Prologue
Night
fell over a research facility deep in the mountains, untouched by any other
signs of civilization. In the brush outside of the wooden fence that surrounded
the brick and mortar structure, the brood mother waited for her chance to
strike. Her children surrounded her, hidden beneath leaves and behind the
trunks of trees. She was a tall, lanky figure, identifiable as female only by
her long hair that stretched down to the sides of her body. Her children were
not so cursed with the form of human bodies, and had to steal them from others
in order to survive. They were a parasitic life form, each one taking over the
body of a human and growing within it, changing it to suit its new function. They
were welcome changes, the brood mother thought. Especially the smell, the warm,
meaty aroma of decay that wafted off of her children's stolen forms.
Her
name was Letherka, and she had a mission to perform. She sniffed the wind, to
make sure that they people inside of the facility wouldn't be able to smell her
and her children, and released a scent into the air that fired them up and
prepared them for battle. They fought with the hands and teeth of their hosts,
and with tentacle appendages that grew out of their fleshy bodies. She fought
with a human weapon, a crystal sword, forged by the Elkith smiths deep in the
forest of Andervard, from whose dead hands she had pried it from, while her
children took the bodies for their own. She waved it in the air and approached
the wooden gate that surrounded the compound. The wind shifted, carrying the
scent of chemicals to Letherka's nose. She spat on the ground, and raised her
sword to cut through the fence. The crystal blade bit into the wood with
contemptuous ease, and the smell of charring plant matter filled the air,
mixing with the smell of the chemicals.
Her
children moved closer to where she was, intrigued by the new development. Letherka
hissed at them warning them to stay back, or face her wrath. They obeyed
without question. Letherka twisted her sword around, finishing the cut through
the fence. She climbed through, searching both ways for signs of the enemy. She
saw none, and motioned for her children to follow her through the hole. There
were nine hosts, who came through the hole one after another. Some held simple
metal blades, and others held nothing except for their teeth and their
tentacles. One of them held a bow, for the host had been an archer before her
child had taken him. Letherka turned to the building, and walked up the side of
the compound, her children following close behind her. She held up one hand,
long claws pointed up at the night sky. Her children stopped behind her. She
looked around the corner of the building, at the main courtyard. There were
three people there now, all of them cartesian, with the distinctive colored
lines of light that their race possessed etched into their skin.
There
were two men, and one woman in the group. The woman in the center was tall and
proud, with long flowing black hair that reached to the bottoms of her
shoulders. She had a haughty expression on her face, one that was undoubtedly
attractive. She wore a lab coat, and held the badge of chief officer on her
shoulder. She wore brown canvas pants over her long legs, surely things of
beauty.
The
man to the woman's left was shorter than her, and had a mustache that filled
the space between his nose and his lips. A curl of color marked his cheek
distinctively, and the rest of his body circuits were arrayed in a pleasing
pattern. The man to the right of the woman was a portly fellow, and looked to
be the head scientist of the facility. The three of them approached the door to
the main building, and Letherka raised up her arm to command her children. She
brought it down with a flash. The one archer in her group fired off an arrow,
and it struck the portly man in the chest. The man with the mustache reacted
first, twisting his body around to reach for his dagger. He took a defensive
stance in front of the woman, and faced against the wave of Letherka's brood
children that came down upon him. He was a brave man, and Letherka almost
wanted to give him respect. The woman grabbed the man by the collar and dragged
him away from the advancing brood, despite his protests. She ran with him to
the door to the facility, which she opened fast, and closed behind herself, not
fast enough to escape the prying tentacles of one of the Brood. The Brood's
host flung its head and arms about and began to attack the opening in the door,
and the rest of the Brood followed. Letherka walked up to the door, pushing
them aside with her long arms. She reached into a pouch at the side of her body
and pulled out a metal card about the size of her palm, and inserted it into a
slot at the edge of her crystal sword. The sword beeped once, and Letherka's
body surged with power. She reached out her hand and pushed it against the
door. The door imploded with enough force to throw it off of its hinges. Letherka
entered the room in front of her Brood, and walked into a long hallway filled
with doors to either side. The woman and her friend backed up along the other
side of the corridor, still visible from where Letherka stood. She reached into
her pouch for another metal card, and kicked the one in her sword out of its
slot. She exchanged the two, and then pointed her hand at the other side of the
hallway, her other hand on her sword. Power coursed through her, and every door
in the hallway burst open, crunching into a flat surface and then falling to
the floor. The cartesian woman paused. Letherka swept her hand up, and the
doors all ripped out of their sockets and flew into the center of the hallway,
accompanied by the splash of broken glass.
The
cartesian looked both ways, at her friend, and then at the broken doors, and
dived into a room to her side. Letherka barked out an order to her children,
and the Brood chased after her. She walked up the hallway, past the cowering
man with the mustache, and lopped his head off with a single blow. The body
collapsed to the floor. She turned into the room that the cartesian woman had
gone into, and stopped in the doorframe. At the other end of the room, the
woman held a cube about the size of her palm in the air, between her palm and
her fist. She tilted her head and addressed Letherka.
"I
know this is what you want. Isn't it?"
Letherka
hissed at the woman. The woman didn't flinch, and brought the cube up higher in
the air. Letherka took one step towards her. The woman dropped the cube to the
floor and ground it under her heel. Letherka cried out in dismay. Much planning
had gone into the discovery of that cube. Her master wanted it, badly. How
could she fail now? In a surge of rage, she slashed with her sword, and every
counter and glass in the room exploded. She spared the woman, however, who
stood solidly in front of her. She hissed, and turned to one of her Brood. "Kill
everyone in this station," she said. "Leave the woman alive. I want
her." She turned away from the woman and walked out into the hallway.
Outside
the facility, with the captured cartesian on the ground in front of her,
Letherka slipped two more metal cards out of the pouch at her side and clicked
them into slots in the edge of her sword. She lifted up her arm, and brought it
down hard. The research facility rumbled, then exploded into a whorl of debris
and dust. Letherka cackled to herself, watching the entire facility being
reduced to rubble. She gave orders to her Brood to pick up the cartesian, and
walked away from the site, her long hair waving in the wind stirred up by the
dust storm.
Behind
her, a single strand of lighter-than-usual dust separated from the raging
storm, flew up high into the atmosphere, and then disappeared into the night.
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