Chapter 1 - The Blue World
“Take this. This is
the blood of our lord.”
“We ask that this Boon might receive the last of your consecrated blood and
make this world into a paradise much like our own. May his body become the
dirt, may his blood become the waters. May all the life of this world be forged
in his resplendent image.”
In spite of the significance of ceremoniously giving birth
to a new world, there is nothing in the least that would indicate any sort of
joyousness in the redundant expressions worn by the tall, pale figures robed in
grayish-blue; neither shared among the congregation, nor individually. Though
their last grasp at creating a new Paradise would undoubtedly result in
near-perfection, their efforts were just that – a last grasp. For their race,
that is, the true and original elders of the Vassal, was one that was nearly
dispersed into extinction. It was sparsely the aspect of age that threatened
the tall, milky-skinned god-men; for they lived nearly without bounds when it
came to years. The youngest of them, whose unblemished face was not wholly
unlike a thing of translucence, was one who had lived more than six times the
span of years of a mortal life. The most senior of the congregation, a
nearly-hunched figure whose face was literally etched with decorative age, was
nearly twenty-thousand years old. The beings of the Vassal were the product of
millions of years of evolution. Through their advancements in science, a
fraction of which the Human race would ever come to understand, even in their
most advanced technological age, the Vassal had crafted a near-perfect
existence for themselves. Their mastery, that is, the thing they grasped fully
above all other of their masteries, was terraforming. They engineered new
worlds; they altered atmospheric conditions, formed solidified masses of earth
and rock and raised them from the seas, but their true passion, or if not
passion, their sole purpose, was the creation of complex multicellular
organisms – life. Terraforming was merely the infant stage of what these
ancient creatures truly did in their planetary synthetizations. If a single
broad term was needed to heave itself upon the definitive mantle of what it was
that these alien beings truly were, then they were planet seeders. The creation
of an atmospherically viable, temperate world was the ground work. The things
that crawled, swam, walked, and took wing in these worlds were the crux of the
Vassal’s work. And yet it was through this scientific omnipotence that their
race unintentionally engineered their own extinction. For many long millennia
the Vassal had tinkered and tampered with the genetics of their species;
effectively negating all known diseases native to their birth world, tediously
removing each and every bodily inadequacy, extending their lives many times
beyond the natural scope of years, becoming gods much akin to the ones that had
created them in a time before time. Even as the Humans of this very world today
begin to purely scratch the scientific surface of the universe, one inevitable
and unfortunate fact remained stalwart since the birth of the multiverse itself
– in spite of our plans for nature, nature would forever have a plan of its own
for itself and for us; one that no terrestrial life could cheat or even massage
the rules of. In their negligent, genetic crusade of stamping out every last
particle of imperfection in their race, the subsequent generations that came
tens of thousands of years ago were unintentionally born without any remaining
signs of gender and no reproductive organs. The tall, milk-skinned beings had
achieved godhood through their knowledge and technologies, and yet through that
same avenue came their dethroning from that false godhood – extinction. Real
and true gods did not die, in spite of any conceptions or misconceptions of
skill or wisdom or power. The Vassal was paying the penance for their lusting
after the mantle of godhood and the true gods were having the last laugh now.
The young being bowed his robed head in solemnity, reaching
out with his unstained hands and accepting the gray-black, half-spherical
object presented to him by the venerable superiors of his religious order.
Today was the day that his purpose in the multiverse would come to its promised
head – and the life that stirred inside of his immaculate flesh would be
forfeit to the final grand design of the Vassal. He fixed the black emptiness
of his gaze on the mundane contraption. He was ready to give his life for the
greater good of his ancient race. A thunderous sound trumpeted into life in the
skies above; snatching the Boon from his contemplative stare and drawing his
black eyes upward. A massive ovalesque form peeked from the clouds and began to
weave slightly to either side; a craft whose massiveness cast its unforgiving
shadow on the surrounding range of empty mountains, putting to shame even the
most boisterous, cloud-kissed peaks of the unharnessed landscape. The ship
began to slowly rotate on its axis until it stood wholly upright. It now
resembled a flat, perfectly symmetrical rock large enough to skip across the
whole of the planet’s seas several times over before losing its momentum.
Another bassy blast filled the world all around the youthful Vassalite. His
slow, humble eyes peered momentarily to his side and rear… he was all alone
now. The Elders of his race, the caregivers who had cultivated his mind and
cared for his body had abandoned him to his task and would go now to their
demise. The ship lifted itself out of the atmosphere and disappeared from his
sight. They would return in a few hundred years to see how their last
evolutionary grasp had faired.
The youthful one stepped forward in slow, thoughtful strides
until he had reached the edge of the rocky cliff he stood upon. The waters of
the untamed blue world fell and raged all around him in a ceaseless cacophony.
He bent slowly and placed the stone half-cylinder carefully upon a long, flat
surface of gray rock. Once his ten-foot form stood again at its full upright
height, the Boon disrobed himself and cast the gray-blue cloak and hood to one
side. There he stood in his nakedness, all save a white cloth wrapped about
where the loins would have been. His body was the epitome of faultless beauty.
Not a blemish showed itself on any part of his ivory flesh, nor did a single
ounce of apathy or excess hang upon his godly muscular frame; he was utterly
hairless, possessed no papilla upon his chest, required only one orifice for
excretive function, there were no teeth or keratin deposits in the extremities
of his limbs that produced nails upon each finger and toe, the front portion of
where his legs met his torso had been smoothed over by the cruel game of
evolution, a small naval still remained. He closed his eyes and took one final
deep breath, feeling the cool wind pass between his legs and around his torso…
it was time now to do what he had been chosen by the elders of the Vassal to do. He
knelt on one knee and carefully retrieved the sacred container before standing
fully erect once more. His forefingers and thumbs encircled the top exterior of
the container; first squeezing gently along the upper rim and then carefully
sliding both thumbs inward. A metallic click was barely audible over the
symphony of raging waterfalls. The flat top of the covering case divided slowly
into two halves and slid away to expose a tiny black cup with a less
technologically-advanced stone covering. The Boon did not need to remove this
second barrier… it began to disintegrate without emitting any kind of polluting aftermath of smoke or melted residue. Whatever the stone lid had been housing,
it was not being destroyed by it, it looked as if it was being consumed body
and soul without a single trace left as courtesy. And at last, there it was… the last of the
blood of his great lord, the Deacon; the cornerstone of all the Vassal’s most
significant achievements. The substance was a rolling transparence that was
akin to neither water, nor ice, nor gas. The blackish-gray of the tiny stone
cup was naturally projected through the colorlessness of the almost formless
material, yet when it was exposed to oxygen and sunlight it instantaneously
shimmered with a layer of gold and orange, before congealing back to its glassy
state of blackness. For a moment, the otherwise emotional void that was the
face of the Boon appeared sorrowful; this was the last of their lord’s blood.
This was the last hope of their race – that is what the elders of the Vassal
had ever led him to believe. But even in giving his life to birth an entire
planetary ecosystem, what hope could he truly be for his ancient species? What
stroke of fortune or luck could his sacrifice bring that could revoke their
doom and return the Vassal to a breeding, sustained civilization? And most of
all, what could he do to preserve the life of the world they had seeded against
their enemy; the warlike heretics of their race, the nameless ones who had come
to reject their planet seeding efforts in the latter years of their species.
During the Vassal’s age of true prosperity, the whole of
their race lived in absolute theocratic unity. Their numbers swelled and they
began their work engineering new worlds full of new life. Above all other
things in the entire span of reality, the Vassal despised military conflict of
all kinds. With science and religion guiding the ancient beings on their
journeys across the stars, there were many millennia of warless, unyielding
progress for them. When the day came when more than half of the remaining
supply of the blood of the Deacon had been used up, a sort of discontent
uneasiness appeared to have come upon many of the Vassal. Whispers of doubt and
words of disbelief soon gave way to a sizeable portion of the ancient beings
openly rejecting the ‘perilous failures’ of the theocratic Vassal and the
short-sightedness of many of their doctrines… chief of all of these failures
was the squandering of the blood of the Deacon in unsuccessfully recreating
Paradise and birthing species after species that refused to turn away from the
ways of war. At first, the elders of the Vassal were able to contend with their
numerous naysayers and keep their civilization from fracturing during the onset
of the age of unrest. It was when the subsequent and final generation of their
species came without reproductive organs that those who would thus be titled
‘the nameless ones,’ unconditionally forsook the Vassal. The nameless ones
decried the faith of the Vassal as the true bearers of heresy. It was because
of their misuse of the blessed blood of their lord that the Deacon had brought
their asexual ruination upon their once grand, omnipotent race. They dispersed
from their home world of Paradise, settling on worlds much the opposite of the
former; dead, wild and lifeless worlds… worlds that did not shine and sing and
smile. Chief of all these stronghold worlds was the Aviary, where the nameless
ones committed their gravest, most significant sins against the doctrines of
the Vassal – embracing the forbidden sciences of war and destruction. Their ovaleseque space vessels were replaced with curiously-shaped ships of death - Juggernauts. They forsook their perfect nakedness; using their foul knowledges to grow biological suits of war upon their bodies which could never be removed. Above all else, the nameless ones maligned the great Deacon in their
attempts to callously reverse-engineer a synthesized version of their lord’s
sacred blood – the Impurity. In their disregarding efforts to recreate
something that brought entire worlds to life, the nameless ones had created a
weapon capable of instantaneously laying waste to entire worlds; which they did to several of
the planets that were deemed failed attempts at docile worlds.
The Boon wiped the thought of the heretical nameless ones
from his mind. His final thoughts would not be ones that dwelled upon his
hateful, unforgiving adversaries. He fixed his mind on serving the Deacon, he
forced the venue of his thoughts upon the new world he would create. If this
world became the reproduction of Paradise that the Vassal so desperately sought, his
sacrifice would be one that would forever be held in the same light of that of
the sacrifice of the Palatial One; the one who had given his life to birth the
Deacon itself and was enshrined as a deity among the Vassal the way the mother
of a god would be. Even as the nameless ones cast aside the theocracy of their
Vassal brethren, still they held true to their own respect to the Palatial One
just as they had with their lord, the Deacon. The Boon lifted the stone cup to
his lips and swiftly swallowed its bitter, thickset contents in a single
effort. He opened his eyes slowly and breathed what would be his last long
breath of refreshment. His flesh began to warm. The Boon looked upon his left
forearm, which began to riddle itself with black, spidery veins. The tip of one
finger became numb and in another instant the tip fell away to ash. The young
set of lungs became uncharacteristically labored; making the next effort of
drawing breath and releasing it feel like he was forced to pull a boulder one
way and then push it the other. The muscles in his legs weakened, his leg
joints and the balls of his knees began to feel as though the weight of his
ten-foot tall form would collapse as he stood. The blood of the Deacon had
begun to atrophy his exterior sensibilities. His eyes blurred as they stared at
the empty stone cup in his right hand. The cup slipped dizzily from his hand
and crashed onto the rock surface. The tiny cup managed to remain intact as it
rolled clumsily over the edge and began its plummet to the singing waters far
below. The ring in his ears worsened exponentially. A peculiar, unsettling
scent filled his nose; a metallic, burning smell which was the result of the
breakdown of his vascular and digestive functions. His lungs burned; refusing
to do their job anymore. The feeling of pushing a large boulder to and fro
became more like trying to move a mountain. Pain began to wrack every
centimeter of his flesh as the losing battle of his defensive blood cells
against the ingested alien fluid came to its head. The brave youth did not cry
out… not until the explosive, stabbing pain ripped through his abdomen. He felt
the flesh began to flake away on his brow, then his shoulders. His grunts of
pain turned to low-pitched screams of agony as the sacred blood ravaged every
ounce of his body. He fell upon all fours, continuing to choke and gurgle as
portions of his physical form fell away. The Boon threw himself over the edge
of the rock cliff, by the time he had struck the pristine, blue surface of the
water, what remained was little more than a muddled, nearly-disintegrated mass
of black and green, with about one-tenth of the once young physical form
remaining. As the ashes of the Boon trailed out into the fresh water, the black
substance began to swirl together to form a primordial, living mortar that
behaved with a distinct intelligence. This was the direct result of the
combination of the blood of the Deacon and the blood of one of the Vassalites.
The swirling darkness began forming strands of DNA. Not more than a mile down
the raging fresh waters.
Within a matter of hours, sparsely as the shrill cries of
the Boon’s agony had ceased to dance throughout the empty canyons, plumes of
algae could be seen growing upon the surface of the water. When the expanse of eukaryotic organisms reached the shores,
green moss began sprouting from the crowns of the surrounding rocks. Within a
matter of days, millions of tiny, illuminous tadpoles were swarming the algae
in a frenzy of hunger. Within roughly the span of a month’s time, the limitless
miles of gray lifelessness that had encased the planet was now blanketed with
brilliant green life. Tall trees began their long, deliberate ascent toward the
skies. Thin clouds of vapor are exhaled from the boundless miles of fauna –
Oxygen. After the duration of a year had passed, a single hand, webbed with
five slender digits slides itself out of the water onto the dry, sandy
shoreline… followed closely by another. A pale-green salamander head poked from
the water; its black eyes, not unlike those of the god-man whose sacrifice had
been the author of the life that flourished throughout. Several more of the
little creatures rose and slid from the water, then hundreds…thousands.
Countless tiny sets of lungs came to breathe the oxygen-filled atmosphere
through their tiny nostrils and mouths. Decades later, the lush landscape was
infested with the salamander creatures; now in varying sizes and hues of
color. The world gave birth to larger,
bipedal forms of life that resembled their salamander forefathers. The upright
creatures chased down and made prey out of the swarms of amphibians; who
scurried en masse back to the safety of the warm waters. Shrill calls filled
the humid air as winged, feathered beasts soared through the skies. The bipedal
hunters of the preceding decade became the prey of the aerial predators;
snatched from the ground in razor-like talons and ferociously dismembered by
beaked mouths. The winged beasts returned to their nests high atop the trees
and vomited forth mouthfuls of meat and blood into the hungry maws of their
young.
Millions of years later, the most advanced creatures walked upright and began to undeniably possess certain other likenesses of the god-men responsible for their creation. And there... in the depths of a dank cave in the chill of the night, the earliest of those upon the first humanoid steps of evolution huddled in darkness as one of them, the provider for the small family and the possessor of the greatest intelligence akin to that era of man. The man and his family were nearly starved to death. They were cold and growing sickly. Before him was a bed of dried grass, small sticks and fern leaves that had withered brown. In each hand, he held a different kind of rock. He began striking the rocks together in a curious sort of desperation that didn't quite come from cold or hunger. Each time he banged the two rocks together, tiny beads of white light seemed to fall away from the dull collision. One of them had fallen upon his thigh, burning him ever so slightly for a microsecond. The man struck and struck, not losing his patience or forsaking the odd sliver of understanding that had come to him in the darkness of his cave, beside his suffering mate and their shivering children. At last, a portion of the grass flared orange briefly. The ape-man blew gently on the embers... more of the grass ignited and passed their torch onto one of the lengthy fern leaves. He stirred the burning embers with one of the small sticks and fanned the burn with the other hand. The bark of the sticks began to glow orange. More of the dried grass and leaves began burning. The other humanoids drew closer; fascinated by the growing illumination. After an hour of feeding and kindling the burn, the darkness of the cave was thrown back. Smoke filled the air. The family of ape-men squawked and yowled in astonishment.
Fire.
