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The Dawning of Destruction
“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 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.
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