Personal Doomsdays

I have let horrible things happen to me. You know this of course, to some extent; eyes being torn out, the ceaseless hounds of Naga wearing me to the bone, having a piece of the Draconian god of chaos trapped in my mind. But I must remind you that I chose these things. I accepted them. They are part of a price that is rapidly accruing, and in time I will take my hard earned winnings and I will cash them in upon Chaw’Haust’s damned corpse and then I will be done.

I have, from a conventional sense, a few hours to kill before meeting with Fenris and Mammon upon Chassovo’s doorstep. Of course I could go there now, but I needn’t do that. I needn’t rush. Instead I go back several days, and I resume life on a world called Tarthenon. I need to prepare a diversion, and Tarthenon is an excellent place to arrange this. Tarthenon is an unaligned world, firmly independent and ever scowling towards the menaces of organized empires that constantly encroach on its domain. For at least the next five centuries—I have not intimately familiarized myself with Tarthenon’s future, but five centuries is sufficient for my interests—Tarthenon will rebuke each and every effort made to subjugate or woo it into any formal relation with any other power. Through means not understood even to most in Tarthenon itself, the system will defy a total of three assaults by the Aberration during those five hundred years. More importantly, Chaw’Haust’s legions will have fierce competition here, if—perhaps when—they attempt to retaliate for that which I am organizing.

This is because, in part, that Tarthenon becomes the unofficial homeworld of the Flux independents. Of course the independents have no formal home, nor do they have much order or hierarchy to follow; but without the independents Tarthenon would manage to survive for hundreds of years as a free and independent system, and the independents loved the stability and the freedom it offered. In exchange for this, from time to time Tarthenon would have an hour of need, and the local fleets—the bounty hunters, the corsairs, the navies for hire and the common man would rally together and set forth to slay the beast. On three occasions in particular, the Flux independents would rally at Tarthenon and again infuriate the insatiable appetite of the Abomination with the coldest and most calculating hunger they could offer it; and Tarthenon would unknowingly reward them by surrounding these rogue Flux with bountiful opportunities to make their way in the world.

I materialized on a freighter minutes from making re-entry into Tarthenon’s atmosphere to attend a meeting I had arranged…let’s say earlier. It will be a short meeting, timed explicitly to last during the re-entry process when sensory systems will be most hampered, and I quickly secure an atmospheric suit from a storage room so as to control the pheromones that’d otherwise immensely frustrate this mission.

I am going to meet what remains of the dozen most deadly people in the galaxy. The living ones, anyway.

--oOo—

The boardroom contains six other beings when I open the doors. They sit uneasily, and while I cannot smell them through the thick helmet I’m wearing I can imagine without great doubt all the thoughts that are murmuring through their minds.

“You’re late.” One of them announces ungratefully. Of course they’re wrong, I’m impeccably on time as always, and I recognize the declaration as a test of my resolve. They—this one is from a race which has no gender—are trying to put me on the defensive immediately.

“Hardly. I have arrived precisely at the moment when our ship is unable to communicate with the outside world, nor can the outside world detect with any details just what’s going on aboard this ship. This meeting will last another three minutes and…twenty seconds. I won’t be wasting time apologizing.”

“You’re a tricky bitch, aren’t you--” Another, a man wearing an unbuttoned vest begins to note dryly. I don’t have time for small talk.

“—an astute observation Mister Lone.” I speak as I slip a data disc—a conventional one, nothing Flux derived as that would be too obvious—into a mount on the table and a holographic projection begins to materialize. “—I sent out a dozen applications for a select number of openings. Congratulations,” I add dryly as I look over the remaining half dozen faces, “on making it through the initial interviews.”

The one without gender—its name is Heiyr—chuckles slightly in approval. Mister Lone scowls in turn, clearly displeased that the initial interviews had consisted in five days of covert assassinations and not so covert manueverings on a freighter which, at present, was only minutes away from safety and a wide number of law enforcement personnel. They were all considering not only why they were all here, or who I was, but how they were going to get off this ship when so many security personnel were waiting for them at the gate.

“I’m offering to pay each of you 10,000,000 negotiable credits for these men’s heads—“ I say as the hologram shows a smattering of calveras, humans and drakes. “—assuming that the assassinations take place precisely at galactic standard noon one week from today, with a five minute margin of error either way. Kill them outside that window and you’ll only be reimbursed for the cost of your travel here to this meeting.” A moment of silence; the two twins in the back of the room exchange glances at each other.

The faces floating on the table are the nine highest ranking members of Chaw’Haust’s followers—he calls them the Timebreakers. One week from now, while I am meeting with Fenris and Mammon aboard Chassovo’s ship—this itself being only hours after they conduct their heists—Chaw’Haust will be calling out to his most trusted followers and again encouraging them to hunt down the perpetrators of the theft, regardless of whether or not it was of Naga’s sword or Shaw’s staff. I imagine he will pin the blame on me, even though the thefts were committed by others.

I also imagine it will create quite an impact as his closest supporters are attacked, with admittedly varying degrees of success, mid-converation. I anticipate perhaps half of the assassinations will be a success; thus half of the men in this room will likely be killed in rather embarrassing fashion by the timebreakers they’ve been tasked to kill. Even then though the assassinations themselves are only diversions, albeit diversions with an added psychological element. In the course of this day I want Chaw’Haust to understand, without a shadow of doubt, that he is no longer hunting me. Now I am hunting him.

“You expect us to find these—“

“No, I already know precisely where they will be. The information will be provided to those who accept this task at the end of this meeting—“

“That one,” a woman in the back of the room notes curiously as she points to an exceedingly unpleasant looking Timebreaker with compound eyes, “is a bit more than cultist affiliated…” There’s something about her that strikes me as familiar, though I can’t immediately pin it down. Either way she’s very alert, and recognizes to some extent that the faces and names floating over the conference table are not simple targets.

“With respect given to your talents in this field, you’ll all be rather challenged by these people.” I answer guardedly, not explicitly identifying my quarry’s temporal abilities. The smart ones are who remain, after all, and once we all part ways and they set to planning their hits they’ll quickly put the pieces together. “These targets are all exceedingly competent—“

The ship shakes slightly as we hit greater turbulence during reentry. I have perhaps two minutes left.

“A bit short notice, don’t you think?” Mister Lone inquires sardonically, and as best as I can while wearing a space-suit I shrug.

“Too difficult for you, Mister Lone?”

--oOo—

The meeting adjurns quickly enough; I’m willing to pay them a year’s wages each after all for a single hit so as short notice as it is they all are onboard with the plan, especially after the down payment I offer. I give them the information of precisely where those targets are going to be because Chaw’Haust will be contacting them at precisely that time. That’s an encouragement to me, too; I still don’t know if Naga’s sword or Shaw’s scepter are taken, but as he rapidly calls a conference of his most loyal and dangerous followers immediately after the heist is scheduled it means that he’s been shaken a little. But it is through that conference call to cultist leaders all over Ancerious that I track them down.

There still remains the small issue of arranging for their safe escape from this ship; I arrange for a mechanical malfunction that forces the ship to reroute to the nearest available landing ship; the hired hands dissipate there without great difficulty.

While all of this happens, Fenris kills my father, and thousands more.

--oOo—

My mother had been killed earlier that year, and after this my father had taken me away from that world—which, like the world where he died, I will not name so no concrete facts will exist by which to identify me.

The Ascendancy had been rocked by the Aberration attacks on the silent bastions, and in the panic that followed distrust grew between those shelters of our people. The only way the Aberration could have breached our defenses was if someone had not only led it to us, but let it in, and it did not help that the someone in question was the demon which had ‘killed’ Prime Admiral Dorin months earlier.

The Heraldics continued to insist however that it was impossible for us to effectively combat Chaw’Haust in secrecy while the Tenebraens remained in this galaxy, and so used this tragedy as a further leverage for the utter imperative that the timecaster’s host civilization must be either destroyed or evicted from our dominion; and the silent invasion was already underway, they told us, so this would happen quite shortly. The Ascendancy had already driven the Sciastenos Centum back into the intergalactic dark by threats of Aberration weaponry, and while we had a new sympathy for those who we threatened to destroy with that weapon we also knew that it was of the greatest urgency that we deal with them, and deal with them quickly, so that we could at last turn out attention to Chaw’Haust.

I, of course, was too young to be cognizant of these intricacies. I was less than ten years old, and I had watched my mother’s corpse be crystalized as my father dragged me into the wormhole that the Heraldic guards were fighting ferociously to defend. I did not understand the intricacies of our secrecy; I only knew that the demon who had destroyed our leader had now taken my mother too. I grew to loathe it for that; coming and going with impunity, untouchable…

Later that year, Fenris came. I remember my father shoving me back inside as a pair of Bounder mechs raced rapidly down the central boulevard, their guns spitting blue fire unceasingly as they went; and the ground was shaking and massive ripples hovered ominously, frozen mid-wave in the watery canals that dominated our city. Fighters ripped by overhead, and the guards were ushering people to evacuation points with cold and frozen silence. We never had soldiers in our streets, and are machines of war were never present in our minds on the homeworlds. We were supposed to have impunity. We were supposed to be untouchable.

And in the distance, the hulking sillouette of Fenris loomed closer, backlit by fire, announced by ice, and by howling.

--oOo—

So I have let horrible things happen to me. I let my mother die because I needed the pain. I needed to understand Chaw’Haust’s utter evil and I needed to believe that malice has flesh and that the darkest things in this universe live, breathe, and see. I could have gone back and altered the event, ensured that she lived, ensured that my father was not deprived of the love of his life.

I have let horrible things happen to me. I let my family be destroyed. I allowed Fenris to thoughtlessly crush my father beneath rubble as he trudged through our world because had he not done so he would not now be at my command. I sacrificed my childhood. I sacrificed my family. I let hundreds of thousands of my people die. I sacrificed myself; I lose my eyes so I can see the malignant cancer that is spreading upon this galaxy. I lose my innocence by cramming parts of a god’s mind into my own so that I can better wound the servant in his employ. I lose my innocence by allowing death to follow me. I lose my name so I am invisible.

Fenris is polite to me in calling me a little thief, for I am far worse than that. I am a follower of vengeance… and when I am done with Chaw’Haust’s damned corpse I will have Fenris collect vengeance upon mine; not because of guilt, but because I will not let Chaw’Haust have peace in the land of the damned. I will follow him into the afterlife and I will ensure he never knows peace again.

So I leave my assassins on Tarthenon, and I go on to Chaw’Sah’Voh. There I will meet Fenris and Mammon and the man prophecy says will kill Chaw’Haust. And there I will see to it that prophecy or not my will be done.