Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Provocation

It was a graveyard of ice and darkness.

Distant blue stars cast a cold, faded light through the field of shattered ice. A thousand crystal facets hung suspended in the cool blackness of space, winking with the light of that distant blue star, like a trillion eyes , open and watching, and between all of it, ribbons of black dust marring the ice with blotches of discoloration, darker than the space behind it.

"Keep an eye on the radio if anything so much as moves let us know. I am relatively sure that if Behemoth was here we would know about it, but it pays to be cautious."
"Glad to see that's one lesson you've managed to learn."

"Jokes at a time like this, Antony?"

"Now that's the pot calling the kettle black."

Adam gave a grim smile inside the helmet of his suit. Underneath his legs, the Gravity Cycle hummed sending vibrations up and into his bones. It was near absolute silence inside his helmet, his breathing being the only sound heard over the pulsing of his heart. The star winked into existence on and off as he passed his way through the field of shattered ice, some sf it still spinning lazily in one direction or another.

"Ho did you find this place." Admiral Lavelle asked from over the comms. The man liked t talk when he was nervous.

Adam understood the feeling.

"We used star mapping information from my suit to match the constellations. It took an algorithm almost two years to do it, but eventually we found it."

He passed through another glittering curtain of ice, and as he did, the scene finally unfolded before him, a massive structure of ice, too symmetrical not to be intentional carved by the claws of a massive beast into what would be a temple.... A temple for a cosmic demigod.

Carved crudely from a massive chunk of blue, green, and silver ice, the Leviathan had made his lair. The entrance itself was vast, and grand, wide enough it was like walking into the upturned face of a football stadium. Distant jutting teeth of ice hung above them and below them glittering a cold cool green in the sweeping beam of their lights, though all remained dark and quiet. There was no sign of the Leviathan and there was no sign of Behemoth.

Adam swept his light over the vast cavern heart pounding inside his ear.

"Captain."

Turning Adam looked over to where maverick was floating on her G-cycle in the heavy SE armor.

He was about to ask what she had called him for when his eyes fell on the wall behind her. He paused, then went silent, as together the group clustered forward to examine the wall, and the massive relief carved into it.

Or less of a single relief and more a collection of them strung into a cohesive storyline.

It was a difficult story to follow, a lot of it didn't make sense, and, there were times where the images being depicted made his brain buzz strangely with discomfort. It started at the top left with, what must have been the creation of the universe. Adam recognized that bit as leviathan had shown him not so long ago.

The images were still seared inside his mind despite his difficulty in remembering them .

And so the story went, down until the last few reliefs.

He inched closer eyes widening slightly as he recognized the scene before him.

There was the leviathan, rendered in beautifully intricate detail, more detail than he would have thought possible for the clawed hand of the dragon, and just below his majestic floating frame, there was depicted a small figure, the figure of an f-90 darkfire suspended in space, dwarfed by the massive dragon's presence.