“It was not
Leviathan’s cunning that had unleashed the Ignus
scourge upon the universe, but rather the sheer
willingness of the Enlar to let them.”
—The Great
Prophet
The
tortured Enlar of that captured spaceship
orbiting above the Ignus birth world had
screamed with high-pitched squeals of terror,
effusively blathering every important secret or
bit of information that crossed their minds in
their utter desperation to end the agony of
their last living moments. The monster’s
victims, thus revealing the secrets of their
species, ensured that their Enlar brethren would
soon be doomed as well…
This is
how Leviathan had come to discover, along with
the procedural knowledge of how to pilot the
stolen vessel, the location of the nearest Enlar
colony. It was the fourth planet of a frontier
solar system, far from the core of Enlar
civilization, and only scarcely populated; but
it was enough.
Crammed
full with starving Ignus serpents, the stolen
starship blasted off the dead world of Old Ignus
toward the fruitful heavens. Leviathan’s
understanding of how to pilot the vessel was
crude, at best, but it was only a relatively
short distance his destination, and fortune had
it that no disaster struck along the way. Though
the vast stockpiles of foodstuffs aboard the
ship had been long since consumed, the Ignus
quickly fell into hibernated state of zero
metabolic activity.
The
Ignus lack any eyes or conventional sense of
touch, but they are able to feel life as most
organisms can perceive a change in pressure, or
temperature. Their skin, covered in millions of
tiny receptors, actually acts as one giant organ
of detection, which is their primary (and some
speculate, only) sense in observing the external
universe. Impervious to pain in most portions of
their body, they are highly receptive to certain
types of biologically generated energies.
It was
in this fashion that the Ignus eventually came
to detect the presence of the Enlar, and
awakened from their slumber overcome with
ravenous hunger. After the span of only a few
standard years, their stolen spaceship had
arrived at its destination, and awaiting them in
plain observation on the planet below was a
feast beyond scope of their meager
comprehensions.
The
world itself was lush and green, blanketed with
sprawling, virgin forests and natural beauties.
Vast oceans—teeming with wildlife of every
variety—covered its tremendous expanse, and
thick white clouds hung low in its prominent
atmosphere.
Landing
their stolen spacecraft within the vicinity of
the damned, the Ignus rushed toward the
unsuspecting Enlar city, their voracious
appetites guiding their every thought. Like
enormous centipedes, the Ignus crawled across
the surface of the planet upon the frenetically
scrambling talons protruding from their bellies,
crushing everything in their path beneath the
sheer weight of their massive bodies.
Their
lacerating talons spent little effort tearing
open the flimsy structures of the Enlar colony,
exposing the fresh meat within. Their sinewy
bodies slithered through the cracks and crevice
of the city, like serpents in the underground
lair of so many condemned rodents, feasting upon
every frightful creature that came across their
path. The streets were flooded with crimson
wetness, as the Ignus filled their gargantuan
bellies with delicious Enlar flesh.
Anything
that could be deemed as a “defense” was quickly
eradicated at the dawning moments of the Ignus
invasion. The Enlar were a violence-loathing
race, being creatures of profound sensitivity to
pain. They had prided themselves on their
pacifistic nature, and it was this quality that
prepared them so idyllically for slaughter.
The only
warning they were to ever receive came in the
form of the hideously howling screams of their
dying Enlar brethren. The ordinarily pristine
air, now saturated with the blaring din of the
slithering beasts’ infernal hissing, soon became
tainted with the stench of death and decay.
In the
assault, the planet’s ecology and civilization
laid to ruinous waste. The only things the Ignus
deliberately left in tact were the precious
Enlar spaceships: the key to own their
longevity. As before, it had been no difficulty
to torture their victims into revealing the
locations of the other Enlar colonies, before
their delicate bodies were then ripped to pieces
and gorged upon by the rapacious horde of the
heinous monsters.
Those
Enlar who weren’t immediately consumed were
slaughtered, and subsequently used as the “dead
wombs” for Ignus offspring. Though the Ignus
were initially relatively few, countless eggs
were planted within the Enlar dead.
Thousands of eggs were laid within each victim
of the gruesome impregnation, but only one
offspring ultimately spawned from every corpse.
An Ignus hatchling require prodigious amounts of
nutrition to survive; and so, their larva burrow
throughout the decaying flesh of their dead
wombs, devouring everything within until they
were at last forced to feed upon one another.
Only the
fastest growing, most aggressive of their
progeny survive, causing each successive Ignus
generation to evolve into a more potent, more
lethal version than the last; for it is always
the weak to be weeded, and the strong to
survive. Within months after hatching, an infant
serpent can grow to some one thousand times its
original size, and will be ready to lay its own
eggs before the passing of a single standard
year.
Leviathan, now grown fat from the Great Enlar
Feast, was too large to be contained within even
the most voluminous of captured Enlar
spacecraft. And so it came to pass that the
behemoth, instead continuing along the front
lines of his conflagration across the galaxy,
delegated instructions to the newest generation.
The
Ignus brain, though relatively unsophisticated
in comparison to those of the Enlar, had evolved
to soak up all the knowledge of their
surroundings like a dry sponge in warm water:
learning basic principles at an uncanny pace. It
was not long before the youthful Ignus
hatchlings fully comprehended the rudimentary
methods of traveling through space.
Bidding
them farewell, the elder generation of Ignus
stayed behind. Their myriad clawing appendages
burrowed into the earth, retreating to the
warmer depths of the planet, far beneath the
surface of its crust, to hibernate until the
coming of a new age.
With
their recently acquired starships, the Ignus
radiated outward, toward the remaining Enlar
colonies. Many simply died in accidents before
ever reaching their destinations. Their species
was, as of yet, unlearned in the necessary
procedures for safe interstellar travel; but for
every ship that landed upon a populated world of
fresh Enlar victims, another dozen arose to fly
across the stars, and continue the chain
reaction of devastation that soon brought the
known universe to its knees
And thus
begat the foundation of the Ancient Ignus War. |