Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Star Brethren

The starborn queen was massive, the kind of massive you can only get from a creature capable of existing in the vacuum of space. Without the pull of an outside gravitational force dictating the weight and shape of her body, the starborn queen had only to contend with her own personal gravity. Even in space one's personal gravity can become an issue, as a certain mass matter tends to cluster together in a spherical manner.

The upper bounds of mass, at which point matter tends to become spherical, is roughly when the object itself if 600 miles in diameter, though that rule was hard and fast and had a lot to do with the general weight and density of the clustered matter.

In this case, the starborn queen was big, but not that big.

Adam noted that this would be both the best time and the worst time to make a yo' mamma joke, and hoped that the starborn queen would hear the remorse in his thoughts even as he said it. He hoped instead that she would focus more on his own personal awe as he circled their ship around, led by an ever growing entourage of starborn.

The queen was a massive creature, nowhere near 600 miles in diameter, but her body, once folded outward, might have managed a little over a mile in length. She took the form of an androgynous humanoid figue, with with long, bony limbs, her legs folded in a criss cross "beneath" her. She had large, four fingered hands that rested atop her her thighs, and a large curving head just a little bit bigger than the average human skull.

Circling around, Adam pulled their shuttle to a halt in front of her eerily humanoid face. She had full lips, high cheekbones, and the impression of a nose without nostrils. Unlike most humans her face was completely hairless: no eyebrows or eyelashes to speak of over her fathomless, dark eyes stretching out like twin pools of black glass.

They were so big Adam could easily have landed his shuttle, like a bug in her eye, but doubted she'd be particularly appreciative.

Starborn were not naturally occurring. Where life had managed to germinate beyond the bounds of an atmosphere, within the vacuum of space, they tended to take on shapes not dissimilar to that of animals which existed in the deep sea. Adam had seen creatures shaped like jellyfish, and there were reports of other creatures in the general shape of stingrays or whales.

Powerful void creatures, took on abominable Lovcraftian shapes, like deep sea octopus, or other monstrous beings.

Starborn on the other hand, were specifically designed in a shape that was unlikely to naturally occur in space, with two legs and two arms and a head that served no real purpose.

Constructs, however, were almost easy to identify when you knew what to look for. They all tended to hold the same general shape, as that shape was most conducive to holding an Anima without smothering it.

Two legs, an upright torso, and a head, with the desired number of arms. There were exceptions to the rule of course, notably the Celex and the Bran, but with the starborn the rule applied. She was mostly humanoid, were it not for her size, and the massive cape of ribbons that billowed at her back, lazily curling and uncurling in wide, sweeping swaths that collected the energetic power of blue light filtering from the distant star. Each ribbon was somewhere in the realm of a mile or two long, longer than her own body, and wider than a football field at their widest.

It was an intimidating sight.

And all around her the starborn queen was swarmed by a thousand more starborn, dwarfed by several thousand times, as they swarmed around her like worker bees around their queen.

Adam could sense Conn's unease as he moved to the back of the shuttle, passing briefly through the airlock and out into space. He could have stayed in the shuttle to speak to the queen, but Adam could sense the thoughts going through Conn's head.