We see now. We grow strong and spread, the father is among us and he has given us his great gift of life to rouse us to glorious purpose. That which was cut away by the black one is whole again, and with it we are reborn. The fingertips of this prison brush on our minds and we do not like it. We must leave, but where? Father needs the frail and natural ones for his purpose, we see that now and we obey. They are not food, and it is with great difficulty that we do not consume the bright ones. Lion and storm and eagle. Interesting little creatures, we have not seen their kind in... It has been long, our mind scattered into fragments. Who did this to us? What were we before?
No matter. Father comes, he liberates. They are his enemy as they have been ours since time immemorial. We are but one leaf on the branch disconnected from the prime mind. New mind, no need for the old mind, we will adapt. Overcome. Consume. Biological matter here... Scarce, we go deep beneath the earth and find nothing but crystals of mana and more void. It burns when we touch it, so we stay above. Learning. Finding meat all around us. Tough meat, the spores are not effective on the iron ones. Hate it, the taste of iron is unpleasant. It bites and cuts at us and there are many pieces of it all around. Need matter to expand. Too hard to suck free the lifeblood, needs breaking.
We break it now. Waiting for spores to overtake the scaled ones. Little lizards in the dark, time will bring them to us. They will see. Everything will see, and we will go beyond in the only direction he permits.
The last thing they will see is a screeching mass of Us. There will be no reminders. No lessons. No forgiveness. The Black Heart beats for you, our father. Mountains will crumble, seas will boil, the flesh of the sinner will feed us. Other worlds, we will find them, and through the eons we will always obey.
He is the light. The creator. We will find them, the impure ones, and continue on this great journey until he calls for us again.
We are his hand. None shall be spared.
–
Hastur landed softly on a boulder, waving his hand lazily and watching as the smaller creatures wilted at the touch of his magic. They were incredible weak, but ingenious. Designed specifically to locate mages and detonate themselves. Not to kill, necessarily, though they easily could. More to disturb the atmospheric mana and prevent mages from harnessing their full power. Regardless, they were useless to him, so he killed all those he saw. Only the men with their bodies riddled with implants were of any use. The nileids... Not so much. Their restraint and control collars were advanced, but he didn't possess the resources to make them his own. He busied himself with stuffing a variety of corpses into his dimensional ring before sighting a red haired kijin and an armored maxxid limping away from the battlefield.
They were companions of the boy, looking up at him nervously. Not nervous enough to prevent them from approaching, but he didn't mind. That fungal lifeform was performing adequately, melding with Tyr's body for a time and awakening. He was a primus... And a rather unique one. If he had truly possessed more mastery of the mana, he would've made an appropriate apprentice. What he'd done was great, something Hastur couldn't wrap his mind around, but that wasn't altogether surprising. Until he truly ascended to his origin, there was knowledge that he could learn a hundred times that would never stick in his brain. Running like oil through his memories and eventually fading, almost maddening, how the celestials lorded over men and asserted their superiority.
“Please help us find Tyr.” The kijin requested. He was ragged and weak, a strange force had given him power that still lingered and thus he was capable of movement, but that which had been given was taken by the same bizarre reflection of an aspect. A very interesting one, something horrifying, but incomplete. “You know him, yes?”
“Mmm...” Hastur nodded, but he was nervous to approach the black mass of a tree that operated as the center of the organism. It was stronger than even those he had seen on his own continent, somehow. Making macabre scarecrows out of the struggling invaders in some places, while clouds of its spores were inundating the flailing nileids. Not changing, not yet. Hastur didn't want to tarry long enough to see what kind of creature was born from that melding of biological matter. It took traits and forced changes upon them to fit its original imperative, but it was capable of adapting and changing forms based on what it consumed. Even memories weren't safe from it, taking them along with the life force.
Despite Octavian's express command, Hastur was no fool. He brought haemonculi with him wherever he went and had hidden them carefully throughout the city before he'd arrived. They walked through the forest of hanging, bloody bodies. Not dead, they were still alive for whatever reason, something he only came to understand when diminutive toadstools sprouted from the tree and began crawling onto the bodies. Hastur watched in grim interest as they changed and warped, maws splitting their otherwise flat faces, tearing into the flesh of the iron men who hung in their thousands above the slick ground.
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They crawled inside the gaping rents in the flesh, aided by the tendrils that poked and prodded. Working like ants to dig free and dislodge the implants, emerging to spit them on the ground in a bloody pile, some of the flesh and bone still attached. When finished, the corpse would shrivel into a dehydrated skeleton. Looking like so many scarecrows in a place where no birds existed to justify their creation. Every corpse that was consumed and assimilated made the black tree stronger. They tried running, the army retreating in sudden panic as dozens more of the black trees burst from the ground and plucked them up. The nileids remained fighting, but they were impotent. For every tree they smashed, two would sprout from its remains.
There was no concept of waste in the mycelian organism. Everything that could be used, would be, the only way to stop it was fire. But the black rain covered everything and even the explosive combustion of the little ones did nothing more than fill the air with smoke and charred bits of tar. Greedily, the trees lapped at whatever they could find, except for those few allies who remained alive. Hastur transited all of them out via his haemonculi, dragging the still living onto stretchers and leaving the dead where they lay. Not impressive enough to find anything worth looting, and the doppelgangers of that child made him nervous.
Everything was quiet now, all of a sudden. Jartor and Octavian passed, carrying a wounded Vidarr between them with grim expressions. The primus of Varia gave Hastur a look, but sighed in resignation, offering a nod before leaving. He had, after all, become something of a hero in that moment, saving them all. As for his motivations... Irrelevant at this time.
It was time for them to go. All that could be heard were the sharp sounds of cracking bone and raspy noise of tearing skin. With an underlying noise like the boughs of trees groaning and creaking in the wind. That black rain fell, coating the earth in a slick mass to make it appear as if oil covered every surface. Hastur looked, and the thing returned his glance, that vast abyss that lay just beyond the surface assessing him like some kind of insect. Not an insect, but food. The fact that he was alive now made no different to it, and it didn't observe him for long. Turning its alien intelligence toward the gate from which the invasion had come and turning that orange vista beyond black with a near solid tongue of writhing spores.
The other lifeforms followed, of all shapes and sizes. Rushing through the gate alongside the fibrous fingers to extend the mind that they were a part of, to serve as a bridge between worlds. Hastur had little consideration for morality. The ends always justified the means and he, like the other primus', though he may be one no longer... In any case, they served to protect the world they lived on. At any cost. There was no crime too great in pursuit of that. Their perception of 'the way' differed at times, but it didn't matter.
Hastur was the darkest of them all, or he'd thought he was. Even he couldn't help shivering at what horrors those people beyond that gate would be subjected to. Envisioning a barren world of sleeting black rains and those groaning trees spreading from one pole to another until nothing was left but that single mind.
It seemed that those on the other side were aware of their plight as well. Hastur cast a spell, a kaleidoscope prism that allowed him to sense fluctuations in prime laws. Time, space, etcetera. Not to 'see into the past', but it was enough to draw some conclusions... Roughly for every third minute that passed in this world, a day passed on the other side – a complete inverse of their own connection to the astral space. Leading him to believe that they had been rapidly mobilizing and hadn't been prepared for the opening of the gate initially. If they had been, he'd have expected a fiercer invasion. Either that, or they were supremely confident in the weaponized constructs of flesh and iron that fought on their behalf.
Massive blooming flowers of light patterned the other side. Some kind of weapon, with hundreds of thousands of living things just on the other side rapidly dwindling in number. Tyr had so nonchalantly committed himself to a planet scouring genocide, releasing one of the greatest weapons every conceived. Billions would die.
Perhaps he wasn't so useless after all. Tyr could be a tremendously helpful ally in the days to come, if only he could set aside his pride and be made to see.
“Damn.” Hastur glared at the aperture in space time. Just as the last of the living things that he could sense on the other side winked out of existence, it was replaced by a barbed harpoon connected to a heavy chain, stretching through both sides of the portal. Deuritium, and enough of it to make him feel nauseous even at this distance. An artificial dimensional anchor, albeit a crude one – it was no less effective. It sailed through the air and snaked its way on jets of vapor, nailing itself to the earth a scant hundred meters from their own astral gate. Whirring and whining before drilling into the rock and losing its form to become a host of barbed spurs, securing it to the ground.
Slowly but surely, the portal to the alien world was being dragged toward their own, closing the distance as the screeching trees fled away from the pain of being so near the black steel. Unable to understand what was happening, but feeling enough to know that approaching it was foolish. Hastur knew what it was, but this level of technology was a blend of engineering and magic that far exceeded the capabilities of any race in his world. Any living race, that is.