Post by veronw on Apr 16, 2023 23:28:16 GMT
The Journey
For the people of the Clade, the past year had been difficult. Impossibly so, even.
So much had happened since their arrival into this galaxy; war had broken out, combat had been necessary, lives had been lost. Towit still had not recovered from his ordeal combatting the Coronan Republic, and that was prior to loss of one of their own with the death of Pyrrhic Visions. As the fallen’s name had implied, all the Meta-Sax saw appeared to end in failure and death.
A legacy written in a torrent of blood was one that Ladon had inherited. He still saw himself on that day, forever locked into the mindset of the child who reached out his hand for aid and received it. Still awestruck by the beauty and majesty of the grand cosmos before him as he was ushered up and out into the universe.
And still, he was disappointed in just how much of it was horrific. Horrifying.
Corona had collapsed into a thousand squabbling factions, and from experience Ladon knew it would result in even greater death. He knew it, but conceded his position in the Consensus when the Pathfinders stated their intent to go, to intervene.
Now, with things on the knife's edge in that theater, Ladon could bear the thought of proximity to it no longer. He departed from the area of space the Shemeshi had set aside for himself, informing his bounteous passengers and cladekin that the journey would be far away from the spheres of the Others.
Non-Saxheelians had a tendency to tire Ladon, not out of their inability to simply get along with one another, but because their ontologies were so obviously flawed. One group consumes relentlessly, because of a belief in their inherent system of consumption bringing a measure of improved station to themselves. Another is consumed, simply because it was in the way of the grand designs of the first. Yet more are turned and twisted to fit the trauma-sized hole in the hearts of a third.
Ontologies established on foundations of grief could not stand. Yet, was that not what he and the rest of his cladekin had done? Even before he was born, before he was Saxheelian, had that not been the function of the old Saxheelians?
They ran, fled into the darkness, before a terrible horde of unthinking things. In their own grief, their own anger, they defied the universe, screamed obscenities at old gods, cast aside old faiths and made their own. They committed themselves into forging something far greater than what had been before, in legacy, in memory of all that had been lost.
So how was it any different than the people who lived here? It wasn’t. It was just a different Path, a different way of being, of addressing eternal pain.
He knew it was part of the Flow, part of Stasis to seek to undue pain, undo the harm. It was in direct conflict with Dynamis, which embraced it as truth and reality. Change cannot happen in a place of perfect Stasis, a place of perfect harmlessness. It was the noema that established the old practice of shipselves developing biospheres which were the entire range of potentials.
Within him, right now, there were two distinct biosphere domains that were immicable to most life. A place to teach, a place to learn, a place of patience. It was a meditation on their pain. On his own pain.
His people had been food, farmed as such and treated as such. It was its own brand of horrors, its own special Tophet. His liberation at the hands of the old Saxheelians had framed his world view in a way that he could not help but want to run away from that past. And flee he had, into the form he wore now, into a mind he could never escape from.
The vastness of his consciousness had only amplified several fold after his Ascension. He’d seen it as utterly necessary as a Mothership. A mere meta-5 could not fathom the necessary tasks, the necessary sacrifices, to ensure the survival of the Clade. He hesitated to call them his clade, but they shared his name. Were they not a part of him, and he of them? Were they not inseparable from each other?
As a meta-7, he could conceive of entire new paradigms. He could understand now in ways he couldn’t before why the Arks of the old civilization had made the movements they had. It made sense.
But it also left him longing for company like them. It would be many, many years before any other of the current cladekin would be able to Ascend to meta-5, let alone meta-7. In that time, there was no telling who or what Ladon would be - he could Ascend another level, push the envelope out of desperation, or he could stay as he is now.
The vastness of his form far eclipsed what he had been at the beginning of the journey. Like all of his kind, he took the matter of how he existed seriously; to promote a sense of connection, he carved paths inside of his body that allowed for natural and easy connection when wandering. He built biospheres of many different types that encouraged experimentation. His eyes were always available for others to see through.
So consumed was he in his worry for his clade, that he did not think that he himself would need attending to. Not until Corona, not until this war happened and made him second guess his choices.
He needed time away from it all.
Several weeks later
Despite the speed at which things moved in Ancerious, Ladon took his time slowly exploring the southernmost arm of the galaxy. The “Invilis Corridor” had a dour name, but it seemed to be what the locals called this slice of the galaxy. He purposefully avoided the inhabited regions, noting the presence of both the Isoterrans and the Zeytans, though knowing them only by reputation.
No, inhabited systems would draw questions, and the presence of the much larger Ladon had gone unnoticed up until this point. Beyond the Shemeshi and Unbroken, he’d not exposed himself to anyone here, and intended to keep it that way.
There were a few larger societies here, like the Republic of Mensa or the Kolat State, but again, he kept his presence muffled. Soft. Quiet.
The way his people were good at, the way that tanifans had escaped becoming food of The Hunters. It came as instinct and was part of what made him so natural a fit for Mothership.
He wanted to delve into the unexplored arm, to chart a course into areas that this ancient galaxy saw as dead and empty. Where the oldest stars were, where the oldest mysterious may yet lay.
A few nebulas were of interest, but one more than most was an ancient stellar nursery and its surrounding pockets of clustered stars.
With a breath of stability, a focused intent and concentration, he placed himself there by moving-without-moving.
Splayed before him was a sight grander than any he had seen since his arrival.
Colors exploded across his eyes as the many bulbous zones on his skin peeled back, each enraptured by the beauty. His skin reflected the array of light on instinct, making him shimmer like a multifaceted jewel in space. The shape of the cloud was compounded into itself, eerily similar to the clouds he remembered seeing as a boy on his homeworld. Already, his multi-faceted vision could pick out the telltale signs of stars being born deep within the nebula.
What seemed peculiar though, compared to the normal stellar nursery, was that this formation was incredibly ancient. There were stars still forming, but they had slowed to a crawl and the nebula appeared to have achieved a state of some equilibrium within itself.
Why this was, the cladeship could not say, but it was possible that due to the differences in physics in Ancerious that the normal conditions for cloud collapse and thus stellar formation were not present. Perhaps there was some sort of exotic mass involved, a dark matter star or an ancerium deposit.
The last thought spiked a degree of urgency in one of his lesser lobes which slowly trickled its way up to his awareness. Yes, he should explore the nebula, to see if it had a vein of the most precious substance in this universe.
Channels had naturally formed within the vast cloud, ones that he could not find the end point to. Like a series of veins strewn about a vast unknowable beast. Unperturbed by the temperatures, Ladon entered one such vein.
Pockets of gasses both exotic and expected littered the area near the entry point. Nothing particularly interesting or in quantities that were worth stopping for were immediately apparent, so he continued on his journey through the vast area.
His sensors and interferometer organs implied that the cloud was nearly a thousand lightyears in diameter, far beyond what he could explore in a timely fashion, especially given that FTL speeds within the cloud were limited. No, he’d have to follow the pathways created by billions of years of gravity and momentum.
Deeper within the cloud, he saw distinct pockets forming in space where stars were coalescing. Rich type B’s that indeed drew his eyes, but something within him compelled him to continue to explore.
Reactionless engines tugged him this way and that as channels narrowed or expanded to beyond the width of whole star systems. His own veins flowed and pulsed with the power given to him by Dark Fluidics, defying the masters of mass and motion. Colors continued to fill his vision and the vision of all within and without him that were part of the clade. He could feel the chatter of them within him, the sensation bringing a warmth all its own to his tired heart.
It was here, at this moment in time, he felt that his journey crystalized.
The next pocket of space was truly vast. Nearly one hundred lightyears of volume inside the heart of the molecular nebula, and further inside a stable group of stars oriented in a cluster. It was, mathematically, incredibly unlikely yet here he was, staring at a cluster in the heart.
Most of the stars were ancient as well, M types that were dim in light and dimmer still in material, but on the edge of the cluster were hypergiants bursting at the seams with matter and energy. The temperature outside of his skin at eighty lightyears distance was a balmy doubling of the freeze point of water.
Liquid water..
All at once, his mind gestated the idea: the solution to his woes, to his peoples uncertain future, to their place in Ancerious and to all their hopes.
A beacon in the dark.
His suggestion was met with a combination of skepticism and outright denial. It would be an affront to their traditions, a rejection of who they were as a people, a forced retirement from their honor-bound oath.
Yet, they could not deny the strength of his argument: what good is an oath if you are no longer present to keep it? What good are traditions, if all who follow them are dead?
What better place to build a second Home than this? What better domain could suit their needs than one so rich in energy and matter? A thousand lightyears of nebula outside, and a second denser pocket all to themselves. They need but build the second within the heart of the first.
But it was more than just a pocket of space, it was potential.
Such a thing was worth its weight in monopoles.
It took some more coaxing, but eventually a Consensus was reached: the space within the nebula would be engineered to suit their needs. The temperatures were just right to do what Ladon dreamed of.
Within this absu would be liquid water. Water that would form rivers, currents, streams, and mighty oceans. A circulatory system of life, of energy, that would twist around stars and deny them their mastery of gravity.
So too would they use these self-same stars to engineer their new domain. A grand project of grand scope not tried in The Real by any before.
He could admit to there being a small degree of vanity in it, but that vanity served a purpose. No other in this galaxy either could claim to build such a thing, and for the Meta-Sax, there was power in that fact. And power could serve to future-proof them.
As holographic matter took shape in his hands, he felt elation for the first time since arriving in Ancerious. In this place, in ABSU, there would be a new Home for them all.