The red, dusty sunrise had once been a symbol of hope and change for Mars, for humanity. Each red dawn had always come with the unspoken promise of limitless opportunities to be had. Centuries ago when the first colonists had arrived, it was that hope for a new beginning, of a fresh start and of freedom, that drove them to settle the vast, dead planet. But that hope soon turned to despair, each blood red sunrise was now a reminder of death and destruction, of war, and that hope that once burned so brightly was nothing but a failing ember, struggling to burn and by the 22nd century, Mars had become nothing but a resource to be exploited by the Solari Dominion Conglomerate. The to the Dominion, Mars wasn't a world; it was a mine, a factory. It was a prison.
As they usually do, the flames of rebellion began as whispers. Shifts of miners refusing to show up and work, a brave engineer sabotaging an oxygen pipeline to the Dominion's Towers. The colony was starting to unite, slowly and separately, straining under the continued exploitation of their overseers. They were small acts at first, small sparks of resistance that would reignite the dying hope in the colonists souls. Those sparks and defiance quickly ignited the fires of rebellion, and all across Mars the colonists began to rise up, only seeking better conditions for themselves. To not be treated like only and seen as just a number in a leedger. They started peacefully, taking over mining tunnels and oxygen farms, trapping Dominion Overseers inside their Towers, cutting off their necessary supplies.
The Dominion acted swiftly and mercilessly. It only took three months from the nearest outpost for the fleet to arrive, and then it only took an additional week for the Enforcers to enter the underground cities of Mars and annihilate entire districts, burying tens of thousands of men, women and children under the dusty rubble and red sands. But the colonist knew nothing but struggle and hardship, they only knew how to move forward. They didn't mourn the genocide of their friends and families, they armed themselves, and vowed any measure of vengeance against The Dominion.
Among them was a man named Dax Varro. He hadn't been a soldier, he had been an architect, once. He was a man who dreamed of designing efficient, affordable homes on a distant alien planet, that no could afford to live on. The Dominion had taken that dream from him and twisted and perverted it, forcing him to design and build better, more efficient factories instead. When the rebellion began, Dax joined out of necessity, not conviction. He fought because his hands had no better use now, he fought because survival demanded it, but surviving wasn't enough. The rebellion was losing.
The Solari Dominion's forces were overwhelming and their equipment was far superior to that of the colonists, who were nothing more than miners, mechanics and farmers, using makeshift weapons and held together by desperation. Every skirmish was a bloodbath, with the colonists losing vast numbers of people every week and their resources were quick;y running out. The end of the rebellion was close.
The hope that the colonists had rekindle had burned too brightly and too quickly. It seemed there was nothing they could do to free themselves of the Dominion's grasp, to break free. There was no more hope. It was then that the Nexus Vitae revealed itself.
No one could say where it had come from, with come saying it was a relic from an ancient alien civilization, buried beneath the dust of Mars for eons. Others believed that it was alive, that it was a being that was older than the stars themselves. Perhaps both opinions were right. When it was first found, deep underground in one of the thousands of mines, it presented itself as a vast black and blue, bioluminescent web of pulsating tendrils. They stretched across a large chamber, bathing it in an eerie, slowly flickering light. It whispered to those who stumbled upon it, promises power and abilities beyond anything they could conceive. They could feel it, they knew it was true, but they didn't know the cost of such gifts. The Nexus Vitae wasn't a gift, it was a trial.
Everyone who had stumbled onto the deep chamber where the Nexus was, had been drawn to it, and everyone who had touched it perished, leaving no sign anyone had been there. It was a siren's song, no one could turn away from it. The same was true for Dax Varro, who found himself standing before the mass of pulsating tendrils, having been running for his life. His bloodshot eyes glazed over as he shuffled, almost mindlessly towards the Nexus Vitae that was calling him. It too was slowly reaching out towards Dax, a long thin tendril stretching towards the hand Dax was extending. He had no idea that the countless others before him had had their flesh and minds burned away by an alien fire, effectively wiped out of existence. Dax continued to reach for that power that was being promised. He was desperate. Desperate for that freedom that would come with that power. And then Dax let out a soul shattering scream.
The black and blue tendril that he was reaching towards drove itself into Dax's flesh, tearing past his space suit and into his body, twisting and breaking it, shaping it into something unrecognizable. He felt an intense heat radiate from his outstretched hand and down his arm and throughout the rest of his body. Dax felt every nerve, every fiber of muscle, every cell, being ripped apart as the Nexus Vitae spread throughout him, supplanting nearly everything that made him human. He felt his eyes boil away, and the scream in his throat died out as he sensed, more than felt, his brain being devoured by the alien force inside him. There wasn't any pain anymore, after that, there was nothing. No hope, no regret or revenge. There were no thoughts.
The gritty, dusty Martian air filled Dax's mouth as he gasped, tasting the alien air for the first time. How? It had been days since Dax had touched, and been touched by the Nexus Vitae, and as he slowly opened his eyes, he knew was no longer human. He could feel it. He looked at the arm laying in the red dirt, it was covered in a black, writing material, and the fingers moved like it was his hand. It was his hand, and the grit in his mouth was martian dust. Suddenly panic set in and he scrambled up onto his knees, looking for his helmet, but it was still on his head, for the most part. He was looking out through a shattered visor, and only a portion of the helmet remained on his head, and his spacesuit hung like rags from his body. He didn't know how or why, but he was breathing the almost nonexistent atmosphere. Dax didn't have long to marvel at that as he took the remnants of his helmet off.
A blinding headache overtook Dax and he fell back into the dirt, his hands clamped to the sides of his head as the creature inside of him spoke. Not in words, but in images and feelings, and in memories. Memories that weren't his own, of other worlds, and other wars on a cosmic scale that was hard to comprehend. He felt the hope and despair of countless beings, across countless worlds and universes, he saw their civilizations rise and fall as they struggled to overcome something that threatened existence itself. He could feel the pure terror crushing his very soul. Dax's eyes rolled into the back of his head as he was bombarded by the overwhelming amount of information, something that would have killed him if he still had a human brain. What felt like days passed as Dax was flooded with the ancient memories of the alien organism, but it had only been a few minutes, and slowly he came back to himself, the dark cave with its gentle pulsating tendrils coming back into focus. Dax didn't fully comprehend everything he had been made to see and feel, but there was one thing he was certain of, he was chosen. Not to save Mars, but to prepare him for something much worse than a petty war.
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What that was, he didn't know, or couldn't understand yet, but he knew the terror it would bring. He knew that the Nexus Vitae wasn't a benevolent thing, and it wanted something. It wanted to mold him, and anything or anyone else it could, into weapons, and Dax had become the first human to bond with the alien, and he wouldn't be the last.
It didn't take long for the once human man to understand and get used to his new, transformed body. He still more or less resembled a human, having two legs, two arms, and a head with the normal holes, in nearly the right places. His eyes were different though, being solid black, like one large pupil, and he had no hair, or eyebrows, and his skin moved and was now like a black goo. Dax found out that was a type of armor, or suit and with little thought, was able to absorb it into his body, which revealed he had smooth skin underneath, but it was bluish in color, with faint lines of black markings running up and down his arms and legs. The lines ran from each toe and finger in straight lines and across his chest to form a circle in the middle where they met. The other changes he felt were more subtle. He could feel that he was stronger and faster than any other human, and the most significant change he could feel was with his mind. He could think so much faster, and process things at a rate he never could have dreamed of. This was the weapon the rebellion needed.
Eventually Dax Varro did became the rebellion's greatest weapon, an unstoppable force that outmaneuvered the Dominion's top admirals at every turn and cut through their forces with an almost cruel efficiency, and the rebels of Mars rallied behind him as a new symbol of hope. Victory after victory followed behind Dax and the creature living inside of him pushed him forward on the path of conflict. He didn't have a choice, the Nexus Vitae needed conflict, it needed progress and evolution and the more that he fueled that need, the less and less human he felt.
Dax's thoughts became erratic and his actions unpredictable and the rebellion became more of a distraction than a struggle for freedom against a tyrannical oppressor. It was just a small, meaningless conflict in a much larger war that no one knew existed other than him. Who cared about a small little dust ball like Mars when there was something else out there, something wanting nothing but to undo existence, to return to nothingness. Still, Dax continued to be the driving force for the rebellion, until one day he just vanished.
Some said he had been killed in battle while others said the Nexus had devoured him, taking back the gifts of power that it had granted him. The truth was simpler, as it usually is. Dax had walked away.
Thirty years passed and the rebellion still raged on, brought to a slow crawl with the absence of it's greatest weapon. Years of endless bloodshed had turned the planet into a desolate graveyard of broken cities and shattered dreams. The Nexus Vitae had chosen others, but none it had bonded with were as powerful as Dax had been, or as resilient or terrifying, and the Dominion remained unbroken, their fleets spread across the asteroid belt and beyond. But whispers of Dax Varro persisted. Someone had seen him at the battle of Medusae Fossae, or that he had been seen in the Tharsis region. Some said he still fought, calling him the Ember Titan, a ghost that haunted the edges of war, appearing at critical moments to turn the tide of a battle. Others believed he was searching for something, some answer that he could only find in the endless web of the Nexus Vitae's mysteries.
For Kira Rennar, those whispers had always been nothing more than legends, stories to exchange on night watch to keep your spirits up. No one person could have done all the things they said he did, and she never believed he was anything more than a symbol for the failing rebellion, something for them to latch onto in the absence of real hope. Until now.
The battlefield was quiet in the aftermath, the only sounds being the crackling flames of the several destroyed vehicles and the howl of the Martian winds. Kira stood among the wreckage of the convoy, her squad spaced out around her in a practiced ease, with their rail-rifles raised, each one trained on the man standing in the swirling smoke and dust. Dax Varro. He was alive.
He stood tall, still, encased in black pulsing armor that seemed to breath. Small black tendrils writhed across his body that gave off a faint blue light, and his eyes, glowing as bright as twin stars locked onto hers. He stood there, silent for what seemed like minutes.
"The testing has already begun," he said, his voice coming as two separate sounds that overlapped, giving it an artificial, alien sound.
Kira raised her rifle, her aim steady despite the tight knot that had formed in her stomach, or the beads of sweat she could feel building up on her brow. "Identify yourself."
Dax tilted his head slowly to the side, studying her. She felt stripped naked and that everything about her was laid bare for this creature to know. Her darkest secrets and her most childish hopes and dreams, she would have told him all of them, anything he wanted to know. She shivered and felt more violated than she had ever been before, like a stain had settled onto her very soul.
"Your struggle is pointless. The Dominion and Mars, the Belt - it's all nothing. You know nothing. The Nexus isn't going to save you. It came to test you and most have already failed," he said.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Kira demanded, staring down the barrel of her rifle, her trigger finger slowly moving.
"The Fire," he said, moving closer. His speed made Kira's breath catch, and his presence was so overpowering she almost fell to her knees, and the heat radiating off of him distorted the air. "You think this war of yours matters, but it doesn't. The real trial is coming, and when it does, most of you will burn."
Before she could respond, he turned and walked away, his inhuman speed carrying him beyond the horizon and into the distant haze like a ghost. Kira lowered her weapon, her mind racing and her squad gathered around her, fear and confusion was clear on their pale faces. Dax Varro was for sure alive, even if hadn't said it. There was no mistaking it. The black armor, the eyes, his presence. They had seen the Ember Titan with their own eyes.
Kira continued to stand there, silent as she thought, ignoring her squads questions and shouts. She didn't know what to make of the encounter. Why was he there, and what was all of that about Fire and a test? Had he truly lost his mind, consumed by the Nexus?
No, she felt that deep down, his words were the truth. Despite the very brief and very weird interaction, she could feel it when their eyes had met. He had no reason to lie, and she was an ant in relation to him, a veritable god. That realization made the Crimson Struggle, as the rebellion had come to be called, truly feel insignificant and a cold sweat dripped down Kira's back as a knot of dread formed in her belly.
The distant winds carried the scent of ash and ruin, and for the first time in her life Kira felt the weight of inevitability pressing down on her, a weight she had no idea how to bear.