The War (Apocryphal Texts)

Addenda for a 50-Year History

[wartime-stories]

Zo la Domini

They birthed chaos, but sought order, pushing out giant hostile space-time events into the universe for the sake of strategy. They were fearless. Or just stupid. Either or. But in the end, they won. Or, at least, they obliterated the Houses, the Celestis, the Remote, the Faction. The entire Spiral Politic is now a single indeterminate event, each second concurrent with the destruction of the Homeworld and the end of the war. No information gets in or out. Why else would there only be fifty years of War-history?

[wartime-stories]

Zero Time

So many possible methods of fighting. The military was like its own economy, spiraling out of control and heading towards incomprehensibility. Every battle was a miniature arms race, every development bringing about a counterattack. But still they move onwards. How long until everyone gets too faitgued to go on? Never, because there are workarounds even for that. They'll continue until every picosecond of established, anchored time has been used up, burned as fuel for a giant mindless machine that tears the universe to shreds.

[wartime-stories]

Yssgaroth

Blame it for everything. It doesn't mind. Whether it even can is debatable, just like whether or not it is an "it" in the first place. But let's stick with the singular for now. Of course, there's the problem of how many things like it are really out there. How many not-universes are spinning out in the void? In those other universes full of other Houses, how many fought their own Yssgaroths? And, worse, how many lost? As far as horror goes, what can you really add to that?

[wartime-stories]

Younger World Story

Is it ready? I think so. So much is dead, but maybe a few sparks can restart everything. I know that I'm not the only one working on this front, but everyone else seems to have gone silent. I hope they still think of the wayward Faction and its escapades through the universe, sometimes. I can't keep it going forever. So I'll stop it now, run down the stories and let it fade into the Stacks, as it's meant to. This is an excursion, and a learning experience, but now I've grown tired, and I must rest. Farewell, Faction. May your bones be sharp and your shadows sharper.

[wartime-stories]

"You" Diversions

YOU. ASK YOURSELF: WHY ARE YOU READING THIS? DO YOU CARE ABOUT THE WAR? DO YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR OWN POWER? DO YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR OWN FREEDOM? CAN YOU IMAGINE THE ATROCITIES THEY'VE COMMITED? CAN YOU EVER STAND APART FROM THIS? DON'T JUST FIGHT FOR YOUR FUTURE. FIGHT FOR THE UNIVERSE'S. HELP DECIDE THE OUTCOME OF THIS WAR. ONLY YOU HAVE THE POWER TO.

[wartime-stories]

Yeh

She was one of the few people- actual people- to traverse time and space. Just a companion to a ship, not a pilot. It sure fooled some people, though. And god, they had fun. Well, she did, at least. She could've sworn that Compassion did, too, but really there was no way to tell. Maybe "fun" just wasn't a concept that jived with her. But who else can have seen so much of the universe? An ordinary person touched the stars and broke worlds into dust. She saw down the timestreams, watched the Leviathins swimming outside of everything, and personally sat on the Homeworld. The Spiral Politic is begging to be understood and explored, and she's one of the only people to see so much and live to tell the tale. She lived the life, and in death she felt content.

[wartime-stories]

Xianthellipse

Science answers all questions and makes all the best weapons. Ritual sacrifice, bloodshed, and attempts at magic are all cute, and they might be good for dazzling the lesser species, but a projectile fired from a firearm and penetrating the brain will put an end to such nonsense. Cold, hard steel is only one flavor, of course, and it's not even the best one. But it's a fine example of the simplicity of everything. Half of the problems the Houses face are due to their worldviews, not actual tactical problems, and like everything else it's time those were updated. And if they won't come quietly out of the mud and into the new era of victory, then they'll just have to be dragged.

[wartime-stories]

Xenoprediction

It's important to limit your opponent in whatever ways you can. It's just how you play the game. And, in the end, this is all a game, played on a board that stretches beyond the eyes of gods with a level of complexity that can't be properly described. People you met today have died in the crossfire, and people you'll never remember have been recruited and lived out long lives serving one of the players. Every one of them is a piece, and every one of them is being held down and moved where they need to go. If one piece of these clockwork masterplans falls apart, so does the whole. The only important detail is figuring out how you must act to bring these schemes crashing to a halt. One set of possible actions can do it, and maybe you can be the person who figures them out. Good luck with that.

[wartime-stories]

Wovoka

What else could it have been but a vision? Something big and moving, sweeping through the landscapes? Calling it entertainment is fine, too, but it's predictive in its own way, a vision of a future that might be, or that could have been. We track our way through the ruins of time and progress, watching them constantly, and letting them influence us. We act for the higher powers that cannot act for themselves, and explore territories that don't exist. We do the impossible, and the fact that we do it in our minds means nothing next to the fact that we do it at all. This is the truth: the messiahs did not die. They didn't hibernate, sleep, nap, or go through rebirth. We don't recognize them any more, though, and that is because we are all messiahs now.

[wartime-stories]

Worldofme

It's just crude of them to abuse their lives like that, to make so many incarnations of themselves, to age in reverse instead of dying. It's just showing off. Even dying has to look good for some people. In a sense, it's the only action that really should look good, because it's always the most important. Yes, always. Every one of these pocket universes will break. Every Lord and Lady will die. It's just a product of probability. Eternity prevails in the end. The House always wins, until it loses.

[wartime-stories]

Women

There is a certain power that comes from femininity, but not one you're likely to notice. It's a different view, just subtly, but enough to be weaponized. There is only so much that you can do against a force that you don't understand. Of course, this isn't to say that the key to the Great Houses' defeat will be a childish understanding of gender; that's only a contributing factor. As it happens, there are a great deal of ways to redefine who you are and what you represent. These weapons are personal, and if the regular people like you ever understood just how important they were, you could become War powers in and of yourselves.

However, you are dictated to by laws of good taste, gender definitions, and the set of preexisting laws which determine practically everything that you do. The only way to save yourselves is to literally break conventions, and that's just not something you're ready for.

[wartime-stories]

Witch-Blood

Let's make a girl out of destiny and bind her together with magic. Or, rather, taint her soul with Houseworld. it will make her infamous, feared, and worst of all, significant. The end of the world will come, and she'll stay standing. The rules will be bent, snapped, broken and reshaped, but she'll stay solid, a heavy stone in the river of time. And she will be beautiful, and deadly. She'll lose her past, and move onwards to a horizon that she'll only recognize when she reaches it. In the meantime, she'll face battles and intrigue in appropriate intervals, and whether her odyssey is successful will never be revealed. Poor thing.

[wartime-stories]

Winter Palace

It's freezing in here, and full of dead hope. There are televisions, radios, laboraties, all set up in little crevices and side-rooms. Small machines clean and run across the floor, automata caught in their own movements. The glorious dawn is passed. Once this was a place for royalty. Now it's tended to, kept fresh, and waiting patiently for new occupants. They'll come, after a few relative millenia. They'll have to overcome the loa and the more material defenses, but that's just a test, right? Only the worthy will make it through the obstacle course. What they do with the buildings is their prerogative, but they'll be overthrown in their own right. Every foundation in this place must be impermanent.

[wartime-stories]

Westminster

Architecture bursts into existence, brought forth by perceptions and meanings. It's a result of the people who first entered it, a large number of subtle emphases which you could only notice if you created a second Empire and saw the differences. Not all of the Empire even necessarily matches to the real London. Good replicas are difficult by necessity, and also terribly boring. Personalized time-empires are going to be all the rage, towards the end of human history. It's just another way of extending your self to your surroundings and picking through them for insights. And because of it, it's a wonderful way to kill an afternoon.

[wartime-stories]

Weaponstores

Ah, the shining armory. Racks of glorious black-shelled firearms, and then the even better toys. Retrocolliders, parallel cannons, orthogonal lances, a regen-gun! Any one of these weapons could win a lesser war, best an army, in a few minutes. Plenty of these things are useless, or even obsolete. They're starting to wind up in the hands, paws, talons and wings of lesser species. Even in worlds that will never hear of humanity and will pass the span of the universe never hearing of the War find themselves holding the most terrible weaponry. They look up to the skies with ambition and stars in their eyes.

[wartime-stories]

Waves of the House Military

The War rapidly appears to be stabilizing. Every battle is becoming a stalemate, every wave just pushed out of breeding machines for the sake of just having soldiers. Biomass is thrown into the War and devoured. There are plenty of these Waves which now never have existed. The cultist-soldiers, the randomizing-hierarchies, the regen-collectives, enemy-doubles, and the nevernesses are just a fraction of the failed might've-beens. Of course, the enemy of the Greats has Waves of their own, pockmarked by disaster and interference. But such things are exceedingly difficult to record.

[wartime-stories]

War Predictions: The Rivera Manuscript

It's possible that this was all a forgery. It's not like we can tell if it was deciphered or even written prior to the War. Plenty of people want to see the event, or era, of the War in Heaven as sacred. They attach meaning to everything associated with it, to the point of morbid obsession. And that's just asking for marketing. Sure, there are methods of dating the documents to before the War-era, but those things can be fooled. There are ways around every one of them, and so you can't trust things like this. Frankly, they're a lot more common than you'd think, especially in hindsight. But honestly, who really cares about whether or not it was predicted? It happened, and for some pockets of the universe, it's still happening. But it's time to let go and move on.