Lore & Short Stories

We found Mars a wasteland and made it paradise

A thousand species of insects and bacteria were formed in our breeding sacks and unleashed upon the red soil. Billions upon billions of tiny workers and engineers. Each did little, but together they outshined the greatest architects of mankind.

The thermite vents rose hundreds of meters into the sky, reaching deep into the frozen sand. Heat from chemical reactions and methane gas burst from the vents, pillars of smoke rising for miles.

As the atmosphere changed, new species were introduced, old ones died out or evolved. The ecosystem grew, specialist biomass being added. Ice melted and the seas of Mars, trapped for eons, was free to crash into ravines and reclaim the surface once more.

We build our civilisation in the new depths. With cities of crystal and membrane. Towers of shell and bone. Vaults that teamed with life.

It took thousands of years to make Mars into our home. But more than anything, we Diluvians know patience.

Of course, success breeds envy. So, other descendants of Earth  sent their own settlers and prospectors to seek the riches of Mars. Earthlings, Jovians, Lunarians, the Iron cult — many conquerors came.

Where our ecosystem was delicate, they crushed it under iron tracks, without care, like children. Our solitude was interpreted as weakness. A mistake on their part.

We are the Diluvians, and we have a mission. A purpose. The prophet of Mars showed us the way. We alon can write in the book of life itself.

DNA is a language. Life is text. Evolution is revelation. We tried to warn the rest of humanity as they traded flesh for steel, their soul for virtual minds. The flesh has a destiny all its own.

The rest of humanity cut the link that anchored them to the biological past. Like a man that cuts off his own head because he thinks the body is weighing him down.

Earth is the Mother Biome. Our life was encoded there. Every piece of earth is part of every human being. The tiniest bacteria and the greatest tree, all part of a single great code.  As we left the gravity well to travel to other planets, we were still tied to the Mother Biome with an invisible umbilical cord. Call it fate or destiny or holy spirit. It trailed behind us.

The very language of our DNA is her’s, the bacteria in our gut is hers. Wisdom built through trial and error, the greatest and purest science. Ancient civilizations called this wholeness “God.” Amen.

But, with a scythe of the iron reaper, humanity cut that cord and floated free into the void. What is worse, we razed earth behind us. They erase themselves from the book of life, thinking that their own languages and their machine codes were complex enough to sustain a soul.

We Diluvians know the horror of such madness and thus it fell to us to preserve and defend. Mars was to become our greatest work, as we made the greatest bioconstruct the solar system had ever seen. The three dragons, the star serpents: Jörmungandr, Leviathan and Apophis.

The size of starships, the serpents were made to grow and shed their starskin many times, until they achieved the size of planets. Each was as complex in their biology as earth’s ecosystem ever was. With the language of mother earth encoded into their cells, the dragons would swim through the great void between worlds and impregnated dead planets with new life.

The serpent’s were gods of life and rebirth. But first they would have to feed to grow. First we feed them our own planet. Watching with pride, we let the serpents consume all the life we had infused Mars with. They drank the seas and combed the sand for every micro nutrient.

Not close to sated, they throw themselves upon the other planets of the system. Earth was the greatest feast, but the others also held teaming billions of would be metahumans. We watched and prayed. Harden our hearts for what was necessary.

The metahumans tried to fight the dragons, but could not. So, they took their vengeance upon Mars itself. Thinking that we could stop the serpents, even should we have wanted to, they threatened to turn every doomsday weapon upon the once again red wastelands of Mars.

Their threats were in vain, but still they took their vengeance. Mars broke under their bombardment and shattered into billions of pieces. Most of us died, but some had prepared. Our newest bioships, known as tombstalkers, grabbed onto the floating pieces of shattered Mars and drifted out of the system, beyond the range of radars and probes. Then, they swam out into the void.

The Serpent’s would be many times faster than our fastest tombstalkers, but their journey would take hundreds of years. Ours would be even longer, so we went to sleep. Hopefully we would wake up in an area of the galaxy with thousands of worlds, seeded with life. We the Diluvains would become their shepherds.

The flood has come, leaving life in its ruinous wake

 

A new chapter in the book of life

 

As above so bellow, as without so within

 

 

The Diluvian Order was founded on Mars in the 3 millennium CE. 

A group of biotechnicians formed around a figure known as the Prophet of Mars. According to his teachings, humanity had abandoned its genetic destiny and chosen the hollow promises of transhumanism. All of life on earth had evolved in tandem, as a single divine dance of millions of ever more complex lifeforms.

Humanity did not stand apart from nature. It’s destiny was forever tied into the entire whole of earth’s biomass. But, transhumanism had gone down a different path. Human bodies remade into automatons of steel or plastic. AIs created through code and algorithms over years of development, rather the millennia of evolution. Everything developed to serve short sighted human goals and desires.

The prophet declared this as abandonment of the divine. A fall from grace. A second exile from paradise. The Diluvians were those that aimed to create a new flood, to drown humanity and start over. Biotechnology was their chosen tool, because cold steel and machines were abhorrent in their eyes. The Diluvians formed a church to lead and rule them, calling it the Ordo Dracul.   

 

Following the teachings of their Prophet, the Diluvians used their craft to construct the greatest bio-machines ever conceived by mankind. Seven beings, shaped like great serpents and designed to grow into titanic size. All the biomass on Mars was given in forming their eggs. To grow into their full size, they would have to feed and all the flesh in the solar system would not be enough to fully sate them.  

The Star serpents awakened in the soil of Mars and rose with an endless hunger in their minds for all organic life. Driven on by the Ordo Dracul, the seven serpents descend upon the unsuspecting empires of the Sol system. Fabled realms like the Lunar cities, the Second earth empire and the Jovian Consortium are overwhelmed by the fury and hunger of the Serpents and the armies protecting them. Billions are devoured as the star serpents feed upon entire civilisations and grow ever bigger and stronger – drinking oceans and devouring earth and rock itself in a wild search for the building blocks needed to grow.

 

As each Star Serpent reaches its maturity they abruptly cease their feeding frenzy and take to the void, going far out into space, driven by an instinct to find new worlds to populate.

But one dragon stays behind to make the Sol system it’s nest and create a new civilisation of humans amongst the ashes of the old ones.

What is left of transhumanity gathers their forces on Terra, in a great conclave that creates an alliance known as Vertex. The most extreme and abominable transhuman strains are marshalled, modified and sent to make effective and devastating war against the Star Serpent and the Ordo Dracul.

The war between the Ordo Dracul and their last dragon, against the Hyperhuman host was the most devastating and complex war ever perpetrated by humanity or its children.

The Dragon could create armies of bio-constructs to defend itself as it terraformed and moulded astral body after astral body to its needs. The Ordo Dracul recruited army after army of fanatical neohumans on Mars to send into battle. It was a war of genocide and hatred that was fanned until a blood madness took hold of the very soul of mankind’s children. Weapons from fever nightmares, doomsday devices of sick and twisted science were deployed upon every battlefield until the Sol system was a dead mass grave of civilisations clogged by the ruins of battle. Yet, it could not end. Both sides were at their zenith of power and technological mastery.

The wreckage of war was converted into new weapons with so little energy lost in the process that victory or defeats was meaningless in the great scheme of the conflict. The war became a way of life, an ecosystem all of its own, with generations living and dying, knowing nothing else. The reasons for the conflict became myth, then religion as the expectation of victory became ethereal. the war had always been and would ever be.

Then, after twelve thousand years of war, news reached the high command of the Vertex that new Dragons were being grown in the sands of Mars. This was enough to warrant a final and desperate assault on Mars itself, the blood lynchpin in the entire war machine of the Ordo Dracul. Such things had been attempted before, but this time there would be no going back. It was all in, or nothing: an Apocalypse.

The cost of the assault was staggering, the first real loss to either side in many thousands of years that could be counted towards victory or defeat. Billions of lives were cast into the fire to just reach the surface with armies and weapons capable of laying siege to the black stone fortress of the Ordo.

Once there, the Vertex enacted a scorched earth tactic that knew no mercy and no thought to the losses on their own side. They poured every bomb and virus onto the surface, cracked the crust and glassed the surface in the hopes of burning the sickness of the Ordo from the very rock of Mars. They were successful, as the Ordo had to flee their ancient temples and mansions to take to the stars in gigantic tombships.

Their command structure broken, the Ordo was scattered and either fled to deep space or set their sights to migrating across the sea of stars to the worlds seeded by the six star serpents.

They swore that they would return one day, knowing that the star serpent would continue its instinctive reforming of the system and thus the unending war would continue. This was just a prelude to the next step of the war, until they could return and reclaim their ancient seats of power, the Ordo Dracul would marshal their forces on distant worlds.

 

The Diluvians took thousands of years to reach their destinations and the galaxy did not sleep in their absence. Worlds was seeded in the wake of the start serpents and entire civilizations grew up and died out, kingdoms rising and falling upon thousands of planets. Alien races were encountered – wars fought, peace made.

The seedworlds grow and changed, some finding each other and forming empires or federations, others remaining in splendid isolation.

In the shallows of earth, the last dragon was still trying to terraform the planets and absorbing transhumanity.

The unending war raged on and the Vertex dominated all of transhumanity. However, offshoots sprouted from the trunk of transhumanity every year, with cults or organizations seeking new life beyond the shallows of Terra.

Like the Diluvians, the Vertex had yet to master FTL travel, so their ships had to slowly travel to other stars. The Vertex’s scientists had almost stopped seeking such a technology, focusing on ever more deadly weapons of war instead. The Exiles – transhumans that sought a life away from the unending war – scattered across the stars, encountering both seedworlds and alien civilizations. To both, the Exiles seemed like demons from the dark void, sent to torment and destroy everything in their wake.

The siege mentality of the unending war did not make the Exiles good neighbors. Amongst the most powerful Exiles recorded from that age, stands the Iron Cult, the Spiral Swarm and the Pantheon.