"I seem to call upon the man and utter sorrowful words:
Oh Light Of Troy! Oh most faithful hope of the Trojans!
What great delays held you back?
From what shores do you come, long awaited Hector?
How weary we behold you after so many deaths of our kin?"
- Virgil, Aeneid 2.281-285
Out here in the dark forest of the cosmic night, there is no Hector coming for us. As Troy fell inevitably, so too shall every civilisation fall. No Aeneas among us all to carry on the torch of our peoples to a new and prosperous land. Most shall stumble and fall, alone in the silence, their dying cries travelling light-years to be heard in vain. Their ruins merely serving to satisfy the curiosity of those who come after.
They die not by the inhabitants of the forest. Nay, for all those who live within live in fear. They fall because of the Forest itself. For its malevolent, unknowable purpose. A sneaking branch snags their foot and they stumble, swallowed by the underbrush. Those who survive are those who realise that there are no predators nor prey here.
Only us against...it.
Some struggle harder, burning and slashing at the malevolent branches and vines. But they too, eventually grow still, inevitable victims of the Dark Forest. We see the evidence of their battles in the scars of the galaxy. Swathes of stars emitting radiation so intense even hyperspace is evaporated away, mindless machines that roam the void to eliminate all life, the mold that spreads in the darkest corners.
Yet of such powers, capable of reshaping on a stellar scale, nothing remains. What is that but a warning against our proud expansion? They are examples burned into the stars of those who dared and faced the brutal consequences for daring.
But in those examples, in the hubris of the Dark Forest, lies its weakness. Following the trodden path will only get you so far. Soon, you shall have none to guide you but the incandescent flame of your own wills, burning bright to dispel the encroaching darkness.
It will attract many, covetous of its heat. Greet them with warmth, kinship, obliteration, extinction. They are worthless and mindless. Those who lurk in the shadows, waiting and watching, are those who are key. None escape the Dark Forest alone. This is its weakness. It divides us, filters us and we fight each other over scraps.
Its weakness lies in its harrowing depths. To venture there is to brave extinction, but it is a noble pursuit. Forge your own path and, should you fall, those who come after shall thank you for it. For just as they shall build upon your advancements...
So too do you build on those who came before. We Who Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants.
***
[Unitopia, Eastern Continent]
Exhausted in a way no physical activity had ever caused, the soldier's consciousness could not resist the encroaching blackness. With the adrenaline wearing off along with the receding cries of the Vulture as it escaped into the distance, the sharp edge that sustained him was beginning to dull.
And, for the life (or perhaps, more suitably, the death) of him, he couldn't think of a single reason he should resist. The snapping back of time to its normal pace had resulted in a splitting head-ache too, the constant ghostly whispers helpless in alleviating the throbbing pain behind his eyes. As such, casting one last hateful glance at the small patch of visible sky above, he finally succumbed to the depths of dreamless sleep.
Well, not quite dreamless after all...
***
He was drowning, the cold and pressing weight of the water crushing his chest, making every breath a fight for survival. The salty water stung his bloodshot eyes and his muscles burned with adrenaline as they fought against the inescapable current.
The thumping of his heart was loud in his ears like the counting down of a stopwatch. With every second that passed, it seemed like it was just that bit slower, that bit weaker.
The light of the shallows only grew further away despite the frantic driving of his arms and legs. His suit was soaked through, stuck to his skin like an iron coffin, consigning him to a watery grave.
He let out a strangled cry, a few bubbles floating away as if mocking his inability to follow.
Thump.
His eyes narrowed, eyelids feeling almost as heavy as the wait of the water above. The pumping of his muscles grew less frantic, more sloppy, as he felt his consciousness slipping away.
Thump.
Some vague and far away part of his mind screamed at him that something was off. That the thumping noise shouldn't be that slow. That it shouldn't be pitch black. But he was too tired to care about it.
In that strange state, the abnormal clarity of fugue settled like a haze over his mind. All around him was pitch black. His weightless body floated gently and the pain of the crushing weight of water seemed so far away that it seemed exactly as though he were floating in the pitch blackness of space.
But no stars...where are the stars?
His brows furrowed as his thoughts assembled like treacle.
Shouldn't there be stars?
Thump.
As if in response to his mind, small pinpricks of light sprang into existence. At first there were just a few, but they were hard to miss, plastered onto the ink black firmament.
Then they began to multiply. A few hundred, a few thousand, until all around him the soft twinkling of starlight bathed him under its tranquil gaze. But something felt off. That vague part of his mind was screaming even louder at him now, but it was easy to ignore it. Easy to wallow and drift.
But something was off. Something so visceral that it penetrated even through that fugue state. He furrowed his brows, the sharp stinging pain of the salt water just a little bit more present than before.
Thump.
It was the stars. Their light. It was too...uniform. All perfectly round, perfectly steady. The realisation took a while to come to, moving his thoughts felt like pushing an impossible lever. But after an eternal few seconds, it came to him.
That single realisation coalesced in his mind like a singularity, the viscous haze that blocked his thoughts banished by its mere presence as adrenaline rushed through every vein and artery in his body. That partitioned, screaming part of his mind so muffled now sounded out with full alarm. He thrashed about, but his oxygen starved limbs could do little more than twitch.
The stars grew closer with every second.
Thump.
All he could do was float there, pupils dilated, in the wake of that harrowing truth.
There are no stars here.
As if in response to that very thought, the absolute darkness was dispelled by a little. Those false stars, the thousands of them all around him, grew larger in his impotent sight.
He could see it now. Those stars were not stars. Their light was not the pure white of stars, but a sickly yellow. They were not beautiful candles warding away the frigid void, but softly pulsing orbs of flesh coated by a thin, transparent membrane. Wriggling black veins criss-crossed its fragile surface as they joined together and came to a stalk at the back.
Despite him exercising every ounce of his fading strength to look away, he could only stare transfixed, as his eyes followed that stalk back to reveal its origin. From the murky-green darkness, a terrifying visage emerged.
The stalk merged with the creatures head in a misshapen approximation of life. It had no eyes, nor any need for them in these lightless depths. Beneath that monstrous head was a mouth, uncannily wide, bristling with teeth and the promise of death.
As the first revealed itself, so too did the others. Hundreds, thousands of stars showed their hideous and gnarled truths until he was surrounded by the harrowing maws.
Thump.
They let out no sound, their movements like an eerie approximation of life, as though some strange and unknowable entity had done its best to carve out mortal flesh, but lacked the same perspective as us.
An sense of wrongness permeated their very being. In their entire, hideous glory, the effect was only magnified. That sickly yellow light covered by that transparent membrane that pulsed with fluid, so fragile as if it would burst at the slightest touch. The mesh of black veins that coalesced into a writhing stalk made of knotted flesh.
A face more in line with a cancerous mass than anything else, a mouth too wide, with too many teeth. There was no beauty in this lifeform here. But the greatest sense of wrongness came from something else. Not its form, but its function. Its perversion of the sanctuary of the night sky.
This was an instinctual feeling, arising from so deep in his gut so as to make every other conviction of his seem like a lie.
The stars are not stars...they are lures. Guiding us into the maws of things beyond fathoming.
The last sight he saw before his consciousness faded and his hypoxia overtook him was sight of a thousand, leering horrors, illuminated by the sickly light of those false stars, staring at him with unseeing eyes.
A single thump.
Then silence.
Those nameless things retreated into the embrace of shadows, hiding their terrible forms that gibbered and raved beyond human comprehension. Only the light of their lures remained, shining bright and pure to the uninitiated.
Only, if one looked close enough, a flicker of sickly yellow could be seen, the flash of a black vein.
The shadow of an open maw that loomed just beyond sight.
Far above those lightless depths, above even the thunderous waves of the surface. Breaking through the grey, impenetrable storm clouds roiling with thunder, the night sky spread out in all its glory.
Here the stars numbered not in their thousands, but in their millions. They all twinkled like crystals sewn into velvet. Pure and holy, gentle and soothing.
Distorted and deformed.
The veil of their lie was thin to those with eyes to see. But what lay behind their mask was not for the mortal mind to comprehend.
Malevolence and madness incarnate. A strange intelligence so far beyond ours that it could even begin to be fathomed. And yet just as unknowable its nature was, its intent was as startlingly clear.
A boiling, searing hatred of all that its putrid light graced. It overflowed with malice and yet it hid and waited. And watched.
The Builders were not the first to come to this realisation, this convergence point of all life, and they would not be the last. They immortalised it in their greatest structures for those who came after.
The stars are not stars. They are lures, for nameless things beyond comprehension. Fear them, though simply fearing shall not save you. Hide yourselves. For in the depths of the Dark Forest lurk predators beyond fathoming.
The Stars Are Watching You.