Upon
witnessing the death and destruction that had
wrought the frontier colonies, the Mandralor
scouts and messengers at once set course for a
return to inner Union space. Their vessels,
outdated an ill equipped, were designed to
travel with grueling slowness—but their
consuming need to alert those in danger pushed
them to uncanny resolve.
Acting
with unyielding courage, they ignored the
ordinary safety procedures of space travel,
selflessly putting themselves at risk by
launching through the cosmos at dangerously
reckless velocities. Most never survived to
reach their destinations, the downtrodden
engines of their decrepit starships inevitably
succumbing to structural fatigue.
The
years turned into decades before any of the
startled Mandralor harbingers returned to the
sanctity of their home world to alert their
comrades of what they had observed. Like
frightened children running to their father,
they told their leader, Mandrala of all that had
transpired. And without the slightest hesitation
in his immediate understanding of the jeopardy
they now all faced, the great prophet departed
to warn the nearest, endangered Enlar world to
prepare them for the ensuing Armageddon.
Not much
time passed before Mandrala arrived upon the
condemned planet, greeted by an entourage of the
Enlar’s most distinguished leaders. The prophet
told them of what his people saw whence relaying
messages between the outermost Union worlds:
“The deaths
of untold millions have thus far been observed,”
he explained, his powerful voice crackling with
loss as his eyes became more vacant than the
black abyss of a starless, nighttime sky. “And
my children were helpless to do anything but
watch…as your frontier worlds were overridden by
the demonic minions of Chaos.”
“Your
message is unwarranted,” the Enlar council
responded perfunctorily. Not the slightest
stirring of emotion was exhibited across their
mundane features. “Our borders are as safe as
ever….But we have long since understood the
barbaric nature of your kind, and if you’re
people had truly seen such horrors, why is it
that they haven’t already vanquish these
creatures themselves?”
“We, of
the Mandralor, are not as naive as you would
care to believe in your foolish complacence,”
Mandrala continued with rising vehemence, in
response to the Enlars’ chastisement. “We have
graciously accepted your gift of interstellar
travel—but do not presume that we retain
ignorance of your hidden ways. Our Third Eye
sees more than the scope of which the lone
ocular if any Enlar can even comprehend…”
“Had our
vessels only been armed with even the most
modest of defenses,” the prophet then said, with
narrowing sympathy, as his eyes filled with
fiery rage. “We could have eradicated this
blossoming threat ourselves!”
“And
what threat is that?” the whining Enlar council
retaliated, doubting the severity of the
prophet’s warning pleas. Their
electrically-charged tendrils sparked with
flashing indignation, as their voices saturated
with the usual air of haughty superiority,
characteristic of their kind. “You are in no
place to tell us what decisions should be made!
Our wisdom has carried us through the ages, and
our doctrine is that no vessel be armed. It is
violence itself that threatens us—nothing else!
Perhaps, you would be wise to depart
immediately, and tell the rest of your
bloodthirsty brethren that their demands have
met rejection….”
But as
those very words traveled through the air, the
light from the sun then suddenly ceased to shine
upon the surface of their planet. A massive
black cloud began to overshadow its ordinarily
brilliant radiance, as the whole world gazed
upward to the heavens.
“What is
it?” the Enlar people cried in their terror.
Countless specks of blackness, each so tiny as
to seem no larger than a miniscule speck of
dust, materialized by the thousand to utterly
eclipse the sun. Within mere moments, they were
pouring down in such great numbers that the sky
was soon wrestled unto eerie twilight.
And upon
witness of those first Ignus transports seen
raining down from the heavens, like a hailstorm
of blazing comets bound to smash into their
planet’s crust, the Enlar realized that they had
erred in their distrust of the Mandralor
prophet.
A black
outline of serpentine beasts rapidly overwhelmed
the distant horizon, stamping out the waning
light of the setting sun as it retreated behind
the curvature of the planet. The Enlar watched
as the Ignus invaders exploded from their landed
spacecraft in a profuse gushing of fluid-like
cascades, spreading outward to engulf the
vastness of their world in an ocean of
serpentine beasts. The air became rent with the
dull hissing of their myriad legs pounding into
the ground, as the Ignus raced across the planet
in a frenzy of hunger and violence—causing the
very earth to quake with their incessant
rattling of their long, knife-like talons.
Panicking and greatly outnumbered, the Enlar
were left with no other option. They hastily
climbed within their giant, mechanized
exoskeletons—normally used for constructive
projects on their massive spaceships—in a
desperate attempt to prepare themselves for the
ensuing Armageddon.
Encased
in a spherical container of metal two-meters
thick, each of these machines became nothing
less than a mere extension of the piloting
Enlar’s body. His sixteen electrically-charged
tendrils (which protruded directly from his
brain) instantly transmitted every thought and
command to his “BattleMech”—giving him supreme
control over his machine that could otherwise
not otherwise be accomplished through ordinary
manual handling.
As the
Enlar helplessly watched while the army of
serpents rushed upon them like the approaching
clouds of a hurricane, each of these enormous
machines rose to life upon an arsenal of
protracted, metal tentacles. Squid-like
appendages that sprouted from the BattleMechs’
shining surfaces like the hairs of an animal,
each of these tentacles possessed an incredible
amount of potency: every one bristling with
powerful blades and tools that the Enlar had
previously used to cut and bend the most adamant
of spacecraft materials…
And as
the opposing forces of Order and Chaos crashed
into one another in a cataclysmic explosion of
metal and bone, the earth cried with reminiscent
horrors of those ancient days of Enlar
predation. Melee ensued as the landscape was
torn asunder whence the Ignus fell upon the
makeshift Enlar defenses.
The
Enlar were completely overwhelmed by the
carnivorous beasts, as the latter struggled to
break open and dismember the huge Enlar machines
so that they may enjoy the delicious taste of
the raw meat inside. The sheer mass of the Ignus’
numbers was enough to crush anything that came
within the their path, as the streets of the
Enlar civilization were literally flooded with
the flow of writhing serpents.
An
explosion of metallic clanging rent the air as
their myriad claw-like appendages fervently
lashed and scraped against the Enlar BattleMechs.
Their gaping jaws struggled to engulf the
enormous machines, as their teeth gnashed and
cracked against the hard surfaces that composed
their impregnable frames.
But soon
the Enlar, though entirely swamped, began to
regain their balance. Their huge, sinewy
tentacles—strong enough to pry apart an Ignus’s
jaws with a single, unrestrained motion—lashed
and clawed their way to the surface of the sea
of serpents. And not much more time passed
before the Enlar were lacerating through the
ranks of Ignus invaders: crushing, cutting,
smashing and killing them by the dozen with each
swing of their limber, albeit powerful,
mechanical arms.
Some of
the larger Ignus, having managed to swallow an
entire monolithic BattleMech whole, soon
exploded in a profusion of digestive acids in
gore. The consumed Enlar machine, having managed
to burst forth from the serpent’s belly with its
arsenal of scalpel-sharp buzz saws and steely
appendages, literally tore the Ignus open from
the inside out.
For
every Machine that was torn open, its pilot
screaming with unbridled horror as his body was
then ripped to pieces and forced down the
elongated gullets of the Ignus horde, a dozen of
the huge serpents were torn to threads of
throbbing flesh.
But in
the end, their efforts were in vain. The Ignus
were too many, as the flow of their swarm never
stopped. The sky remained blackened from the
shower of transport vessels that continued to
rain down from the heavens.
“We must
retreat!” shouted the great Mandrala from the
thick of the battle, wielding a pair of burning
flamesabers in each of his four hands. Lashing
out in every direction with uncanny alacrity,
his lightning-fast reflexes engendered a crimson
blur of motion as he tore his way through
whatever unfortunate beast crossed his path.
Gore was flayed into every direction, as his
complete mastery of combat became manifest after
so many centuries of constant honing. Without
wearing so much as a single plate of armor, he
had managed to outlive the vast majority of the
Enlars’ mechanical monstrosities.
“Prepare
the vessels to save all those who remain! We
must escape to warn the others!”
And at
once, his words were obeyed—not by his Mandralor
children (all of whom had long since perished in
the carnage), but by the remaining Enlar
warriors. Their huge BattleMechs regrouped and
then followed the mighty Mandrala’s path through
the surrounding abyss of serpents, as if He were
a lantern in the night.
The
Ignus had left many of the grounded Enlar
spacecraft unscathed, to the immediate
astonishment of Mandrala’s entourage. It spoke
of the secret to the strange serpents’ success:
they preserved the devices of their captured
Enlar planets, and rose from the ashes of their
conquest.
They
boarded the first vessel they could find, and
immediately blasted off to the sanctuary of
space, abandoning all those still alive on the
fallen Enlar world. Below them stood a planet
flooded with destruction; a pall of darkness
engulfed its surface as the beasts continued
their relentless expansion across every square
inch of its solid vastness.
And that
is when the order was given, by the coldly
calculating minds of the Enlar aboard the
survivors’ vessel. Staring down with their lone,
glaring eyes, no inhibition stood in their way
to prevent the vengeance that was then enacted.
“Burn
them…” they said, and the ship’s captain at once
adhered. Though they had never so much as armed
a single Mandralor vessel, the Enlar protected
each of their own spacecraft with an incredible
stockpile of devastating weapons.
The
entire planet was then engulfed in a prodigious
cloud of black smoke, as raging flames stormed
across the vast expanses of its surface within
moments. Enough explosives were dropped to grind
even the tallest mountain to tiny particles of
dust. And so, the Enlar incinerated their own
world to protect the countless others from
falling to the same end—cauterizing the wound,
lest the infection spread.
“The key
to being wise, is listening and learning from
other people’s experiences. But you must live
your own life, and learn your own lessons for
them to have any meaning.”
–Old
Mandralor Lore. |