The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (74 page)

“Greetings Prince Mark, to you and to your fine company.”
First Mauve began. 
“This meeting shall have two purposes; to explain to you and to your people our methods of warfare in the void more effectively than has been done so far, and to begin the co-ordination of our forces for the coming conflict.

“Allow me to introduce First Purple, Triax Goddess of Flight, Third Eldest among us.”

That worthy being faced Mark and tipped forward a bit in mid-air from her position floating more than a meter above the sand.  Mark took her motion for a bow, and bowed to her in return.

“Those in the Habitat Sphere are our finest mortal commanders, strategists, navigators, and weapons specialists.”
First Mauve continued.

“Your gods and ours have finally perfected effective translation procedures to allow mortal Triax and Kellarani to communicate with one another directly; without needing an immortal to translate for them.  It is a great triumph, and the previous meeting between your mortals and ours was a vital part of the process.

“However, that meeting was less than perfectly successful in its primary purpose; the exchange of understanding of mortal methods of warfare between your people and mine.

“Since both parties have subsequently enjoyed ample opportunity to consider the results of that previous meeting and to plan for more effective procedures of communication, we are confident that today’s gathering will be more productive.”

“I agree.” Mark nodded.  “And it seems sensible that we must understand each other’s methods of warfare before can effectively plan to co-ordinate our forces.

“We welcome you to Hilia, we are both glad and grateful to have you here.

“My son Six here will speak for us in the matter of methods of warfare, though any of us might choose to contribute if it seems appropriate.”

“Thank you Father.” Six nodded as he stepped forward and faced First Mauve.

“The first meeting held between our peoples to share methods of warfare exchanged more knowledge than understanding.” he stated with a smile.  “This is because both sides were trying to explain what they do right now, though we both lacked the historical context needed to make that knowledge understandable.

“Therefore, we have prepared a presentation; a very basic history of our societies and races and their development, focusing on the history of methods of warfare on Kellaran.  Its level of detail is such that a well-educated Kellarani could view it and understand it in about three hours.  The truth is that the design and use of the first weapons on Kellaran has affected all that came after, so we’ve included everything from the use of claws and fire in the first dragon war, right up to the methods we used in the recent War of The Founding of The Just Alliance, and what we’ve developed to fight the demons since then.  We’ve tried to show how each development led to the ones that followed.  We’ve included the use of weaponry, tactics, and strategy.

“We ask that you prepare a similar presentation of your own history of warfare and society, starting with your earliest recorded conflicts.

“Once we’ve viewed each other’s presentations, we can outline our present plans for the upcoming war with the demons, then we’ll work on altering those plans to include each other’s forces.

“That is well thought.”
First Mauve stated. 
“Begin the showing of your presentation.  I will compose our presentation, and begin displaying it shortly.”

“Agreed.” Six nodded, and cast a large Revealing of a new design that included numerous subtle psionic effects.

It showed a gray dragon facing off against a brown, snarling and circling, then they darted together and set to with teeth and claws and fire in a sudden explosion of snarling violence.

As this happened, the sound of the battle was joined by a calm, human-seeming male voice; “Of the living intelligent races on Kellaran, the Draconians were the first of us some three hundred and fifty million years ago, and they have always fought each other for dominance, resources, and mates.  Their wars were composed of many fights, one dragon against another in single combat.  During great battles, thousands of these fights would take place simultaneously, usually on one great field of battle and in the air above it.  Yet it was not true warfare, for no dragon was ever out-numbered in combat, no dragon ever had to fight against two or more other dragons at the same time.  Fighters who had no immediately available enemy would wait until the nearest challenge was completed, then challenge the winner to another round of single combat if their enemy was victorious.  After two hundred and forty million years, the first magic attack spells were developed and used in combat.

“Then, about fifty-five million years ago, The People of Morning emerged on Kellaran.  The dragons had just endured one of their worst wars when they realized that the unicorns were sentient.  Despite their depleted population and weakened state, they declared war on The People of Morning, and the first true warfare on Kellaran began…”

The view in the Revealing illustrated all that the voice explained, and it was impossible to tell which parts of the viewing had been recorded, and which had been re-created from memories or historical records.

“I am ready to begin our presentation.”
First Mauve stated. 
“I suggest that I project it further down the beach, and that you Kellarani move there, so that each presentation does not distract from the other.”

“Agreed.” Six nodded again, and they followed First Mauve about a hundred meters down the beach, leaving the rest of The Triax watching the Kellarani presentation.

First Mauve’s display was far more basic that the advanced Revealing that Six had cast, but it conveyed understanding readily enough.  It was somehow obvious that she had not recorded it in any way; she simply told the story and illustrated it with a large round Illusion cast against the relative darkness of the trees at the top of the beach.

The Triax were not a very warlike race.  They were the only intelligent race on their mostly-aquatic world, and for the first two hundred and fifty-three thousand years of their recorded history, they had lived in peace.  During this early golden age they developed a rich and artistic culture that prized knowledge and understanding.  Their first technologies; aquatic farming of plants, domestication of animals, recorded communication, and metallurgy done by chemistry, led to an impressive hydraulics-based industry.  The pumping of water and other liquids within vast networks of metal pipes provided power for machines and fast transportation.  The pumps were originally turned by muscle and animal power, then ocean currents and large vertical flows were captured with huge water-screws.  Liquids under high pressures in pipes became a medium for long-distance communication that was almost instantaneous, and complex pumping and networking schemes led to the use of intricate valving to calculate complex mathematical problems.

At the end of the first Triax golden age their population were many billions, and the oceans of their world were unrecognizable from their natural state.  Their surfaces were covered with domesticated plants, most natural plants and animals were either domesticated or extinct, and the Triax civilization was a dark and gloomy industrial place lit by artificial light in the murky waters beneath the closely-packed plants.

Overpopulation and starvation finally brought war to The Triax, initially consisting of theft of one another’s food plants and sabotaging one another’s hydraulic networks, then open warfare began. They attacked each other with their machines, their domestic animals, projectile weapons powered by compressed gases, blades, and teeth.  The first Triax war devastated their aquatic world, leaving it little more than a wasteland.  Only one in every two hundred and thirty Triax survived that war and the social and environmental collapse that came with it.

After a long recovery, stability returned, along with another period of peace and prosperity marked by strict population controls and the restoration of much of the natural state of their oceans.  The greatest advance of their second golden age had been the discovery and utilization of rare heavy materials called ‘hotrock’ that gave off vast amounts of heat and other dangerous energies when the material was refined from its natural ore and concentrated.  Eventually all of their industry was powered by these amazing but dangerous substances.

However, a series of industrial accidents released large amounts of poisonous hotrock residues into the waters of The Triax’s world.  Many died, and the entire population was sickened for many generations, along with most of the wild and domesticated plants and animals.  Society collapsed, and small bands of survivors often fought one another for the few remaining resources, usually with quite primitive methods.

After another period of slow recovery that lasted for millennia, Triax society rebuilt and reformed.  The use of hotrock was forever banned, and they reverted to the techniques they had used before its introduction; taking energy from currents and flows to power their society.  Eventually they added wind power by building windmills in the shallows.  They invented suits that allowed them to survive out of water, and the land masses of The Triax’s world were finally explored and utilized for the first time.

Only after more than eight hundred thousand years of recorded history did the Triax discover magic.  One of their land explorers discovered it by accident as she was falling from a cliff.  In her panic, she willed herself to fly,  and while she did not truly fly on that occasion, she discovered Movement and used it well enough to slow her fall to a non-injuring speed.

Unlike the Kellarani, The Triax were never religious about magic; their study and use of it were academic and practical from the beginning.  Perhaps because of this, their expertise in magic developed quite quickly.  Within four centuries they had developed all the major spell categories except Translocation, and within a millennium the use of magic had permeated every aspect of Triax life.  After a further six hundred years they had their first magic war, the first of several over the next two and a half millennia, but none of them were globally devastating.

Four thousand years after they developed magic, the first of The Triax to become a god achieved Ascension.  However, they did not consider him a god as the Kellarani used the word.  The Triax word for gods meant merely ‘the Transformed’, and they never established religions or were worshipped.

They did lead Triax society, and they kept the peace for almost thirty-two thousand years.  But when they finally went to war it was a disaster of unprecedented proportions.  There were only fourteen Triax gods at that time, but their power combined with all-out magical and technological warfare among the populace killed almost every mortal Triax in less than nine hours.  Fewer than one in two million survived.  That was the last war that The Triax ever fought among themselves.

Then they had peace for millions of years, though their prosperity was interrupted by two great crises; a nearby star exploded, and it would have sterilized their world had their astronomers not seen the changes in the star that were the explosion’s precursors.  They had the Kellarani equivalent of a year and a half to prepare, and it had taken all the effort of their gods and their people to shield the world well enough to preserve life, and a quarter of them were still killed.  Millions of years later volcanoes began appearing on their world with increasing frequency, and they suffered a period of incredible volcanic activity and earthquakes that lasted for thousands of years.  At the worst of it there were ranges of closely-packed volcanoes as big as continents spewing rock and poison and ash into the air and waters.  At the end, the last refuges of tenuous life on the world were on the warm borderlines between the inferno of the volcanoes and the dark and frozen wasteland that was the rest of the planet. They fought it for centuries, gods and mortals working constantly to clear the air and waters so that sunlight could still reach the life-zones.  Then they finally admitted defeat, and gathered their remaining populations into sealed, self-sustaining habitats excavated beneath the center of the hardest and thickest continental bedrock.

Millennia passed, and eventually their world stabilized.  They assisted their world’s natural recovery processes, and slowly their own civilization recovered.  But the techniques they’d developed for living beneath the rock were to prove useful again eons later.

This part of First Mauve’s presentation had taken just more than an hour, and much of that had been devoted to weaponry and military techniques.

Then she showed the attack of a horde of demons that descended on their world from the skies; some by flight, some by Translocation.  They had come to the world of the Triax in a gigantic vessel they had made from a metallic asteroid, and hidden it from detection until their attack was well underway.

The Triax fought and lost, then hid themselves away from the demons in habitats deep beneath the rock under the deepest oceans.  They remained hidden for generations, fearful to emerge, and when they did return to the waters and the surface they found that all life had been exterminated and consumed by the long-departed demons.

Some of them wanted to rebuild their civilization yet again, despite the colossal effort it would require, but after centuries of debate they chose another plan.

They recognized that if they remade their world and filled it with life again, eventually the demons would return to consume it all once more.  So they constructed the first of their great spherical void-vessels and moved their entire remaining population into it, with all of their artifacts.  After three more centuries of traveling around the planets that circled their sun, preparing and training intensively, they set out into the void to hunt the demons, beginning with the horde that had destroyed their world.

That demon horde was not the first they found, it was the third.

After centuries of traveling and searching, they were lucky in the first horde they found.  Its vessel was smaller, the demons within less numerous, and it was caught  deep in the void near the end of a long journey between stars that had weakened them.  After a short but incredibly intense battle it was utterly destroyed by The Triax, who suffered relatively minimal losses and damages.  The anniversary of that victory was still celebrated annually as the most important event in the Triax calendar.