No one can know the sky beyond the horizon. No matter what cloud or wind is before your eyes, do not confuse your guess with knowledge.

Huddled in the rubble of an open-air mall in the shattered remains of Kithari, Tirot ej-Canon recalled the words of his father with sadness. Remembering his training, he took a breath and pushed down his anger. He could feel it, pushing at his insides like a wind against an old shutter, but his training kept him safe. Sorrow, remorse, guilt – these he could freely feel. But not anger.

In a world conquered by the Progenitors, anger could get you dead.

The dust was thick in the air, coating his wings as he kept them folded to his back. Hunched behind a series of shattered sculptures, the forms of five Progenitors stayed tight in his vision. The gem fused with his chest burned with a low, azure light, but wrapped in the crystal’s magical Shroud Tirot held no fear of discovery.

Rather he feared what he would discover. He had been intelligence gathering for the resistance for months, but today something was different.

He may have died decades ago, but his father’s phrase had been righter than he ever could have known. The massive forms of his enemies thundered by him, unknowing as they moved into the Progenitor’s command complex. Watching them with practiced impassion, Tirot remembered the day before the Sword had slammed into the world.

Sunny. Beautiful pink and blue skies, filled with the first hints of the spring’s pollen harvest. Families flocked to the great open-air galleria, to take in the art, the music, the poetry of life. The air had been filled with a happy buzzing, the wings of a thousand men, women, and children enjoying the simple gift of life.

A beautiful day, but one of thousands of such mornings he and other kithikin had experienced. There was nothing in that glowing sunrise to suggest it was their last day of freedom.

Everything had changed by the next sunrise, their once flawed but beautiful world turned into a hellish nightmare in the beating of a single wing. The Sword arrived within view of the Great Hives, falling from a magical gateway that had opened in the sky like a wound.

Within a month, as greater and greater forces emerged from the strange dungeon that had embedded itself into the rolling fields south of their largest city, the Kithikin were forced to recognize they were losing a war they scarcely realized they were in.

No one can know the sky.

The crush of rubble being pushed aside called Tirot’s senses back to the present. The lead Progenitor towered over the others as it scuttered along, its long segmented body carried by a dozen meter-high legs. Along with its retinue of smaller attendants, it walked among the shattered remains of Tirot’s world like an animal moving through dried, fall leaves. Art and memories, crushed without a second thought.

Keeping pace by clinging to the shadows and corridors, Tirot pushed down the anger that threatened to bubble to the surface. This had been an open-air galleria, a place where he and his family had come to enjoy the paintings and music of their people, to breathe in the air and celebrate a life they had no idea would be ending so soon.

Each broken column or tattered painting was a memory, every passage a happier moment both too long and too soon ago. It would be easy to rage at the injustice of it all, but Tirot was in this position for just his ability to suppress that emotion and the chemical sensations it would release.

The Progenitors were all but blind to expressions of joy, of hope, of compassion. But anger they sensed like a blinding light.

He suspected their invaders had converted the Galleria to a command center not for its tactical value, but rather for its large open spaces. The great size of the Progenitors rendered most of the Kithikin structures too small for their use.

Not that a tactical location would matter. The world of Kithari was thoroughly conquered and had been for months. After a few weeks’ resistance, the Kithikin military commanders had decided they knew the inevitable outcome – a complete defeat. In their arrogance, they thought they knew the sky and chose on the world’s behalf.

They had surrendered to the Progenitors to save lives, handing over the future as if it were something to be traded at a market.

Tirot felt differently, and he had not been alone. Abandoning his post, he had started down a road that led here, where he hid in the shadows as the most powerful Progenitor on the planet stood just a few meters away. Part of a resistance that had yet to resist, a tiny collection of heroes and fools, truly insects before the might of their foe.

The interface inside his mind reminded Tirot of the details of his subject, as if he could forget.

PROGENITOR GENERAL AP: 475/475 CURRENT STATUS: Metallic Resistance (3), Elemental Sync (Innate), Escorted Metallic resistance: Requires one full pulse to cast. All damage from weapons is reduced by 10 AP. This effect lasts for four turns. (May be cast once per battle). Elemental sync: (Innate, does not require casting – activates once Progenitor reaches half armor.) The progenitor’s elemental resistance shifts to match the element of the last attack. Any attack by that same element results in no damage. Escorted: This Progenitor is accompanied by one or more figures with the ‘escort’ status effect. 25% of all damage is distributed to the escort, this number increases to 50% once the Progenitor General reaches half-AP. All negative status effects will first affect an escort, and are only passed to the General if all escorts are already affected.

The numbers and other ability information was meaningless outside one of the Progenitor’s transport Dungeons, the strange massive vehicles that had delivered the invasion to Kithari. The Sword had been first, and the Axe had followed.

The gem embedded in his chest allowed him to resist the ‘still’, a time disruptive field the Progenitors seemed to be able to generate. Precious and rare, teams had been sent inside the dungeon to retrieve as many of the arcane crystals as could be found. They were studied, weaponized, allocated to the Primarch and the family-squads that had been sent into the dungeon.

Squads like his own clutch. A precious few gems had been later found by the resistance and put to as much use as they could be outside the Sword and Axe. Touching the blueish gem, Tirot felt gratitude for its presence, even if it was permanent. The strange objects’ messaging and translation capabilities had made it invaluable as an intelligence gathering tool.

Standing at a height of over five meters, the leader of the invasion force scuttled forward, carried by a series of dozens of pincer-tipped legs. His long body snaked into the room, the carapace night-black and shining as if it had been polished. A pair of segmented eyes scanned the room, looking for any surveillance.

Tirot stiffened behind the column but kept his heart-rate steady. He had been here dozens of times, knew at least ten escape routes if he were detected. But the General would not discover him today, Tirot was sure of it. He knew his target, from the patterns of his antenna to the frequency of his breathing.

The General was off today, nervous. Something was wrong, and that fact alone kindled a tiny spark of hope.

There were four other Progenitors flanking their massive leader. One pair was only about a single meter high, a pair of squat fat insects with red carapaces and antennae as long as their bodies. They were joined by insects so tall and thin they almost appeared to be columns themselves, brown and dark fur covering their small upper bodies, while their lower legs bristled with spines.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

On a nod from the General, the fatter insects inhaled, their abdominal regions expanding. Tirot felt the pull of air towards the strange pair, as they inflated to twice their original size. In unison they then released the stored air, which came out of their pores as a cloud of golden mist, filling the central court.

As the final wisps released from their bodies, the squat yellow Progenitors intertwined their antennae, and the mist began to swirl. New colors and definitions began to show within, images forming.

Tirot had to admit he was fascinated by this strange form of communication the Progenitors had developed. Where or how had they learned this, and where was the being he was about to see actually located?

A single form began to show within the image, but it was not the one Tirot expected. Normally, the General corresponded with another of his station every other day. It was mostly an exchange of numbers and productivity information, the entire conversation rarely took more than five minutes.

Yet today was different. Instead of the dark cobalt and blacks of the general class, Tirot could see the orange angular features of a Progenitor Engineer.

The lighted eyes of the engineer seemed to peer through the mist, focusing upon the General. Tirot could see the tiniest reaction from the large Progenitor. He detected new pheromones in the air, emanating reflexively from his enemy. Frustration, confusion, even worry.

These are good things, and Tirot grinned. There had been too few good signs for far too long. Yet the smile faded almost as quickly. After all, what could truly offer hope in such a hopeless situation?

The picture wavered, as a new image formed through the mist released by the smaller, attending insects. The colors swirled and shifted, the golden hues giving way to darker tones of cobalt and gray. The thin, taller attenders now lifted their hind-most legs, rubbing them together to create a humming that rose and fell with intensity.

Tirot was familiar with this ritual. The gem embedded in his chest translated the auditor of the strange clicks and hums into words he understood. He had hidden in these confines for so long, seen so many of these meetings, he was starting to think he could understand the Progenitors even without the translation.

Certainly, the body language of the General was easy to read. His head was bent low, antennas down, in a sign of respect and deference. But just of view, the gouges his pincers dug into the steel deck told a second story, one of frustration.

The image in the mist was new though, both to the General and to Tirot. Had there been a change in command back wherever these monsters came from? He supposed it was possible, even likely. In the year since the Progenitors had completely absorbed Kithari into their control, he had seen many cases of promotion by combat.

Tirot wondered if the general was going to question the change. He assumed not, as the Progenitor likely had a bigger concern on his mind, the same one that had brought Tirot here today on such a risky intelligence mission.

Over the past week, a new gateway had been put under construction, and it was a priority task. Kithikin slave resources and Progenitor workers had been thrown at this new task, leaving all other projects understaffed, if not halted altogether.

As such, the massive oval metallic structure that dominated the central square was already half complete. Under heavy supervision of a pair of newly arrived Progenitor Engineers, workers from both races had been laboring day and night, hauling and installing materials both mundane and magical.

All of it was directly next to the current location of the Axe Dungeon. Hundreds of meters high, the strange arcane weapon had emerged from a similar metallic gateway months prior. The titanic metallic oval had materialized in the sky, melting into slag as the form of the Axe Dungeon emerged from within and slammed into the ground below.

It was clear to Tirot and the other leaders of their would-be resistance that the Progenitors intended to send the Axe Dungeon to a new destination, and quickly.

But why was it leaving, and to where? The Sword was already gone. If the Axe left as well, their enemy would have no easy way to reinforce, or resupply. The resistance needed to know if this was an opportunity, or a trap. In an entire year of occupation, they had not yet revealed themselves.

They would only have the element of surprise once.

The Progenitor general spoke first, as Tirot expected. It seemed to be part of the culture for the subservient to initiate communication, perhaps to show their vulnerability first.

“Confusion: new gateway.”

Like all Progenitor speech Tirot had heard, the General spoke in a short series of clicks, his sentence barely more than a few seconds in length. Always efficient, always devoid of all but the subtlest color or nuance.

The Progenitors had no art to them, no poetry or song. They were like machines that ran only on rage, showing little emotion beyond anger and ambition. No love, no joy, no reasons other than their strange existence. It was horrifying.

The image in the mist said nothing, while the seconds ticked by awkwardly. Progenitor speech followed a strict give and take, one side then the other. Never he had heard this level of pause, this strange failure to respond.

Breaching the protocols Tirot had come to expect, the General spoke a second time. There was a slight shift to his voice, an increase in the sense of his intimidation.

“Statement: Current workload significant. Gateway resource level requires re-tasking from other critical projects.”

Still no response. Tirot found his jaw hanging open, while The General’s pincers pushed ever deeper into the deck underneath them. His nerves, fear, and frustration so clear they were an odor in the air, a pheromone of lost ground.

“Query.” A third un-answered sentence. “Reason for deviation of plan.”

There was a shimmering in the mist as the new figure seemed to consider their subordinate’s words. Tirot wished the gem’s targeting could identify what he was seeing through the strange communication system, but it registered nothing.

Yet when the voice came, it registered as female to his ears. It was less harsh than the tones that had previously been instructed from afar, but also more confident. As if it had been borne to power.

“Clarification.” The golden mist shifted and swirled with the speech. “Sword Dungeon remains present and disruptive in the world housing the Prime, in landspace designated ‘The Realm’ by the inhabitants. Secondary gateway necessary for deployment of Axe Dungeon.”

A faint vibration ran through the carapace of the General, one that Tirot had come to associate with confusion.

“Reminder, Apex. Axe Dungeon difficult and unreliable. Sword is pref-“

“Context: the Sword Dungeon is lost to our control.”

Normally, Tirot would have been shocked by the act of one Progenitor interrupting another, even a subordinate. But the news was too stunning, its possible impact too far-reaching.

The Sword has been lost? The Progenitors could lose control of a dungeon?

The Primarch had last gone into the Sword, along with dozens of family-squads, with a mission of destroying the dungeon from within. Weeks later, all that had emerged was death. None had been seen sense, and most had given up hope for any of the survivors.

Most, but Tirot was not most. A tiny flame of hope burned within him still, one he kept carefully hidden.

The image shifted, now showing the shattered remains of what looked like Progenitor equipment, fallen around a massive pulsing emerald gem, held over a pit by massive chains. Writing in the image identified it as the heart of the Sword Dungeon, the very target the Primarch had gone to destroy.

He could see no Progenitors around it. There were beings around the gem, wingless bipeds of varying sizes and colors. And among them was a face that had haunted his every night.

Nearly nine months had passed since Tirot saw his wife and family pass through the golden door at the base of the strange, massive weapon. Gone in support of the Primarch, gone as one of a dozen family squads sent into the dungeon. Simply gone.

The last thing he saw was his daughter Isca’s eyes as they looked back at him, antennas lowered in worry. Now he saw those eyes again.

Isca? It took all his control to keep his emotions in check. Daughter, how are you there?

“This General serves at the will of the Apex.” The hints of anger were gone from the Progenitor’s voice, replaced with concern, hints of worry. Tirot pulled his attention away from his thoughts of his family, struggling to keep his focus on mission at hand.

“Correct. You do.” The female, who the General had called Apex, carried a hint of whimsey to her voice. Tirot had never heard such a note from a Progenitor before, and it was unsettling. “The Gateway must be online within a week. Target the Prime-housing world. Lead the invasion personally, and prepare modification for new subservient species acquisition.”

Subservient species. That was what Tirot had heard his own kind referred to. Modification carried with it more notes of concern. The resistance suspected that the Progenitors had been taking Kithikin and altering them biologically, but nothing had been proven.

Each quiet beat of his heart cried out for Isca’s name. He wanted to take to the sky, to fly himself to the Sword’s empty crater, to find some way back to his family. But he kept his feet rooted to the shattered floor of the Galleria. His job was not done, and there might still be hope for them all yet.

“Query:” The General looked back into the fading communication mist. “Designation of new subservient species?

The Apex’s segmented eyes narrowed, the light behind them becoming more intense as she spoke. Naming the Progenitor’s next target for conquer and slavery, her strange clattering speech issued forth a word as alien as any Tirot had ever heard.

“They are known as orcs.”