NationStates Jolt Archive

They squirmed out of mechanical, swirling birthpods, streaming more of them out every second. They were the servants of the Maker-Mind, the scions of the sane madness that had birthed them.

The crust on the planet they had been birthed upon was cracked, the mass hive-factory, or tree, that they had hatched from, extending deep into the earth. They looked like tiny spiderlings hatching from a massive, pregnant mother, swarming all over her as they sought to grow.

But they were not tiny. Standing nigh as tall as a common man, they were the weakest brood the Maker-Mind had ever spawned. They were the smallest, the easiest to kill, and.. the most numerous. Where previous broods had numbered in the thousands, these numbered in the millions.

They were deadly beyond the belief of man, as they could move faster than the eye could blink, slicing and slashing their enemies as their lithe spidery legs aided them in combat. They were weak, however, and a mere explosive could knock them down, or even destroy them.

A million had just been spawned, the greatest ever spawned. Another million spewed out elsewhere, the millions, nigh ten of them, crawling out of the infested, corrupted earth without notion of their importance to the Maker-Mind's plan, swarming like insects, lithe and deadly insects nonetheless, insects with the craving to destroy.

What did they know of the great wars that raged through the galaxy, the milieu of lifeforms that inhabited it, and the constructions of thousands of years, buildings of immense beauty? They knew that, to achieve the Maker-Mind's will, all such would have to fall.

It had taken significant resources, but it was a horde beyond any other ever spawned by the Maker-Mind. There would be forty million in total, an army by any reckoning.

They were legion, and they were prepared to slaughter. They squirmed under one another's weight, and began their life.. a life that would know only hatred, only deceit, and only loathing. It was a life that none would envy, but they would know no other.

It was the beginning of the Maker-Mind's preparations.. although there would be many more to come. The preparations it would make would be sudden, but they would be sufficient. What might it possessed would be arrayed against that of all life, and made into a force that would carve out a mighty empire in the stars, and fling the mightiest from their high perches, bringing fear and destruction to all who surveyed it..

Siyla awoke from her cave, and quickly grabbed her pistol. She flicked on its light, and saw.. her friend Sai dead. Standing over his body.. was a giant silver spider.

"You sons of whores!", Siyla yelled in anger, as she fired her pistol, blue energy charging into the spider that whirled towards her. It fell back, and shuddered, blue sparks running up its lithe legs, and crackling over the ovoid head.

She was one of the last refugees of Yeyio, her planet. The strange metal creatures had fallen from the sky a few months ago, and.. the Yeyan government had sent out contigents of tanks, planes, and even spacecraft to counter them.

Their defeat had been measured in minutes, and so they were forced to live a nomadic existence, using a cache of weaponry left by.. someone, from another age, that defeated the silver monsters, at least for some time.

At first, the rifles they had uncovered fired misty-blue blasts, which disintegrated enemy spiders as soon as they were touched by the unfolding mist, but, after some time, they ran out of such blasts, and had to be recharged, and could only fire.. something unlike the original blasts, which merely stopped the silvery monsters.

She fired two more blasts into the body of the spider, which shuddered again, and again, and then lay dead, blue energy sparking up and down the strange body.

From her position in the cave she was in, she turned around, and looked.. a sea of silver awaited her. "You've got to be fucking kidding me", she whispered, as the swarming spiders started moving towards her. She dropped her pistol in horrified surprise, and then, after a few seconds, picked it up, and screamed. And ran.

She ran along the ledge of the cave she was in, stumbling down the hot surface, unaware of the heat searing her feet. She fired wildly into the distant horde, and.. tripped. She fell, and hit her head on a rock, and knew no more..



A few minutes later, she supposed, she awoke. She hurt. The pistol was still clutched in her hand, and spiders.. the spiders! They were everywhere! They must've ignored her for some reason.. she tried to move. She couldn't. Her eyes flickered open, and she looked at her middle. A spike protruded through her torso, and was slowly slicing through her body, towards her head. She tried to scream, and.. she couldn't. She couldn't feel anything. She just stared in horrified amazement, as the razor-sharp blade sped up, ripping through her last few moments of life...

On a moon, thousands of lightyears away, spherical craft orbit, seemingly dead, and motionless.

Thousands of them sit there, doing absolutely nothing, unmoving, inactive. Tiny, constantly quavering, a sharp contrast to the still craft, fields surround them, flickers of red light flowing around them, keeping them stable.

As they sit there, in orbit around the moon, a crater on the moon flares. And then flares again. Red light shimmers out of it, and a final time, it flares. A vortex of red light cracks the moon open like an egg, the inner part of the moon consumed, the outer shell cast away, to wander the void.

As it does, thousands more tiny, tiny craft swarm out of it, thousand upon thousands. They surround the dead spheres, and begin orbiting them.. red light flares from the vortex, linking with the craft around it, and the formerly dead spheres awaken, the tiny fields surrounding them growing into massive, intimidating shields of pure red light, sharp malevolent energies.

They whirl off into the massive vortex, deftly avoiding a chunk of broken moon as they do so, the red light that surrounds them glowing brighter, and faster, as they approach the middle of the vortex. As they swarm into it, a perfect set of spirals, constantly falling into the deadly red seething glow, like a wound in the fabric of spacetime.

As the last of them spin into the undulating vortex, the vortex ceases to glow, bolts of red lightning flung into the heavens.. it closes slowly, like the wound it is, slowly being healed by the natural order of the universe..

The call has been made. The scions of the Maker-Mind begin to obey its call..