[center]
[hider=BGM: Inanna - Ancestral Raging Tides]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trkb_zOnVWM[/youtube]

[/hider]
[/center]

Usually the gulf that sat between the Foundry and the Imperivm was a quiet place in an intergalactic sense. The loose clusters of worlds belonging to some vague, warring set of worlds could not be counted upon to become much with how long that civil war had been going on. Had it ended in someone’s favour perhaps? Human presence in the form of space stations and starcraft still patrolled its exospace but something had changed. The Ascendancy that had ruled them for long was defined by bright gold, whites, and deep blues but these rigid, boxy craft had gone for something fierier as of late. Striking streaks of red, night black, and even moments of motley green defined them now, greater in number since the war seemed to drone into a footnote of irrelevance on the grand scale – the internal politics of lesser kingdoms, like the ambient buzzing of swarming flies amidst a brutal and uncaring universe. It was something that should be beyond the interests of the Dominion and competing would-be empires making their grand power games – nobodies were a dime a trillion.

Yet even independent vessels passing amongst this grand cluster of worlds noted that perhaps such dismissal was not entirely well founded. The bush fires of flame thinned and retreated to increasingly isolated portions. The strange floating monoliths of flesh, metal, vegetation, and shimmering ethereal matter fired their beams at one another less and less and moreso on those bearing the colours of the old regime. The violence had not vanished but it was diminishing, forced into smaller spaces as the multicoloured vessels of eldritch, alien construction joined with those of humanity’s architectural rigidity. Away from the prying eyes of warlords, tyrants, aristocrats, and alien consciousnesses something stirred amongst once besieged soils. A new unity born from a common heritage of suffering and defiance; hands of chitin, bone, mycelia, and cartilage, all clasped around the same goal and throttling the same throat of a hated, now vanquished enemy. The Ascendancy was no more but the distant echoes of the last hidden holdouts and their misguided remnants battling amongst the civil wars they had engineered up in their cruel wake.

Beyond their boundaries and into the warp gates, the strange ships that seemed as much arthropod or fungoid as they did machine voyaged forth – the largest movement of vessels beyond their boundaries since the days of the now deposed human empire that ruled them. Movement was fast with the wormholes, the fleets of mismatched fleets joined by strange shapes far more than merely bestial – they moved with the fluid, predatory animation of the great star-faring devourers of the myth. These creatures dwarfed many of their smaller ships, some of which even outclassed their capital vessels in size, layered not only in their natural scales, shells, and exoskeletons but bristling weaponry and armour integrated into their bioluminescent forms – spiny, plated, jagged, sweeping hungrily for targets. They moved in formation with the rest of the vessels as a group of coordinated predators in a silent drift. 

Some of them would spread outwards towards the three wormhole points between the NIRC and the Imperivm. Their quarry was elusive, rightfully so. The Ascendancy after all, had been removed but not obliterated and ever since their departure from what was now the territory of the Nexus of Integrated Revolutionary Councils, they had sworn a revenge and bristled with an incessant vitriol. It was more than angry sputtering of fallen lords and kings; the still murky boundaries of the Nexus were easy for the old regime’s most fanatic to drift through and within, find those who still praised the gilded hand of iron and the uplifting divinity of their reign. If not that, then joining the civil wars to further the last raging embers of internecine civil war would do.  Some of the Nexus’ war-forged legions desired revenge, others simply a ceasing of hostilities, but it was clear that the problem would not solve itself. Power was always waiting to flow from the barrel of a gun – a ship mounted plasma cannon and an electrobiological auto-rifle fulfilled the same function.

Another group, slightly larger in size but not quite a full-on invasion fleet, had neared Karbana Kinis, circling around its northwestern hemisphere as they fanned out over the labyrinthine world. The floating, drifting fragments of mechanized planet looked almost like reeds or stones, hiding whatever secrets it could from the eldritch hungers and curiosities behind the fleet. It would be a mistake to claim they were strangers to this planet. Traces of their own could be found here whether in the distant past or the antediluvian one. Settlers and explorers from times before both the Nexus and the Ascendancy, vanished somewhere into the chasmic depths and the scattered surface plating. 

The enormous bioweapons did not appear to have the hesitation of the sapients who commanded them. They slowly drifted in descent as gravity tugged them close enough to be halfway towards the outermost layers of the atmosphere. Shadowy entities of serpentine and decapod shape scoured the realm with skulls tapered and triangular, hyper-evolved senses adapted to stalking through cyberspace and the blackness between the stars augmented by powerful syncretic technologies fusing human, tarrhaidim, gealtirocht, and vrexul and attaching it to the sensory organs of these creatures. Antennae large enough to slice smaller ships in two, energy-reactive glands pulsing with an ominous sickly light, taste-buds wired to olfactory-analytic networks, even additional eyes maintained by nanobot and symbiote colonies, piercing metal with their gaze as information was slowly drip fed back to their handlers. This was an occupied world after all; they did not wish to become the same as the conquerors and tyrants they had overthrown. It would be treated well for its secrets.