodies this role, being a bustling hive of factories, laboratories, military compouds and marketplaces of all calibers. Life on Giaxil is busy to the point of being frantic, but also famously well-paid.
Ur’Theniax: In many ways the polar opposite of Lisrak, the Accord of Theniax never shifted its attention away from its resounding success in the Reaping, instead choosing to capitalise on the practice of world harvesting and its various products. Besides swelling to obscene wealth through careful exploitation of the flesh trade, biotechnological research sponsored by it made leaps and bounds thanks to the abundance of high-quality subjects that were ethically and legally free game, its society was always the most progressive in its acceptance of uplifted Acolytes, and its patronage of the church of the Wurm let it reap the rewards of its cultural primacy. In contrast with Giaxil, its capital of Ur’Theniax is a clean, quiet and photogenic paradise, decorated with ample stretches of unspoiled nature. It is ideal estate for research facilities, elite trading hubs (usually dealing more with stocks than the actual deal), religious centers and luxury estates for wealthy skirol or successful Acolytes.
The Silent Maw: Located at the fringes of Conflux space and the one of the few places in it freely accessible to outsiders, the Silent Maw is one of the most concrete signs of the social restructuring that has pervaded the Innumerate Suns. This vast, well-fortified habitat station, strategically placed at a convergence of several local transit routes, is the greatest slave trading hub in skirol territory, and certainly one of, if not the largest in the galaxy altogether. While maintained by the Conflux itself, the nature of the business that takes place on it such that some concessions need to be made for more legally dubious clientele, and thus, despite standard surveillance and the application of tax rates, transactions can easily be held in complete anonymity.
Kardatt: During the Detente-era industry reforms, the reconquered harvest worlds, the Conflux’s closest-held secret, underwent radical renovations to become the backbone of the now once more insular flesh trade. Kardatt, one of the last inhabited planets to be conquered in the first period of skirol expansion, and thus comparatively less ruinated by rampant exploitation, was the prototype of the chillingly efficient new model, and remains a symbol of the undertaking’s success. Heavily defended and camouflaged, the planet is a hell of assembly lines, breeding pens, cloning chambers and worse, regularly churning out herds of debased beings to sate the skirol’s hunger.
Demographics
Population
Skirol - 78% officially; 56% effectively
Acolytes - 22% officially; 16% effectively
Others - none officially; 28% effectively
Skirol: A species of malignant parasites who grew to exceed the size, strength and intelligence usually held by such organisms, but never lost their voracity and primitive non-dimorphic, worm-like appearance. Their prehensile branching tongues supply to the needs of fine manipulation, though nowadays most prefer to use mechanical prosthetic aid. In ideal conditions, they can live for a surprisingly long time, exceeding several centuries even unaugmented; however, this is generally only achieved by the wealthiest among them. Strictly carnivorous, skirol, in an atavistic throwback, prefer consuming their prey alive, slowly draining it of fluids and externally digested organs before finishing the desiccated body in a few bites of their bone-breakingly powerful jaws. Psintegrat aptitude among them is unusually rare, though those that do show potential can develop tremendous powers.
Acolytes: A blanket term for beings descended from the minorities of conquered populations that willingly joined the skirol. Generations of bio-augmentic tinkering and simply living among their masters have long made every Acolyte unrecognisable as the species their ancestors had once been, their bodies warped beyond nature and their minds overtaken by an alien culture. Having abandoned every vestige of their old lifestyles out of scorn, desire to integrate into the dominant society, or simple convenience, they mostly reproduce through cloning or artificial parthenogenesis. While they can be divided into a number of mostly stable breeds, every Acolyte is a biologically unique entity, shaped by a free choice of augmentations and distinguishing marks of their occupation.
Others: The ones you won’t find in any census or galactic atlas. Despite forming a sizable percentage of the Conflux’s overall population, the inhabitants of subjugated planets are not recognised as sapient members of it. Bred in gigantic factories that were once their homeworlds, they are treated, sold and devoured like cattle by the skirol, and centuries of debasement have indeed left most of them mentally little better than animals. Those that do reach the public eye do so as exotic slaves from allegedly primitive worlds. In late pre-Ashtar times, this category has been expanded to include the victims of abduction raids, who are likewise subjected to the same treatment.
Society
Traditionally, the structure of skirol society has rested on the notion of the trezklin. This word, loosely translatable as “swarm” (though much of its meaning is lost), denotes a large, but tightly bound family unit living and working in close vicinity. Spanning various levels of more or less extended kinship, trezklin are extremely diverse in size; the smallest might count around a dozen members, while the largest number in the hundreds, and in some cases even the low thousands. Those numbers are, naturally, in constant fluctuation as some leave the family web to join another or found their own nucleus, and others are conversely taken in as they come to join a new mate or several. Single skirol living outside a trezklin are not quite uncommon, and are growing progressively less so in modern times, but are still regarded as eccentrics.
The reason for this is that, now as thousands of years ago, by and large it is the trezklin, and not the individual, that is considered the minimal formant unit of society. Jobs have historically been, rather than positions to be filled by fungible appropriately skilled workers, dynastic traditions upheld by the members of the same trezklin over the generations. The staff of a facility, the crew of a ship, an entire military unit; each of these was, and in many places still is, far more often than not a family in addition to everything else. Young skirol were quite literally born into their roles, and raised accordingly. This did not, however, negate social mobility; those dissatisfied with their position could seek membership of a different trezklin, if they were accepted and proved they possessed the necessary aptitudes, and units judged to be underperforming by those higher in the hierarchy (itself a rather complex notion; more details in the government description) could be downgraded to a lower position and replaced.
While this system has held from the birth of skirol civilisation, ever since the species began to expand into interplanetary space its inflexibility and difficulty in adapting to the needs of spacefaring nations became apparent. Assigning jobs to individuals was a completely alien idea which all but the most radical visionaries struggled to even process, but a compromise was found in the shape of what came to be known as anrak-trezklin, or “surrogate” trezklin. Those are typically groups of skirol who join together in order to receive a temporary position, and only remain thus until the term of the job has expired. Although those anrak-trezklin can occasionally develop into actual families, in most cases the relationships holding them together are purely businesslike, with each member still considered part of their trezklin of origin and expecting to return there. A gradual shift has made this model of employment the dominant one on the modern market, though, depending on the place and field, old dynastic trezklin occupations are still common enough, and the progressive integration of Acolytes has made individual work a more widely accepted, if still curious reality.
Despite the enduring rigidity of its structures and the perpetual control of communications by Conflux authorities to ensure the truth about the harvest worlds is not leaked out, skirol society is surprisingly liberal. With no clear division of class beyond disparity of income, the goods and privileges available to any citizen depend exclusively on their wealth, and extreme poverty is, if not completely nonexistent, becoming increasingly rare. Basic commodities are generally affordable to any social stratum, not in the least because, though the skirol enjoy luxury, they can easily subsist on very few minimal necessities, albeit how comfortable that subsistence is can be debated. Nevertheless, a permissive social order and a widespread striving for profit contribute to a rather competitive environment, which results in further entrenchment and insularity of the trezklin - the reason why solitary lifestyles are still discouraged at a distance of centuries.
The position of Acolytes in all this is an ambiguous one. Nominally accepted, they are neither skirol, nor do they have an innate drive to form trezklin. Because of the integrational difficulties caused by this, Acolytes have long remained on the fringes of Conflux society, trying to build their own cultures and communities with varying degrees of success and interacting with the wider macrocosm of the Innumerate Suns in the capacity of mercenaries and hirelings most of the time. Theniax has always been a notable exception, showing itself more willing to accommodate the needs of its recruits by creating professional niches available for individuals. Besides easing the access of Acolytes into society, this has had the added effect of lessening the stigma around solitary living, as this has become a viable choice for skirol as well. Due to this, most of the Conflux’s members have long been reluctant to follow Theniax’s example, though more and more concessions are being made in this direction in recent times given the beneficial results of this policy.
In a society that is, at its core, market-driven, the importance of religion has long been on the decline. Nevertheless, the inherently conservative nature of the trezklin has so far considerably slowed the withdrawal of spirituality from the Conflux, in a personal if not a political way. Among the many ancestral devotions and latter-day cults of the skirol, a majority of which tend to adopt some form of skewed animism, the most popular remains the worship of the Wurm Raslir, which is likewise overwhelmingly dominant among the Acolytes. According to its doctrine, the Wurm, commonly interpreted to be symbolic of the skirol species, is a vast metaphysical entity that parasitises the cosmos itself, taking what it needs and giving nothing in return but the wisdom of its example. If one considers the immense historical impact of its teachings after it was brought to relevance, it is really little wonder that the Conflux should have become what it is today.
Economy
Until the Detente, the Conflux’s policy of isolationistic aggression caused its economy to develop in a self-contained form, with the only, albeit not insignificant, influx from outside coming in the guise of abduction victims. Consequently, while a lack of external stimulation might have prevented it from growing to its fullest potential, the proportionally greater importance placed on self-sufficiency contributed to the formation of a powerful and diverse production base and an active internal market. Where this impetus would have proven insufficient for a lesser nation, the Innumerate Suns’ colossal reserves of territory and xeno-power, as well as the skirol’s physiological needs allowing for problems in sectors like agriculture to be solved in uniquely economical ways, proved a sturdy foundation for an industry of titanic power. An adequate example of this strength needs be sought no further than its performance during the Great War, where the Conflux’s fleets, despite their defeat by the Ashtar and subpar performance in prolonged combat, blazed through most of the conflict almost exclusively through force of numbers. While the industrial complex has not yet fully recovered from that strain, its reconstruction has thus far been steady, partially owing to the market reforms.
Arguably the most important of the latter has been the decision to make the Conflux’s economic scene more accessible for outside trade. Although its stringent information control regulations prevent it from entertaining foreign presences outside the Silent Maw and a few other approved trade hubs, its own merchants are seen abroad much more often, and remote transactions, however laconic, are gaining in popularity. Most notably, the Conflux has spent the best part of the decades of peace making a name for itself on the international slave and bio-construct markets, whether legal or less so - a distinction it finds wholly irrelevant, beyond how it might negatively impact its public image. Beyond having grown to a major actor in these fields, the Innumerate Suns have adopted a more open stance vis-a-vis the exchange of heavy industry products, importing machinery and ship components from relatively cheap corporate sources and selling their own. Traces of the skirol’s notorious insularity remain as entertainment and consumer goods are concerned, however, with most foreign produce being considered confusing and uninteresting for the former, and simply incompatible or superfluous for the latter.
Government
Despite the sprawling size of their territories, or perhaps because of it, the skirol have steadfastly maintained their tradition of not centralising their government into a single organism, instead preserving their political status as several quasi-independent polities. The emergence of the Conflux and particularly its growing importance during the Great War and afterwards might be early signs that, despite all odds, such a centralisation could after all be possible and even necessary at length, but, in the current conditions, it will likely be decades at the least before this ambiguity finds a resolution in either direction.
In terms of geopolitics, the Innumerate Suns are divided into five main blocs of unequal size and influence. The most powerful, monolithic and recognisable by far are the Lisrak Covenant and the Accord of Theniax, nations that have endured since the earliest space-faring days of the species and either never stopped growing or capitalised on individual events of major importance. Despite the occasional (and not very firm) resurfacing of the sentiment that all members of the Conflux are at least nominally equal, it is no secret to anyone that Lisrak and Theniax hold the greatest sway in all matters of common concern, and indeed dictate the course of events outright more often than not. The only meaningful opposition they could encounter, barring an unprecedented coalition of the other three parties, is each other; however, while their ideological disagreements, large or small, are myriad and often incomprehensible to outsiders, their lines for questions of international importance are most of the time compatible enough for overt clashes to be rare.
The third and fourth factions, while a far cry from the two giants in prominence, likewise share a major structurally defining trait, though instead of unity theirs is diversity. The Halypt Conglomerate is a rather tight-knit ensemble of venerable skirol governments native to Vesereth, who, however, never were as successful as their more famous compatriots, and lobbies representing the interests of major corporate bodies, who saw a safer path in entering a formal agreement with state partners, at the risk of incurring charges of commercial favouritism, rather than trying to challenge the two titans on their own. As a result, the Conglomerate’s sizable market presence is disproportionate to its actual political influence, which, while respectable, is still comparatively meager. Some speculate that it could plausibly rival the Conflux’s superpowers were it not for the many conflicts of interest that regularly arise to plague it, condemning it to remain largely fractured and lacking much of a unified ideological direction.
On the other hand, a more harmonious state of internal affairs is in itself not a guarantee for success, as demonstrated by the Conglomerate’s rough counterpart. The Pale Coil, as it is known, is a loose association of younger colonial nations, formally assembled to defend their concerns on the wider stage of the Conflux. Though not comparable to the Conglomerate in terms of wealth, controlling a scant few harvest worlds overall, the Pale Coil is far stronger in terms of individual voices, and, collectively, its heavy industry is a close contender for the second place after Lisrak among the Innumerate Suns. However, any advantages these factors might grant are hamstrung by a very limited engagement in international politics; between its disjointed nature and sparse development in most fields, members of the Coil largely prefer to focus on inward growth, and only really undertake any sort of unified action when they believe their interests to be threatened.
Even more disorganised and invisible than the Coil, to the point of being often disregarded altogether, is the final pillar of the Conflux’s superstructure. The various minor Acolyte societies that exist outside established skirol nations are as a rule too small, scattered and politically inactive to have any true standing. The very archetypal idea of the small Acolyte commune living at the edges of civilisation is steadily becoming a vestige of past times, as more of these groups become integrated into wider bodies. As such, the very existence of a “fifth power” in the Conflux is only recognised in a purely formal capacity, and it is widely expected that even this aspect will disappear before the turn of the century.
Despite their impressive number, the practices of internal governance of those powers are relatively easily described. Skirol governments have a curious tendency towards a sort of convergent development; any society beyond a certain size will be virtually guaranteed to coalesce into certain broad structural patterns. The underlying form of any regime almost invariably tends towards taking the shape of a plutocratic oligarchy, with wealth and income being the main indicators of a trezklin’s chances for upward social movement and the influence it wields in local society. In an environment of stable employment and regularised wages, this system would quickly create a vicious circle of stagnation. However, in the overwhelming majority of skirol economies income is under minimal regulation and tied to a variety of factors, a good number of which are usually outside the control of the employed trezklin’s superiors (for instance, market fluctuations, authorised secondary sources etc.). These factors contribute to the rather paradoxical conditions in which a sluggish institution like the trezklin exists in a social environment with the potential for constant flux, though the immediate effects of this are most of the time less dramatic than this description might suggest.
At the upper echelons of any nation, however, these regularities break down. While in theory there would be nothing stopping a single vastly influential trezklin from instaurating itself as an absolute power at the top of the social pyramid, history has shown more than once that such drastic actions provoke equally drastic reactions, and a family that gathers too much power for itself will be the target of heavy reprisals from rivals, occasionally culminating in outright civil conflict. Thus, the usual solution to such power struggles is the creation of a governing body from anrak-trezklin made up of delegates from the most outstanding lineages. Should any of the latter be supplanted, their members in the government are likewise replaced by their successors, a process that has been bureaucratically refined over the ages to be far less grey and vague than it might sound. At the rarefied tips of the hierarchy, success is impiteously and inflexibly measured in hard quotas. The specific rules and conformations of these coalitions vary between nations, including how the branches of authority are divvied up, but a generally observed basic law is that no participant trezklin may hold an overwhelming majority presence in any organ, no matter the circumstances. If this law should be broken, the other formant families unfailingly take it upon themselves to restore balance, often by drastic means.
Of course, none of the aforementioned structures and factions would be as notable as it is without the intervention of one factor. The Conflux is at one time a coordinating mind, a restraining web and the arena on which they vie for superiority. Originally founded as a focus for projecting an irreproachable image of the skirol to foreign powers via information control, the growing evidence of the impossibility of such a task in the age of mass multimedia information (for a long time now, it has been relying chiefly on the good sense of its citizens to keep quiet and the threat of public denouncement), combined with the increasing number of challenges that had to be faced jointly by the skirol nations, caused it to develop beyond its intended purpose. Nowadays, the Conflux is effectively a supra-national organism with sweeping, rather vaguely-defined authority; its true limits and capabilities are a subject approached as cautiously as a hornet nest, and usually not at all. Its composition is likewise baffling, as while it was once formed exclusively by delegate anrak-trezklin, age has contributed to the birth of more than a few true trezklin among its halls and corridors, firmly tied together in ways confusing for the authorities of the member states. Beneath its crust of assorted paperwork, it functions as a nexus of diplomacy both internal and foreign, in which it crudely resembles a simplistic parliament with all associated structures, and the head of joint military efforts when necessary. If nothing else, the skirol are mostly capable of coming to a mutual understanding in these basic expressions of war and peace.
That said, every system has its deviants, and the Conflux is no exception. Rogue factions are nothing new, with many criminal groups having come and gone since the earliest days of the exploitation of harvest worlds, but the damage caused by the Ashtar and then the Great War has exasperated the existing currents of extremist thought. The number of militant groups owing no allegiance to the Conflux, now resting on mostly ideological bases, has increased, and two in particular have swollen to dangerous size. It is suspected that they can rival established nations, partly thanks to rumoured connections to major official entities. The Omniphage in particular are often associated with the church of the Wurm, despite not conforming to commonly accepted doctrines. This sect believes that it is the divine right of the skirol to not merely prey on other sentients, but hunt and devour them to extinction, that they might be the only masters of the galaxy, and the fanatism of its members is well-supported by strangely abundant reserves of weaponry. Less spiritual, and arguably more dangerous, the Genome Harvesters are usually believed to have ties with the military-industrial complex, and the advanced technology they have proven to possess gives this theory some ground to stand on. Their organisation and goals are more obscure, but speculation has it that they seek the collective genetic records of all species for some nefarious purpose - and that they might really have a hand in the officially renegade expedition to Agdemnar to further their schemes.
Technological Information
The Conflux’s technological development is on par with that of most galactic powers, if occasionally taking different detours to reach similar results. While the diversity of the skirol nations and minimal to no regulation have prevented any overall standard from forming, some principles are universally in use throughout the Innumerate Suns, either harkening back to an age of more densely concentrated populations or having spread by virtue of their sheer superiority over any alternative.
Major Techs
Traction-Core Generator: Conceived in its earliest forms in the early days of space travel, the vacuum-core principle has been a fundamental of Conflux energy production for centuries, supplanting even nuclear sources as the more widespread system of choice. Its main application consists in the generators, large apparati from which obstruents are removed in order to create a partial vacuum. At the center of these structures, usually shaped like cylindrical vats, although spherical variants exist, there is placed a compressed cluster of superheavy matter, typically of the heftier metals, which is then made to spin and generate centripetal traction. The latter is collected by a system of pistons in the form of kinetic energy, which is then converted, through secondary additions to the generators, into the required forms. While the production of traction-core generators is significant, they are physically large and bulky, and were thus traditionally only used in industrial complexes, urban energy plants and aboard large ships. However, recent breakthroughs in miniaturisation have finally made the production of reliable smaller models possible, to the point that even small ships and some atmospheric vehicles can be outfitted with them.
Vacuum Shields: One of the main disadvantages of traction-core generators is that, due to the relative complexity of the intermediary systems, regulating their output is a difficult matter, especially in the cramped confines of a spaceship. As such, typical default production settings tend to be rather high in the event that a sudden performance spike might be needed at an unexpected moment. Naturally, this leaves a sizeable excess margin in normal conditions, a circumstance that has heavily influenced the design philosophies of skirol shipbuilders and is most clearly reflected in the energy shielding systems mounted on their vessels. Rather than projecting a static field, vacuum shields, so named after the source, channel the power fuelling them into a constant outward flux, dissipating and renewing their outward layers many times a second to provide a stable vent for the excess output they receive. Redundant systems ensure that the transitions do not leave the perimeter exposed. Due to their functioning, vacuum shields provide a very effective defense against protracted pressure at relatively low intensity, such as from directed energy weapons; conversely, they are more vulnerable to high-density impacts like those of projectile armaments. The use of vacuum shields is likewise the main reason why Conflux ships only mount energy weapons for short-range point defense purposes.
Vortex Cannons: While the vacuum-core principle is certainly not central to all aspects of skirol naval technology, elements of it have been incorporated far and wide in the field. Ship-mounted weapons are no exception, and vortex armaments have for centuries been the mainstay of spaceborne combat. These devices are effectively railguns that use a non-linear motor, having a propulsion system shaped as a magnetic coil with a central repulsor element. Vortex cannons employ centrifuge force as an additional accelerating factor, increasing shot velocity at the expense of some projectile mass. As such, a vortex cannon will be larger and more ponderous than a conventional mass driver using slugs of a comparable size, but perceptibly more powerful.
Vacuum Warheads: Sometimes, the road from vacuum-core to weapon is not as indirect. Vacuum warheads are little more than missiles mounted with a device similar to a traction-core generator, though significantly less stable and with fewer functional additions. On impact, the device’s outer shell is ruptured, briefly exposing its surroundings to its powerful inward traction before it collapses. The result is an implosion strong enough to deform and tear open starship hulls and armour, exposing the target to the diffusion of any secondary payloads the warhead might carry.
Slipspace Pulse Disruptors: The skirol’s raiding habits in pre-Great War times and the following need to cover up their operations spurred them to innovate in the field of stealth and infiltration. All their achievements with radar evasion and sensor attacks, though, rest on the necessary foundation of the pulse disruptor. Attached to the slipspace drives used on Conflux ships, these machines create a disturbance effect upon exiting FTL. This alters the surge that is the first perceptible effect of the ship entering realspace, and that has throughout history been the bane of stealth designs due to the ostensible impossibility of masking it. Although disruptors cannot hide this pulse, they are capable of curtailing it, funneling the burst into spare capacitors, and scrambling its signature. The result is that any sensors will detect the surge as being produced by a variable number of light ships exiting FTL, none of them intense enough to be equipped for combat. Due to the demands on power and space, disruptors are only used on ships designed for stealth, but a number of them mixed into a battlefleet could throw an opponent’s preliminary calculations severely off-course.
Organomechanical Integration: A staple of Conflux manufacture great and small, the melding of machinery to engineered organic components, usually through surgical synapse attachment, is found at all levels in daily life and beyond. From basic personal devices to vehicles, body augmentics and, more recently, starships, if something is produced in skirol space, chances are it will have a fleshy pulsating mass on the underside. This offers obvious benefits in decreasing production and replacement costs and time, as grown components are faster and cheaper to procure than assembled ones, as well as greater ease in interfacing and comfort in handling (if one has the right physiology). On the downside, integrated devices require more intensive upkeep and, insidiously, are easily prey to planned obsolescence, creating a very profitable market for living spare parts.
Military Information
Military Overview
Prior to the manifestation of the Ashtar, the Conflux, despite already presenting itself as a singular entity, did not have a unified military. Every separate nation relied on its own armed forces for peacekeeping, raiding and conquest, with the divergences in resources and technology spreading the overall picture too wide for any clear standard to be applicable. The occupation and subsequent string of defeats confronted the skirol with the necessity of being able to present a compact front in more than theory. While new military actions were impossible and rearmament was difficult, there was nothing preventing them from restructuring their navy at a formal level as long as no true conflict came from it, and so they did.
The result was a federated force under the command of the Conflux’s Commission for Enduring Harmony, itself partially comprised of representatives of the contributing powers, with every component retaining a large degree of autonomy outside of times of total war. To promote standardisation across the fleets, the practices of circulating blueprints and schematics of crucial systems and collecting common war effort funds were instituted, enduring until the present day. The destruction brought by the Great War and the rebuilding that followed were, among all else, opportunities to further streamline the previous diversity of organisations and approaches, and the most was made of them where possible. Nowadays, while the skirol militaries remain quite clearly varied in their appearances and tactics, they tend to use the same ranges of designs with relatively minor modifications. The eternal exception to this are independent Acolytes, who, being prevalently mercenaries, remain a motley and colourful crew.
Fleet
The Conflux’s fleet is the branch of its military that is attributed the most importance, and the one that has seen the most radical overhauls over its history. Having started out as disparate forces used mainly for raiding and suppression of inferior enemies, the early unified navy sought to capitalise on the design features common among its ships - speed, stealth and offensive capabilities dramatically outpacing their defensive ones. These vessels relied on quickly bridging the gap between them and their opponents, bringing the fight to dangerously close ranges where their weaponry would have room to shine. The tragic results of this approach are reflected in the staggering death tolls of the Great War, where skirol fleets were decimated time and again by more resilient enemies.
The need for greater staying power was keenly felt in post-War times, but the terms of the Detente prevented overt experimentation with warship designs. A solution was found in the once-discarded notion of applying organomechanical integration of machinery at the level of starships. Previously disregarded due to their difficult and laborious implementation funneling resources away from more reliable traditional fully-mechanical models, hybrid craft were devised and put into production with a view to circumventing treaty limitations, especially playing on the parameters on tonnage and armour. The result were prototype lines with less skewed armaments than before, but whose main goal was crippled by the very subterfuge that brought them into being. Organic components, being less dense, were indeed lighter, but also less robust, and the problem of defense lagging behind offense again presented itself.
In the last years, the crumbling importance of the treaty, along with far greater experience in shipwide integration, have finally let Conflux engineers reach something like the fabled balance they were seeking. Melding organic and metallic parts in a much smoother way, last-generation vessels boast defenses unparalleled before in skirol history, along with improved weaponry. As such, when they take the field (which is not often, given how rare they are as yet) they are found spearheading assault formations, followed by the malformed droves spawned by the Detente period. In an ironic reversal of roles, the older ships now form the rearguard, saturating enemy defenses with massed fire to cover the advance of their new, improved counterparts.
Dreadnoughts:
Insatiable: Coming into service in the later stages of the Great War, the Insatiable-class dreadnoughts were an early attempt to correct the deficiencies of Conflux shipbuilding. These imposing vessels are thickly armoured and shielded on several layers, while retaining a heavy array of weaponry. Of course, this aged equipment is far less impressive nowadays.
Sun Devourer: One of the crowning achievements of Conflux industry and development, Sun Devourers concentrate decades of work on shipwide organomechanical integration and improvement into leviathans of plasmid-flesh and metal as deadly as they are immense. These flagrant defiances of the Treaty are as yet few, their existence one more among the skirol’s secrets, and it is not soon that they will fully enter mass production.
Battleships:
Reaper: Once the iron fist of the skirol raiding fleets, Reaper battleships were fine-tuned for the role, being prepared to deal with sparse local defenses through speed and overwhelming firepower. Due to their flagship role, their defenses were nonetheless not fully neglected, and they thus fared comparatively better than smaller lines in the Great War. Compared to modern craft, their once-fabled agility is nothing to write home about, but a lot of guns on a pair of strong thrusters remains a lot of guns on a pair of strong thrusters.
Flayer: Among Detente-era experiments with integration on warships, Flayers are unique in that, instead of having a few components replaced with organic parts, they were mostly built from living tissue instead, an artifice partially motivated by the more stringent limitations on battleship designs. As a result, along with being a clear improvement over the Reapers in terms of speed and armaments, they sport some unique advantages like biochemically-assisted engines, a spontaneously regenerating hull, and amazingly cheap and fast construction. However, this comes at the price of wonky machine systems requiring special instruments and spare parts to work with and rather poor armour under their shields.
World Gorger: Striking a much better balance between organic and mechanical, World Gorgers coopt the strengths of the Flayer design while correcting its weaknesses. Destructive, streamlined and far more resilient, they neatly outclass any of their predecessors in any field. The only obvious disadvantage is that they are proportionally more expensive and slower to produce, which is only further hampered by the secrecy surrounding them.
Battlecruisers:
Invader: Invader-class battlecruisers were rarely part of a raiding force themselves, but nonetheless played a crucial role in those operations. Forerunners of the reaping fleet proper, they were tasked with disrupting the first lines of defense around their targets. Their aptitude for rapid, precise strikes did not suit them well in intense combat, and they took the brunt of the losses of the Great War. Nowadays, they survive mostly in an auxiliary facility, or bought and retrofitted by mercenaries and corporations.
Pestilent: A more typical Detente hybrid design, Pestilents were built around a mostly metallic corpus, with a few organic components mostly inserted only to lighten the tonnage. Sturdier for their class than Flayers, but less mobile and more lightly armed, they were designed to accompany the battleships as support units, providing defensive screening and limited artillery fire support, and, if not else, fulfil that role adequately.
Void Plague: Virtually a direct affront to the Treaty, all, of course, in the name of a balanced peace, the new Void Plague ships are towering juggernauts, packing tremendous firepower and encased in layers over layers of shields and armour. While slower than World Gorgers and still mostly excelling at close ranges, they are nevertheless capable of great offensive flexibility, bombarding the enemy with missiles from long distances even as they inexorably close in to deliver the coup de grace.
Cruisers:
Harvester: The traditional raiding ship by excellency, Harvester stealth cruisers were built to mop up the final layers of resistance during an assault and loading as many captives as they could fit before bombarding their incriminatingly empty cities into dust. This specialisation left them fairly useless from the Ashtar wars onwards, though in present times they have been upgraded and retrofitted in several ways, with variants serving as either tactical stealth ships or dedicated siege vessels.
Flesh Grinder: Supplying to the need for a mainstay combat ship of the line, the Flesh Grinder is a fairly recent hybrid design that has nonetheless surpassed the Harvester as most widely produced cruiser. Respectably armed and armoured for a Detente ship, it does not excel in any single aspect, but is extremely flexible in fleet configurations, and guaranteed to give the enemy a hard time in any circumstance.
Destroyers:
Veinsplitter: Once one of the first prototype hybrid ships, the Veinsplitter has gone through several iterations during the Detente period, over which it has phased out previous destroyer models. Today, it has firmly grown into the niche of strikecraft-killer, though it easily doubles as a predator of corvettes and other smaller vessels. If needs be, it can be mounted with anti-missile weaponry, albeit even then it is rather less effective in that role than dedicated models like the Pestilent.
Corvettes:
Stingworm: The adage of strength in numbers, or, more cynically, quantity having its own quality has always held for the Conflux navy, and Stingworms are the latest example of that mindset on display. Fast and cheap to produce thanks to their hybrid structure, despite making slightly fewer sacrifices in durability than earlier Detente models, these small but hard-hitting craft swarm over battles in vast numbers, seeking out vulnerable spots while the enemy is focused on the fleet’s heavyweights. Modular armaments allow them to carry heavy warheads suitable for attacking battleships as easily as vortex guns to outmatch other corvettes in a straight confrontation.
Strike craft:
Mutilator: Due to the structure and activity of the old Conflux fleet, strikecraft were never given much importance, and this shows in the scarcity of designs. While minor variants certainly existed, the Mutilator was the only major type in use, combining the functions of fighter and bomber in a general-purpose support vessel. Nowadays, they are often found in the possession of mercenaries, who modify them according to their needs on an individual basis.
Ripper: Times change, but design philosophies do not always follow them. In the intervening decades the Conflux navy has still not found much of a role for strikecraft, and the aging Mutilator has been joined by the equally multipurpose hybrid Ripper. The main difference, besides general performance improvements, is a more easily switchable modular component, allowing for easier case-by-case specialisation, but otherwise not much has changed.
Planetary Forces
Given the Conflux’s most recent pre-War history of groundside military activity, one might think that their planetary forces would be similar to the spaceborne ones - light, mobile and fast on their feet. However, this would be entirely wrong. Long before raids became an established practice, the main task of the skirol military was to occupy harvest worlds - primitive and subjugated, but entire planets nonetheless. As such, their armies were built to be enduring, imposing and extremely difficult to dislodge from their positions, a tradition which they continue to follow to this day. Most of the light-footed work is done at the stages of deployment and scouting; after that, one ponderous steel wall follows another.
The backbone of Conflux planetary forces is formed by armour and mechanised infantry. While the skirol can be deadly in close quarters thanks to their bulk and powerful mandibles, they are naturally slow to the point of being barely mobile. Modern diets have aggravated this by making fattening doses more accessible, and even civilians mostly rely on personal vehicles to move about; the military merely takes this to its logical conclusion. All skirol machines are organomechanical hybrids, which eases interfacing on the pilots’ part and allows for adaptive functions like atmospheric filtration.
The biomechanical skirol armies are never encountered without a following of Acolyte auxiliaries. Usually mercenaries or otherwise irregulars, they are a diverse crowd, outfitted with custom weaponry and augmentics to turn them into lethally efficient killing machines. Some go as far as sculpting their body into a form specialised for combat at the expense of everyday utility, a practice only encountered among those most dedicated to the military life and some religious groups.
Hyperdread
Titanic and armed to the teeth, the Embrace of Srynokk is the apex of Conflux fleet construction. An immense project already secretly started in the last years of the Detente, during which its separate components were built at different ends of the Innumerable Suns, the monstrous hybrid ship has recently been assembled into a functioning whole, and its performance has fully lived up to expectations. Despite its proportions, its functional design is rather straightforward, being built to accommodate a staggering number of synchronically working weapons. The only really peculiar part of its equipment are its potent shielding systems, built on layer upon layer of redundant fields; so powerful are they that at extremely close ranges they can become a weapon in their own right, crushing smaller vessels on impact. Furthermore, their radius can easily become a refuge for a small support fleet.
On a sidenote, the ship was originally planned to bear the name Embrace of the Wurm. However, after some resistance from secularist members of the Commission the designation was changed to its current, more neutral one, named after Vesereth’s star.
It was dusk when Split’s eyes flicked open, first on the sides, then ahead. Long as she might have spent under them - too long to keep count, if she had ever cared for that - the cycles of the sky sometimes still felt out of place. Dark should have been warm, but here again, like every time before, it got a little cooler. Still, the tiny difference was well worth not having to squint all the time in the open, and at least it looked a bit more like that so sorely missed blackness of the tunnels.
So, get up at dusk she did. When she slept at all, at least.
She stretched her four upper arms, flexed them in the elbows and half-jumped, half-slid out of the tree she had taken as her bed for the day. Luckily, her axe did not catch anything stronger than twigs on the way down. That was something even years of practice could not help. It all came down to the tree. A light tap was enough to straighten the weapon in its rough reptile-skin strap; check the chipped stone knife at her side as the hand came down, and off she went, pattering on all sixes over the tall, dry grass.
Patter, patter. Sometimes she listened to the sound, sometimes she did not. What mattered was not doing either for too long. When either her steps or the chirping and buzzing around got too monotonous, the silence underneath started to drown them out, and that was something she knew to avoid. It took just a week or so to understand, and from then on it was clear. If she let the silence get to her, she would start hearing things, and after that seeing things was not far off.
It worked, well enough that the worst she ever got was a suspicion of a whisper somewhere over her shoulder, or a blur in the corner of a side eye. Even when a strange-looking bird had appeared one day and started talking, which made her fear that despite her efforts she had lost it after all, it had turned out to be really there. Hearing a voice had been like a cool draft at first, and even better when it brought up freedom, though her attention had faded when it had started jammering about death and souls. She was not sure that stuff helped anyone, and either way thinking about it was the sort of thing to make her start dreaming awake. The one time it had happened in her sleep had already been bad enough. If those were dreams, she had not been missing anything, and she sure did not want any more.
And she had gone back to pattering, on and off. Patter, patter-
Creak
Something moved in the far distance.
Creak… Creak… Creak…
Split stopped, following the sounds with the sharp ear of a cave-dweller. A cracked, dried tree could creak like that, but so often without a breath of wind? There were no trees over there close enough to hear, either. Hands reaching for the haft over her shoulder, she stood up on her hind arms, smelling and looking ahead. So much for not having to squint.
There in the distance marched -- if it could be called a march, dense with strange, stiff shambling movements -- a handful of strange creatures, all clearly fashioned out of wood. Out of all the figurines, the one at the head stood out the most, as while his design was simple, even minimalistic when counting his shortage of appendages (just four), a strange sword floated above its head, point down, and threatening to drop on the bizarre mannequin at any point.
The kostral raised another hand to scratch her teeth, and found herself nibbling at the finger. It was not that she had never seen anything as unfitting with the rest of the world around at this - floating talkative rings beat it square by a good margin. But it was one thing to have seen something as strange as that, and another to look at the weirdness itself. Whatever else she had been over, wood moving around on its own, without even an oversized rabbit head or twitching eye sockets behind it, was not any less unusual for that.
But, wood or not, it was the closest to something like herself she had seen in a long, long while. Much longer, and she would stop believing there were beings that could walk upright anywhere else in the world at all.
As bad as it might go, she had not tried her blade on living bark yet. The axe felt a little heavier on her back. She chewed the thought to the back of her head, but kept a hand over her shoulder as she trotted closer to the jittering procession, making no effort to hide herself.
The squadron of uncanny, if not almost comical, walks didn’t seem to pay her any mind, until she was half a stone’s throw away. The lead swung a leg around, coming to a stiff halt. Its shoulders were square, and even without a face, Split was certain it was regarding her presence. Just like that the fields fell silent, with even the creatures of the ground and sky scurrying away from the showdown. Slowly, very slowly, there was a harsh creaking sound as the mannequin began to turn away, clearly done with its assessment. With an awkward stride, it began its march again, the others clamoring behind.
She followed it with her eyes, cocking her head sideways, then turned to follow, trying to fall into step with the crowd of shuffling things. Had she been expecting a piece of wood to greet her somehow and start talking? That would have been a huge relief, absurd or not, but not something she had been stupid enough to gamble on. No, it was already something that the creatures had not turned on her straight away. Always keep an eye open, but company was company, and by then she was ready to take almost any the wilds threw her way.
Keeping pace with the oddly moving figures was no easy feat. Just when she thought she had found a balance, a twitching step would go arcing much too long or much too short, leaving her plodding or scampering not to fall to the wayside. It became easier, if still not effortless, when she stopped looking for a rhythm and just kept an eye trained on the closest shape, speeding up when it loped and slowing down when it shambled. After a little time, it became almost a reflex. Walk, speed up, slow. Slow down, speed up, walk. It left her mind a bit clearer, enough to think of how this was like her time in the tunnels, when she walked with the others. There, too, nobody spoke, except for a gruff snarl from an overseer now and then. They just went where they had to go, together, keeping step in the line. It seemed like a good, simple time now, and for a while she did not think of why any of them had to go anywhere in the first place.
Eventually, however, that thought reared up again like it always did, bigger and bitterer for every passing year. Split grit her teeth with a little exhaustion and looked outward again. Her eye, used to the dark, took in the contours of her closest marching companion with any attention for the first time.
This one was different from the first, with big lumbering limbs as if hewn right from the log. It was a lot taller, and in all ways bulkier. Next to that one was something quite short in comparison, yet still stout. It waddled more than the others, its legs a bit shorter and wider, with remnants of what could have been the start of a snout on its featureless face. The others were a similar medley of tall and bulky, and short and stout -- all but the leader, who was the most plain of all. Curious too was their joints, the wood so tight next to each other and held together by pegs, it seemed almost impossible for them to move at all, let alone so wildly without falling apart.
Creak…
One of the smaller figurines turned its head to Split, as if just noticing her. It was silent and blank, just like the first time.
Her eye narrowed, now a little apprehensive. It had not yet occurred to her to think where the things could have come from. They did not look, even vaguely, like anything she had seen before, but the similarities among their two kinds must have meant something. It was not clear how old they were, either. Some were so worn and cracked that they must have been walking around at least as long as her, but others looked smooth and new. The leader, she could not tell.
Whatever had made them could not be far, and this was not good. Something she had missed in all this time did not sound believable. Which way had they even come from, now that she thought of it?
The shape that eyelessly faced her was not a sight she liked, either. She could take it that wood could walk, fine. But wood looking at her, or close enough, was something else. That even really wood? It did not feel dangerous, none of the jittery things did, but it sure felt wrong. Not for her. Just wrong all about it.
Tentatively, she raised a hand and gave the figure a wary sign of greeting.
The faceless head seemed to follow her hand, all the while maintaining its march as if it never looked away from its fore. It held the stare for a little longer, and just about when a normal person may have said something, or at least waved back--
Creak…
The head swiveled on a wooden joint, once again facing forward.
Split bit down, heavier than before. Worse than wrong. Ugly. Maybe she had started dreaming again.
With a quick, cautious movement, she stretched out an arm to lightly tap the creature’s side, ready to retract it in a blink. It was cold, like wood -- because it was wood. The figurine, if it could feel her, was doing a great job at ignoring her as it continued to walk, but then there was an itch.
Sure enough, the leader's head swiveled with complete 180 and was now staring at her -- or what could have been a stare if its face wasn't empty. She trotted up to its side, its featureless head following her, and silently pointed at the convoy behind them, eye widening in a wordless question.
There was a pause, the march never slowing, but a pause nonetheless. It could have been her imagination or perhaps a subconscious wish but she could have swore she felt a sense of reluctance coming from the wooden mannequin. Did she assign it emotion, perhaps, but against all odds and after a time far too long past the question, there was another creak, a new kind.
"Crea... Go." The word was hollow, as if pounded into existence by old wooden rods, "...a-way."
“Rhgh.” Split’s voice was little more than a dry, rasping creak after years of mutely battling the silence. For some long, quiet moments there was no follow-up to her opening sound outside of some whistling gargles as she stretched the dust away from her throat. Some of it was surprise that the thing could speak. “No,” she finally managed, in a withered husk of the words that had called out through unlit tunnels so long ago. “Not yet.”
She hadn't noticed when it happened, but all the other blank faces seemed to be staring at her as the leader fell silent again, save for its creaking joints. Slowly the rattling creaks that could only be its voice groaned once again, "O-K."
It slowly creaked as its head spun right back round, the others slowly peeling their own attention from Split.
Slowing her steps, she fell in with the thick of the group again. It was already a lot that it had spoken. Expecting it to speak any more than that too was, now that she thought of it, absurd. Then again, she did not have much more than absurdity left to count on. She could try again later, when her own voice got better. At least she would hear herself talk again, and a thinking thing, wooden or not, was always a safer partner than thin air.
Later. For now, she could just enjoy having someone to walk along with, and no iron hand pointing where to go. If she did not think too hard, it would be good and calm.
Wrong and ugly, sure. But it was a step ahead.
Stranded in the wilds of Ehomakwoi, Split has been enjoying her copy of One Hundred Fifty Years of Solitude and trying not to go crazy in the process. By the time we rejoin her, she’s already stretched so thin that when one night she meets Damocles and his procession of punitive puppets she’s less spooked than happy to have finally found some company. As she unwinds a little, though, it gradually hits her how strange the whole thing is. When questioned, the mannequins aren’t very eager to explain anything. Damocles himself points her to the figurative door, but doesn’t protest when she chooses to tag along for a bit instead.
Vast burning eyes flickered open, sending the tiny shapes crawling around their sockets scurrying away from the sudden blaze of heat. Iron claws quietly rasped into motion, crushing rock outcroppings the size of ancient trees to dust. The earth rumbled as the colossal weight within it shifted forward, slowly straightening up.
With a smooth though audible rasping, Narzhak turned his head to one side, then to the other, careful not to dislodge the thick, pulsating tubes that snaked past his armour and into his throat. The continuous flow of bitter fungal spirits through them might not have helped clear his mind, but he suspected that, if he stopped too suddenly, he would get a headache. His fingers gently pressed together over one of the gargantuan root-like growths, pinching it closed before lightly tearing it away. He left the leech-like suction mouth at the tip leaning against the edge of a plate, detached three more tubes to join it and finally looked around.
The once crude chamber he had carved for himself at the end of the Pit was, in truth, still crude, but had sprouted new furnishings, like strange cave-swamp growths, over the last decades. Rather than a near-shapeless, worn mountainous outcropping, his bulk now rested over a rough simulacrum of a gigantic seat, hewn out hastily, though not entirely carelessly. Nested in the corners above and below, immense metallic vats, steaming intoxicating vapours and tended to by hundreds of kostral, gathered the other ends of the living tubes in webs of titanic vines around their bases, with others yet extending out from them towards hidden sources. All across the vault, handholds had been cut into the rock to ease the hurrying of hordes of attendants. They swarmed across the god and his surroundings alike, scraping rust from his armour and sharpening its edges, pouting the contents of rudimentary iron vases into the vats and periodically refilling the monumental trough the quiescent monstrosity at his foot sipped from. Upon his stirring, they hastily streamed down from the throne’s sides, putting as wide a space as they could between themselves and his sweeping motions.
Narzhak leaned forward, eyes narrowing as he tried to find the source of the disturbance. It was not anything in the drinks, nor in the air. A quake, perhaps? No, he would have felt whatever had caused it.
Then it struck him. It was the sounds. Groaning, bellowing, howling rose from all sides, surrounded by confused snarls and snapping of teeth. Sounds the Pit had never heard. Sounds of fear.
A furious roar rose to drown all other voices from one end of the measureless cavern to another. Boulders fell from the unseen ceiling and new fissures split the ground open as the earth quaked under the sheer wrath pouring from the Iron God. Struck by his voice as by a maul, myriads of kostral dropped from wall and sky and collapsed in prostration. The sleepers jolted awake from their unquiet dreams, only to fall to the ground again.
”S I L E N C E”
The command was unneeded, as all sounds, even the rasping of beasts and crackling of flames, had fallen still for a few moments after being smothered in the tide of rage, but Narzhak felt that, without even a word of release his anger, he would have torn down the entire chamber around himself. The kostral, his kostral, had been forged with naught but blood-hunger and subservience to fill their minds, perfect instruments for the shaping of such vast designs as could direct a world down the path of growth. They had known no fear, could know no fear. And now someone had jarred that flawless mechanism, maybe out of nothing but carelessness. Who was the insolent heap of scum that dared? Azura again? If it was her, he would tear out every feather on her body, then the skin under them, then-
He scraped his fingers together in the likeness of a snap. In the time of a few blinks, two skestral descended from above, holding one of their wingless kin between themselves. As soon as it was released onto the iron desert of the god’s expectant palm, the kostral crawled into a grovel, only to shiver and curl its middle arms under itself as the searing gaze of the four eyes burned past its flesh and bone to stab into its thoughts like an incandescent blade. Mercifully, a divine eye was fast to spot what it needed, and before it knew it the hapless servitor had been deposited, shaken but unharmed, onto the ground amid the bowed ranks of its fellows.
”K’nell,” the god clenched his claw into a fist. Though his voice was more subdued than they had ever heard it, the kostral shrank under the menace even their dim minds could discern in it. ”Think you’re clever? That you’re safe to throw out whatever filth you like while you hide in your castle of air?” His fingers dug gouges into the ageless stone of his seat.
”Now you will learn to fear the shadows you cower in.”
Bloody paste squelched under the worn makeshift pestle, spraying deep-red drops on Vrog’s hand, the rocks around it and the ground. The crouching brute reflexively licked the spatters from his fingers, grimacing as he blew off the dust they withered to dust as his tongue withdrew, and tossed the crudely sectioned remains of a farmer ape’s limb into his imposing if rudimentary mortar. The pestle went up and down, again and again, as he threw in new pieces of assorted wildlife, interspersing them with splashes from one of the flasks that always happened to find themselves in his hand just at the right moment. Now and then he paused to spit a burst of acrid sludge into the concoction, prompting bursts of caustic hissing and puffs of smoke to rise from its midst.
He still could not get a mouthful of any kind, no. As much as he had tried to find a measure that worked, from large enough to need some chewing for once to finely shredded, he had only succeeded in thinning the numbers of marauding dragons and desolating swathes of woodland after emptying them of animal life. So long as it was getting eaten in some way, it went no further than the first row of teeth. Orvus might have been a terrible vrog-talker, but this was by all accounts a job well done. Picking every last crumb of that absurd sword - who brought swords to a battle, anyway? - from his body would have taken much longer than he had patience for, and even then he was not sure it would work at all.
So, he had looked for other ways.
Drinking worked, to a degree. It still dried up fast enough, but it he knotted together his tongues outside his mouth and held it there, he could feel the taste for a few moments. If the stuff was strong enough, he could even pretend he was sending down the actual thing. With a bit of dulling of his insides, dust did not feel entirely different from a regular sip, except for the part of coughing it up later. But, for someone who had really drunk, pretending was not good enough.
And he had come up with something better.
He wiped the pestle from the dense bloody mixture, set it aside and blew into the contents of the mortar. What life remained in the gruesome slime shrivelled up and fled on the wind, leaving behind a heavy, cloying mass that reeked of slaughter. Vrog gathered a wad on a hooked finger, slapped it in the middle of a long, wide dry leaf and wrapped the whole tightly. His tongue curled around the manufact in a spiral, holding it well outside his mouth. A snap of his fingers sent a spark into the tip of the macabre construct, lighting it into a sharp crackling burst of noxious black smoke. On his exposed tongue, it tasted vaguely like nearly every being that had gone into the making of the core, mangled, mashed and roasted into a near-indistinguishable, but all the more delectable mess of carnage. The thought alone made him slaver, and he had to snap down with a few hastily grown lateral mouths to avoid biting his tongue off.
But, of course, it would have been many times better if he could actually gnaw and gorge something like that. The mouths gritted in frustration. This thought never failed to show up when he lit a stack, and sucked out the best part of the enjoyment from it.
Vrog took an angry pull, stopping the smoke just short of his jaws. Another couple decades like this with nothing but animals to slice up, and he would turn into a raving beast himself. Since that Laurien, he had not found a single thing that could properly appreciate the pain and fear he would deal - and without that, where was the fun?
Speaking of pain, this one wrap must have come out bad somewhere along the way. None of the others had made him feel a burning deep in the now unneeded stomach, certainly not one that spread like an actual fire through his limbs, into his head-
His mouth gaped open, tongue darting in with its load of what was now dust, and he clutched the center of his thorax. The metal skin twisted under his grip, a force that was certainly not his own violently pushing out from beneath it. The hand was forced aside as the metal rose up like a wave of molten fluid, rapidly cooling into the shape of a ribbed spine writhing and bending as a skeletal worm. It coiled upwards, its still flat-plated extremity hovering before his mockery of a face. In the last throes of its fluid transformation, the plate’s edges became even more ragged and irregular, much like something he had nearly forgotten.
Four points of flame lit up amid the simulacrum of Narzhak’s visor.
Rivulets of dust streaming to the ground between his teeth, Vrog spluttered out the remains of his wrap. “D’you really have to do it this way?”
The answer sounded halfway out loud, halfway inside his mind. ”You know a faster one?”
He had to admit he did not. “What’s the deal now?”
”I’d ask about what you’ve done about our first one,” even as a shrunken talking head, the Iron God managed to sound threatening enough to someone who could catch the allusions behind his tones, ”but you’re lucky there’s worse things to think of. New orders. Find K’nell and bring me to him.”
“K’nell? That the dream one?” He parted the skin curtain at one corner of his mouth, exposing pensively clenched teeth. “How the gut am I supposed to do that?”
”You’re asking me?” The mask oscillated on its spine like a snake poised to strike. ”You’re the one out there. You talked to one of his puppets earlier? That’s your start.”
Vrog raised a finger in protest. “More like I talked at someone who said she was dreams. Wasn’t very convincing about it, either. What’s that do to spitting help, anyway?”
”You do the thinking on that one.” The fiery eyes flared up in a blaze that consumed the daylight around them, and Vrog grated all six sets of teeth and then some as a fist of molten iron clenched around his thoughts. ”I won’t take excuses for failure.”
The spine with Narzhak at its tip uncoiled and began to sink back into his chest with a feeling unpleasantly similar to being impaled on Orvus’ sword, if much worse. Before its last vertebrae had fully retracted, the visor turned upwards one last time. ”Stop us at that place of Chopstick’s on the way. I haven’t seen her in a while.” With those final words, the mask merged back into the breastplate, as though it had never been there.
Curling his skin-lips and straightening his various mouths, Vrog massaged his still painfully thrumming head and spat a seed from his throatless pair of chewing jaws. Things just kept getting better, didn’t they.
The woods around the easternmost mountains were much as he had left them. Same nondescript smells of sap and leaves, same roots that snapped underfoot with almost every step. The only difference was that those wretched morsel-things he had been fed that one time had spread - and quite a difference it was. With nothing much to eat them, the filthy things were everywhere, from the braches to the soil, and every lick in between. Squashing them like overripe fruit as he walked was satisfying in more ways than he cared to count. He chuckled when a few leapt into his mouth and crumbled before he could feel their hatefully bland taste. At a distance of years, he had to admit that had not been a bad joke, though of course it would have been much better if it had been done to anyone else.
Even now, however, the parasites had a way of making themselves a nuisance. The trace he was searching for, if it was to be found at all, was easily drowned out by their similar irksome smell. There was no telling if his quarry was still anywhere near there, and, even if so, if he would feel it at all without a lucky gust of wind, no matter how many of the vermin he stomped on. And, if not, even wind might not have been enough.
Similar, not the same. There it was. Not new by any stretch, but unmistakable amid the background noise. Vrog clicked his tongue. He did not need to make excuses; he simply did not fail.
From there, following the track was as easy as it had been the first time. He grimaced at the thought of how the bitter foretaste had given him pangs of hunger then. Now, after having had enough to burst, it did anything but that, casting a mildly disgusted apathy over his innards. All things considered, that was probably for the best given his ability to put anything into them. Two wrongs did add up to a right after all.
And, just when he thought he had it, it vanished. Not by breaking off, but abruptly going skyward. That complicated things. Whatever had happened there, he doubted he could jump up as easily. His tongue darted up, then around, seeking any kind of grip on the disappearing path. It found something. Not far.
Disappointingly, it was just a bauble of some kind. He picked it up between two fingers, trying it to the tongue, then to the tooth. Close as the taste was now, and though it made his teeth itch with anticipation, his stomach was still perfectly indifferent. Vrog rolled the small sphere in his hand, considering. It was unlikely to help the search in any way, but, if it was anything of value, better times were to be had by keeping it. At the same time, he did not have room to spare for any litter he found. What if, though…
For all he was likely to get out of it, he might as well just have the last laugh in the eating matter. With a flick, he tossed the orb into his mouth.
It did not become dust. In fact, it did not become anything - it simply was not there. No, there was something after all. Not something he could feel, but he could see it. See it?
Chomping, gnashing, grunting, squealing, cutting, snapping, chopping, scrapping, skinning, ripping, smashing, slamming, swiping, crawling, loping, growing, fattening, gorging, gutting, mauling, bashing, biting, stomping, snorting, scrouging, plundering, pummeling, beating, brawling, tearing, bleeding, smelling, stabbing, snatching, little arms in the mouth, little bones in the pouch, bloating, swelling, spreading, scourging…
Funny little things that those were.
So engrossed was he with watching the scenes of tangling pests rolling inside himself, one followed by a still better other, that he caught himself with a foot almost off a cliff, an alarming heat rising from below. Shaking himself from the curious sights - was that what dreams were like? - Vrog probed the air around himself. The trail was still a line above his head, and just a step forward was the boiling sea someone had had the brilliant idea of putting along one of the coasts.
He lit a wrap, contemplating the way ahead with a few side-tongues. On the better hand, the party was actually close enough on the way, which meant no more annoying detours than strictly needed. On the other, he still had to get across that oversized pot, and who knew where the Omen had gone off to.
It seemed, however, that someone had conveniently enough dropped something into the water. Not just one something, but another, equally big one, and another further left, and... Though the spectacle of the great marine lamps was lost on Vrog’s lack of anything to see them with, their usefulness to someone in his situation was fairly clear.
Were there enough to get to the other side? Maybe. Worth a try, either way.
He took a pull from the wrap, spat a seed and jumped.
Having finally managed to more or less adequately make alcohol out of unspecified underground mushrooms, Narzhak has set up a handy drinking system in his corner of the Pit. However, he’s stirred from his etilic slumber by unrest among sleeping kostral due to the recent dream events. He is more than a little annoyed that people keep trespassing on his turf, and divines that K’nell is behind this.
Meanwhile, on the surface, Vrog has been trying to poke loopholes in his curse, but the best he’s managed so far is smoking handmade fresh petrol. He gets a chestburster-call from Narzhak, who tells him to go find K’nell and Choppy so he can talk to them by, for once, using an avatar for its original purpose (which seems to transcend the current MK altogether). Vrog is less than thrilled at the idea, but is given little choice.
Lacking better leads to follow, he tries to pick up Diana’s trail again. While poking around, he finds the piggut dream orb she dropped, eats it and sees visions of the creatures within. He’s so amused by them that he almost falls into the Saluran Mendidh. Briefly stumped on how to cross it to both follow the trail and reach the tea party, he notices the newly-sprouted giant lava lamps. Though unable to appreciate the visuals, he thinks they might be good for hop-frogging his way across the strait, and rather recklessly sets off to prove his theory.
Starting: 8 MP, 8 FP
1 FP spent on teaching the kostral to brew and distil alcohol (as well as conditions allow).
Izurich
Archetype Zero
Lord Zee
Cyclone
