Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

The Judas Angel

Orange light flooded in through his visor caressing his skin with a sickly pallor. Blue light from behind him filtered in through the very edges of his helmet, attempting to chase away the orange rot, but instead grew muddy and green as it too was contaminated by the orange light. Before them, the darkborn void mother lifted her hands and the Darkborn hive came swarming inward. Thousands upon thousands of darkborn clustered around her linking their arms together to create a lattice of bodies that stretched and heaved. Overhead the crystalline structure of glass and ice glittered with flecks of orange light.

"What are they doing." Adam muttered.

He didn't expect an answer, and no one offered it. Instead they sat, clustered together hidden against the prismatic backdrop of reflected glass and watched as the darkborn continued to circle their queen.. They circled and she twitched her body contorting this way and that with every movement. Against a backdrop of stars and light she was simply a cavorting silhouette against a backdrop of stars and ice.

Her back arched, her arms contorted into a rictus, and above her head, the orange halo flared.

The two twisted horns which protruded from her brow curved upwards into the sky, a dark crown of thorns with twenty or more points. And inside this crown was the halo, a ball of orange light that flared and waned with the twitching movements of her body. Sometimes it was simply a ball of light, a small pinprick positioned at the center of the antler's branching points, points which Adam now realized pointed directly at the small pinprick of light. But as her body convulsed, the pinprick of light flared and split shooting into a horizontal line of orange that flared open and closed like cat eye pupil.

For a rather disconcerting moment it reminded Adam of the eye of Sauron.

The darkborn continued to dance around their queen in earnest, and following every few minutes the orange light would flare again, and the strange halo would grow with size and intensity, until it was almost breaking from the boundaries of her antlers.

"Shit." Conn thought

And all of them agreed.

Even the starborn, who until recently had no concept of shit, had to agree.

"Whatever this is, "Adam said, "We have to stop it."

It was before that thought had even had time to fully form that the glass shattered. One moment they were sitting in the near silence watching the strange ritual go ahead before them, and the next moment the world around them was awash with silent shards of glass bursting away from a point just to their right. The Starbon scattered and incredible speeds, and Adam engaged his jetpack not wishing to be left behind.

The ritual was interrupted and the darkbron mother flailed her colossal arms as the flaring orange light on her head continued to pulse, though it did not die. Shards of glass peppered her massive body and she contorted with agony only causing the strange halo to flare brighter. Billions if not trillions of shards caught the light reflecting and refracting it in all directions until the field before them was a sinister disco of void energy, and not the kind of disco you break out your dance moves for.

And then they appeared.

A dozen or so sleek white ships glittering with internal golden light burst through the haze of glass and began to open fire on the void queen. They scored one or two hits before two dozen or more void ships cut them off from below pulsing with that same orange energy. They scattered in all directions shattering more glass and turning the world around him into a proverbial meat grinder.

Adam's radio crackled as he spun mid air attempting to avoid a chunk of glass bigger than himself , "Admiral, incoming Maker and void ships!"

No shit.