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The Ignus Invasion
“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.
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vessels, outdated an ill equipped, were designed to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.
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