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The Rising Star
The immense starship,
though bigger than any vessel that had ever been
created, was utterly crammed with the bulk of its
thirteen fearsome inhabitants. Each of the Legionites
onboard was more massive than even the largest Ignus
ever seen, but condensed into a powerfully built frame
some three-stories tall. Their brawny arms were larger
than cannons, and their six legs were like tree trunks
mounted upon huge feet the size of boulders. One can
comprehend the sheer destructive potential at the
disposal of the Great Mandrala’s army by imagining
twelve mountains of muscle willing to die at the mere
command of a single word.
After only a few short months, the gargantuan spaceship’s uncannily
swift engines had delivered them to its destination on
the remotest frontier planet in the known universe, XXX:
the very first of the Union civilizations that became
infected by the Ignus plague.
It was dull and unimpressive, and looked like nothing more than a
battered asteroid, drifting aimlessly through the
cosmos. Destroyed and mutilated from war, its face had
been scarred with countless unnatural canyons and
fissures that stretched across the entire globe. The
starship quickly descended through the thin atmosphere,
blowing about dust and debris as its stentorian engines
blasted down upon the dead planet’s ravaged surface,
when the Legionites took their first steps onto the
hideous landscape.
Stretching around the Thirteen in every possible direction lay the
ruins of civilization. A lifeless graveyard of bones and
misery, it was littered with the unsightly remnants of
toppled buildings and rubble for as far as the eye could
see. In the air lingered the faint, coppery taste of
blood, and it was very difficult to breathe. The
overhead star hung low in the jet-black sky, with its
blinding rays glaring down upon them.
“Restore your peace of mind,” Mandrala then told them, having
observed the terror in the Legionite’s huge, glistening
sapphire eyes. His voice had a tranquil, almost
song-like quality about it that seemed saturated with
the unmistakable air of unwavering confidence. “For it
is you whom I have chosen to represent Order upon the
fields of Chaos today.”
“WwWweeEee WwwiIiiilllll…” the Legionites began to murmur amongst
themselves. Their voices grew slowly and steadily. Soon
their melodious cry began to echo through the heaping
mounds of rubbish around them—rising in strength and
gaining intensity until it rang like an orchestra of
monotone brass instruments. “DDIIEE FFOORR YYOOUU!”
And as if it were the summoning call to a banquet, the Ignus then
awakened. The landscape began to tremor and quake apart,
shattering like broken glass, as if in gigantic parody
of a dessert floor cracking beneath the scorching rays
of the midday sun. Its numerous canyons and fissures
widened like yawning mouths, spilling forth the noxious
odor of death and decay. Twelve nightmarish monsters
then blasted upward from the now-gaping holes in the
earth. Like lava bursting forth from a volcano, their
sinewy bodies stretched toward the heavens, while
enormous plumes of dirt and debris rained down from the
sky.
The Legionites began to tremble with fear, for the Ignus had them
completely surrounded. Falling down upon the earth in a
loud crash, the Ignus shook the landscape, and then
began to emit the sound of hissing as the talons along
their undersides rattled incessantly upon the earth,
like the fingers of so many tapping hands.
Mandrala was surprised at their numbers, for only a dozen of the
serpents now slithered across the broken landscape. But
they were much, much larger than what He had previously
imagined could even be possible, stretching further into
the distance than what the eye can see in an endless
flow from the horizon.
“LleeaadD uss…” The Legionites shouted with sudden trepidation. A
story-tall wall of scales soon surrounded the party in
every direction; for the Ignus had wrapped their
elongated bodies into an enclosing ring about them. “WeE
arre nnoothing withoouut yoou!”
“And that is more than enough.” spoke Mandrala. The Prophet was
calmly resolute. He took not even the slightest visible
notice in that the ominous roar of the approaching
Malestrom had become almost deafening. Although He did
not shout, He spoke with such precision and strength
that there was no lack of audibility in His voice.
“Without my guidance, you are nothing but yourselves.”
“Bbuut WweE WwiilL DDIIEE!” they pleaded, unconvinced. Their
barking words faltered in their panic, an unsynchronized
clatter of ill-tuned interjections. “YyoouU AarREE UusS!”
“By that very admission, you have proven yourselves worthy
leaders…Disturb me no further.” And then, with a brief,
almost imperceptible pause, and a faint glimmering of
sadness, “I shall require absolution before the
impending sacrifice.”
He then merely proceeded to fold his 6 limbs into a perfectly
balanced stance of meditation, and sat down upon the
ground. His face became relaxed with heavy thought, and
there He remained, rigid as a statue, as the serpentine
rivers inched ever closer in a constricting spiral of
death.
When Ignus came within a stone’s throw of the party, now having
completely encircled His entourage, their heads reared
into the sky to expose the thrashing blades that lined
their segmented underbellies. Standing like monolithic
towers over the 12 mountains of Legionite flesh, saliva
poured like rain upon the earth from their tooth-filled
mouths, while their countless talons clattered
incessantly with grisly anticipation.
They were the only Ignus that remained alive in the aftermath of
that first fateful invasion, and having had nothing to
eat since the last of their brethren had been consumed,
they were ravenously hungry. Devoid of any other food
source, they had already cannibalized all the other,
smaller Ignus of the planet; and, grown fat from the
feast, they were the largest, most hideous and deadly
specimens of their kind to have ever been seen.
The Ignus fell upon the their prey, striking in a lightning-fast
blur of movement, and thrashing their myriad one-edged
talons into the Legionites’ thick blue hides. The latter
recoiled against the sheer weight of its attackers, but
their steely skin and hardened flesh was merely
scratched upon the surface.
They quickly regained their balance, and then retaliated by
disarming the serpents’ deadly arsenal of thrashing
blades. One after another, they ripped the Ignus’ talons
from their sockets with their own prodigious strength,
until the earth became littered with tooth-like bones
and drenched in crimson rain.
Free of the Ignus’ stingers, the Legionites then spread wide their
long arms to wrap around the serpents’ circumference in
a sort of crushing hug. Using all their might, they
toppled the towering monsters’ with the aide of their
own tremendous weights—stealing them from the sky and
tearing them down to the planet’s surface, which formed
great craters upon the impact of their combined masses.
On the ground, the Legionites pounded the hideous beasts against
the unforgiving earthen floor. They slammed their heavy
fists into the Ignus’ scaly bodies, again and again, as
the stentorian blast of crumbling stone thundered
through the air with each successive blow.
Having grown accustomed to feasting upon easy prey, the Ignus were
completely unprepared for the ferocity of the potent
Legionite army. One of the serpents, in a futile attempt
to swallow one of the huge blue warriors in a single
mouthful, had wrapped its jaws about the meaty arm of
the Legionite named ZZZ. Its razor-sharp fangs were the
size of railroad spikes, and sunk deep into ZZZ’s dense
flesh, as its mouth stretched like rubber struggling to
encompass its victim’s enormous whale-like body. It was
the last thing that the monster ever consciously did.
The two colossal beasts grappled for several moments, while the
Ignus slowly looped its sinuous length around ZZZ’s
every limb. Neither was able to gain advantage until ZZZ,
filled with violence and rage, finally began overwhelm
the other with nothing his own brute strength.
Prying its gnashing teeth from his body, ZZZ grabbed both lips of
the monster’s huge mouth with his powerful hands, and
began to force the serpent’s jaws to the breaking point.
The beast let out a terrible dying shriek as its head
was torn wide open and simultaneously cleft into two
separate portions.
Almost entirely decapitated, the slain Ignus collapsed lifelessly
to the earth. But ZZZ, still ensnared by the monster’s
body, was dragged down with it and crushed beneath its
immense weight. The Legionite warrior, greatly fatigued
from his efforts, was helplessly pinned against the
ground—when he, realizing that he was unable to lift
himself, let out a bellowing cry of unbridled horror.
The other eleven serpents, as if hearing this, suddenly
disentangled themselves from their own individual
battles, and quickly darted across the barren landscape
toward the helpless creature. The remaining Legionites,
dazed in the sudden turn of events, were too slow to
react. Their heavy, lumbering bodies were unable to
reach their comrade in time, as the Ignus then swarmed
upon the fallen warrior, tearing out vast portions of
his flesh with lacerating tooth and talon. Blood gushed
from ZZZ’s body as if it were the sweet liquids being
expelled from a crushed grape. Gore was flayed in every
direction, as the serpentine beasts writhed like
lightning in the sky to snatch every delicious morsel
before it landed. Within the short span of a mere few
seconds, nothing remained of ZZZ but a haphazardly
scattered collection of blood-soaked bones.
The Ignus then extricated themselves from the corpse. In each of
their bellies resided the prominent bulge of ZZZ’s
remains, slowly moving down their great lengths with the
pull of digestive muscles. The monsters then unanimously
shifted their immense weights so that their gaping
mouths, now dripping with oozing red liquid, turned to
face the eleven remaining Legionites.
Exhausted and disheartened, the Legionites resigned to their
collective fate. They let out one last murmuring cry of
helplessness as, subdued in their defeat, they simply
waited in grisly expectations as the serpents then
rushed upon them.
The Ignus moved slower than before, and bumbled across the
landscape in an awkward gracelessness caused by the
burden of their inflated bellies, crawling upon one
another in a massive bulk as if they had grown into one
body of a single nightmarish monster. They were slow and
ungainly, but were almost upon the Leginoites—when an
intense flash of reddish light then filled the sky…
The Legionites shielded their eyes from the blinding glare that now
utterly drenched the landscape, as if the overhead star
had enflamed to a thousand times its normal brilliance.
The effervescent sound of a nearby fire ripped through
the air, undulating and crackling like a raging inferno
whose flames had been recently doused with water. Still
unable to see, the Legionites were utterly terrified as
they heard the raucous hiss of the serpents’ screeching
tear through the air about them—until, just as suddenly
as it had started, all became silent once again.
There are no words to describe that which the Legionites felt in
that moment, as the lights dimmed and their power of
vision was restored. Uncovering their eyes, they looked
up to see what now lay before them. Where mere moments
ago had been the deadly mob of writhing snakes now stood
an amorphous blob of steaming flesh. The pungent smell
of ozone overwhelmed the air, as the smoke from the
monster’s baking remains wafted upward to disappear
forever amidst the sky. And, somewhere atop the
mountainous heap of rubbish was none other than the
Great Mandrala Himself, all three eyes closed as before,
sitting down in a motionless state of meditative
serenity.
“MMAASSTTEERR!” the Legionites all cried in one voice. Their
exuberance and shock at the spectacle before them flung
their mouths wide open with disbelief. Slowly, they
regained their words, forgetting all that had led up to
this single moment of ecstasy. And as their voices rang
out upon the landscape, ringing majestically to fill
their desolate surroundings with its first glimpses of
joy since the dawning of the Ancient Ignus War, the
Legionite people fell to their knees, weeping with
blissful triumph.
“YYOOUU HHAAVVEE SSAAVVEEDD UUSS FFRROOMM—”
“No, I have not…” Mandrala then said, truncating the echoing cries
of the eleven remaining Legionites. His voice was flat
and lifeless, as if somehow disappointed in the outcome
of what appeared to be complete victory. Though He had
just spoken, He gave no further indication that He was
to remove Himself from his motionless contemplations.
Peacefully, His body did not stir as it merely continued
to sit atop the crisping mountain of serpents.
The Legionites, bewildered and suddenly torn from ebullience to
shame, stood silently for several long minutes before
they responded. And when they spoke, it was not in the
synchronized melody that was typical of them, but a
misshapen song that bumped and boggled from their eleven
flapping mouths to the air.
“WwHhaaTt dDoo weEe dDo nNowW?”
“Leave,” Mandrala responded abruptly. As before, nothing moved upon
his entire body. Even his mouth seemed to be as fixed
and rigid as stone. “Leave now….before it is too late.”
And it was no sooner had these words had left His mouth that the
ground began to shake more forcefully than ever before.
Vast portions of the landscape heaved upward, and the
ghostly remnants of the toppled buildings in the
distance began to sink below the horizon.
The Legionites collapsed with the unimaginable vehemence of the
ground’s violent movement, when a deafeningly loud
groan—like that of an awakening demon—blasted through
the air as if the very planet were screaming out with
quaking terror.
The Legionites looked about them in every direction, but could
contrive no explanation to the sudden phenomenon.
Casting their gazes up to the lonely figure of Mandrala,
who still sat unperturbed atop the mound of dead
serpents, fear overwhelmed their loyalty—and they broke
out in full sprint toward the direction of their
spaceship.
Fleeing in terror, they waited only long enough for the last of
them to board the vessel, before its powerful engines
fired—blasting them off to the sanctuary of space—but
not before they got their first glimpses to see what was
happening to the planet.
A huge, gaping canyon had begun to crack open across the entire
globe, like some malicious smile stretching from either
visible side of the planet’s hideous face. Then,
widening as if it were the screaming mouth of hell, a
blindingly iridescent red light began to seep forth from
the fissure. The crimson glow was accompanied by a
billowing flood of molten lava and an unimaginable wave
of heat from the planet’s core, which instantly
vaporized anything that strayed too close to its
incinerating clutches.
And that is when the Great Mandrala, finally alone to confront his
nemesis, arose from his contemplations. |
