Chapter Text
1.i Apocrypha
Direction is meaningless. This holds true on all levels. Direction is an artifice of sophontic thought; it bears no truth beyond the subjective assigned by beings who can grasp it. A migratory whisper-hornet does not travel south to overwinter in warmer climes: it follows instinctual drive that impels its simple mind to be there and not here. It does not know that it vacates the north, it does not understand the easterly winds that buoy it, it does not ponder on the meaning of why the sun rises from thence and not whence.
For all this, planet-bound directions do align with measurable phenomena. A rotating core manifests a magnetic field, which is polar - though the assignment of poles is, of course, arbitrary. Coriolis smears weather patterns into bands that rotate directionally and spread warmth and moisture up and down. That up might mean 'north' and down mean 'south' and thus aligns with negative and positive charged poles of magnetic force is not a mistake, but it is not designed. It is a recognition of natural patterns and a subjugation by description.
Beings are excellent at recognizing patterns. It is a universal truth.
In simplistic theory, all life is a competition of fitness. The most fit species survive, the least fit die. This is a simplification. It is not untrue, but it is not true either. Fitness is as nebulous as direction.
What causes a species to succeed is not strength of sinew, keenness of claw or sharpness of eye. It is matching patterns. A creature that can link consumption of unprocessed sucrose to fat reserves and eased caloric requirements is a creature that will search for more and more sources of this benefit and is a creature that will outlast those that cannot capitalize. Similarly, a creature that shies with wariness from dark undergrowth, uncertain if carnodon lurks within, is a creature that sensibly matches patterns of known danger to unknown potentials.
Say instead, that evolution is an engine driven by patterns, which lead to success, which lead to fitness, which leads to survival. Thinking beings, considered at the 'apex' of such concerns - and betraying their inherent bias - can be considered, then, masters of patterns.
Thus, directions are suited to factors and used to mark and chart the world surrounding. North and south, east and west, left and right. In primordial times, these were simplified, constrained by the boundary of a world.
Beyond the clouds of a world, directions become more abstract.
All space is empty, and all space is occupied. A cubic meter of vacuum between star systems might contain a single hydrogen atom, but to a square lightyear, a star is much the same.
A moon orbits a world. A world orbits a star. That star moves amongst its neighbors, perhaps orbiting a much greater mass-density region like a stellar nursery. That stellar nursery swings through the rippling gravity densities of a galaxy. That galaxy moves within the matrix of a local neighborhood, which exists within a cluster, in a supercluster, in the tangled web-like expanse of the universe.
Which way is up? Which is down? When all directions are 'up' and all are 'down', where can a being cast adrift from clarity of solid ground and heavens above mark themselves to, where do they cast to for a rudder in a vast, empty universe?
Patterns.
Solar systems assemble in local space. Almost all bodies will be within forgivable deviations that can be rounded off into a nice, easy to visualize plane. Thus do we return to the prairies and savannah of old. A star sits in the middle, worlds roll about it in predictable orbits. There. Assemble it on a table. It's close enough.
It makes sense to a being. Up is now away from this plane, down in opposite vector. And to define which? A return to those cardinals, those ancient winds. North, south. Positive and negative. North defines up, south defines down. To plunge away from a world or rise above it. Any other motion is simply away.
None of this is true. All of it is correct.
Moving beyond a single star, the abstraction only compounds.
What makes part of a galaxy, which is filled with innumerable worlds at all possible angles, wherein north becomes all points on the compass, considered to be 'up' or 'down', to be 'north' or 'south' or 'east'.
Beings enjoy simplicity. Beings match patterns. A galaxy has a disc, a flatness that is visible. Emptiness above and below is instinctual - that is away. That is up and down.
For what is up and down, in fact, but measures of the unnatural? What are they but vectors toward challenge, toward emptiness, away from the known and into the unknown?
Most sapients in known galaxies arise from terrestrial roots. Before technology shattered the chains of natural order, beings were born, lived, and died, upon flat planes. Oh, there was variation: mountains and valleys, seas and oceans, but for hundreds of thousands, millions of years, beings crouched beneath trees and peered out and across. They walked, left and right. Forward and back.
Meaning suffused these motions. To move forward was to progress. It was to be active, proactive, to move into the possible unknown. Further into a world that was, fundamentally, knowable. To move back was to retreat. To remain in the comfortable. To linger without progress, or erase it.
Through locomotor limbs, through rafts and canoes and catamarans, through bonded mounts and wheeled carts, beings moved forward, forward and forward until all the world was surveyed. Until no more monsters lingered beyond hills and no more dragons infested corners of the maps.
Yet up and down remained unattainable. To move down was to expend incredible effort for so very little gain. To go down was to excavate or to find seams, perilous, treacherous seams, which led into underworlds of abject darkness. To go up was to defy the natural order. All things came down. Even those with wings must alight. To ascend was the opposite of descent: nigh unto impossibility.
What of those children of the seas and skies? Those who swim and those who fly! Outliers; outliers that prove this rule. No bird may soar forever. All must return to roost. All find heights where wind no longer catches, when air becomes thin, and that forever up tears away from mortal tenacity. So too in the watery world, where down becomes certain death and up is suffocation at worst and impotence at best.
Even those who are blessed with greater motion are condemned and trapped within this narrow band of life.
Is it any wonder that those two directions became invested with ever-growing weight?
Patterns. It is always patterns. A being dies - they fall. Down. Down is death, down is the cessation of motion, down is the direction of the dying. Down is mortality. Down is the underworld and the hells and shadowlands of species across known space are without count.
Up becomes freedom. Up is impossible, up is the opposite of death, up is where, perhaps, a truly unfettered creature might find their home. It is heaven, eternity, life forever, the realm of angels and devas and wonders unimaginable. For up is toward the sun, toward light, away from death and darkness and the silence of stone. Patterns. It is always patterns. It is always subjective. It is never wrong - and it is never right.
Therefore it can be said, by any measure, that as the defenders of the Core rallied their starships and brought forth their galleons, their barques, their battleships, that the encroachment of the Yuuzhan Vong slunk into the assemblage of worlds from beneath. That from below the hordes churned and revealed themselves from the outer darkness, peeling away from the blackness of the space-beyond, stalking into the light of Coruscant's star.
It would not be wrong that by ancient measure the Yuuzhan Vong entered as devils, creeping up from the hells to nip at the daylight lands of the living.
In all the ways that matter, this is both true and untrue.
In all things, there are patterns.
These patterns unravel thusly:
"Did you know? In some cycles, Yun-Shuno ages in reverse. She was birthed at the end of time, the last fading breath of Yun-Yuuzhan caught with the final glint of light of dying stars, and the Pardoner stepped out clad in veil and with tears upon her cheeks. For she had seen the end and the death of the Children of Yun-Yuuzhan, who were her brother-sons and daughter-sisters. Before her eyes, the wheels of galaxies shrunk back together. Life bloomed again in the quiet spaces, and she joyfully welcomes each of us upon our deathbed and grieves us at our birth.
It was said that because of the Pardoner's steps through time, she is the only of the Yun'o worth of judging us. Worthier even than Yun'Yuuzhan - and the shiver of heresy is well earned - for it was the Celestial Father who set her upon her lonely path for our salvation. She pardons those pleasing, because she has seen already their redemption and joyfully celebrated their honor reclaimed. She weeps, and her tears are our blessing, her remembrance of our greater years and glories to come and the bitter taste of the future of our wicked past she must endure.
These are unpopular stories. Priests of Yun-Shuno will deny them and decry you. They will tell you the Pardoner was made from the flesh of Yun-Yuuzhan the same as all others of the Yun'o, at the Time before Time, before the Chosen people. They will tell you she knows the truth of your soul, and that is why she carries the scales, but I am not convinced. There is a beauty in this bitter maiden's life, to pass back-ward through the glories of her people and her Divine family. What better forgiveness can be found than from one who has seen your repentance and your sincerity, in the acts that you will one day do? And what greater sincerity can there be, but for the Pardoner to grant us her blessing, knowing all-well that she will need to bear our wickedness thenceforth, with only the fading memory and faith that what had been will be again and that her sacred love was worth it?
I know many tales I should not - for if I am to twist them properly and spin the most convincing lies, then I must study the waggling tongues of other Priests and other Sects. And what more delicious ways should I deceive, than with a truth abandoned by those who had first promulgated it?"
-Deception Sect Priest Harrar, to Supreme Commander Malik Carr
Would you die for duty?
The corridors are echoing dark. Statues slide past like rows of tired soldiers. Faceless, eroded, mere lumps of stone on chip-worn plinths. Broken fingers scatter in the dust underfoot. Carven weapons are broken and scattered. His stride catches the pitted marble flat of some ancient halberd. The air is stale, sour and old, old as catacombs, old as civilization, older than writing. It is thick, dense, not cold but not warm, a presence that is jealous of his passage. Skull-faced emblems leer from alcove and bulkhead frame. Bundles of wires, tangled, spidery, vine-like and moldered, dangle limp. Clusters of serpents, ripped from the tree, bereft of their tempting fruit.
Ash paints silhouettes, shapes of men, of greater-than-men. Shapes entwined with other forms, other bodies, bodies without limbs and with too many, bodies that change even in their atomic shadow blasted across the grey travertine walls of the corridors. The ash is an unceasing mural, the last moments, final moments, seared by light and fury and the last raging gasp - the dying of the light.
He walks the corridor and ponders on the thought. His limbs are leaden, dragging him down. He has unlimbered all his burdens, until bare of bolt and blade and arms and armor he trudges, chin sunken to rest against his chest.
Would you die for honour?
All markings are etched away. No symbol nor sigil graces these halls. When fogged-crystal (smeared by oil-hand prints that no being left, pressed by hand again and again and again, desperate to enter, desperate to leave, to clutch at the universe beyond/within/without) draws his attention, he sees beyond, he sees lumped castles and tumbled keeps, he sees broken spires and collapsed buttress. A city, a nation, a world, hefted into the void, all of ceramite and stone and so many symbols, withered down to ruin under the last dying light of a dim brown orb. There are no other stars in the ink-black sky. The scale shifts toward infrared. There is nothing left to see.
Would you die for glory?
All his burdens are cast away, and still his shoulders slump. A spitting span of light dangles from one fist - a part of him as much as a hand, or foot, or eye. He cannot place it down, for when he took it up, bonded it became, twinned it insisted, forever it demanded. It has no color, for all color has washed from the spectrum. The laws have weathered away too, worn and ground to dust, until the polished slates no longer tell the wavelength, until gravity is but a sigh, until entropy itself is but a whisper.
It is light without color, it is life without living, and he bears it, he bears it, and it lights these lost, ash-choked halls.
Just a little farther. Just a little longer.
There is a woman, made of flesh, of flesh and bone. She hangs from cruel thorns, which pierce her wrists, her ankles, which split from nail and knuckle, which hang her, bind her, crucify her. Pendulous breasts rest on gravid stomach, wobbling betwixt exaggerated hips. A fertility idol, rendered in real. Rattling breaths wheeze. Her chest stutters. Her head rises, drawn by creaking hawsers of tendon.
Her forehead is flattened, her skull elongated. Color once filled the ink which encrusts every inch of skin, but color exists no longer. Tattoos burn in deep, murmuring radio. Her eyes are craters, weeping sockets filled with shards of silica glass, and about her neck is hammered a collar of thorn and fang. Long, sharp bones pierce the hollow of her chin, pin tongue to soft palette.
A crown, a crown of thorns and horn and bone, a crown hammered into collar.
Would you die for life?
He looks at the colorless light in his right hand, flickering and spitting, hissing cool and sharp and harsh. Hard angles of shadow are cast, his shape made monstrous, the shadow on the wall, the mystery of the cave. He sees the light he carries, he sees the shell he wears, the armor, which holds him, hugs him, claims him, whispers and speaks, knows him, loves him, saves him, is him, and it asks:
Would you die for life?
With fistful of shadows and dripping cold white light, Aeonid Thiel pierces the smooth-shell of his chest and wakens.
"Macragge's Honour, Macragge's Honour - do not translate, repeat, do not translate-"
-Final broadcast from High Yard Plenary Complex, Navigatory Spire. Sent via short-wave, ancient radio transmission
"Ushkul thu! Ushkul thu!"
A thousand throats chant the same three syllables, a triad of intent barked in voices hoarse and high, old and young. Accented and flavored by a thousand worlds and more, by tribal divergence and cultured education; made all equal in rapturous wonder. The star above is blue-white and it is furious, it lashes with plasmic arcs across significant spans of interplanetary space. It throbs, like a swollen eye in a socket, it aches like the hollow of a tooth, it sears like high disdain.
"Ushkul thu! Ushkul thu!"
The syllables are not always the same. Languages diverge, they split and vary, and it is the meaning that matters. The syllables are different, the meaning is always the same. Some might claim incorrect translations, which prove their invalidity by the dissonance of their formation. 'Offering sun' is common, and this approaches accuracy but falls short. 'Tribute star' is nearest. 'Sacrifice star' is further from the truth. Uskhul thu is chanted, along with Pardom bant and Gebben skal. Two syllables, a third. Two syllables, a third. This is not a mistake, because there are no mistakes in the languages of ruin.
Better translation is 'Giving star', because what is a sacrifice but a giving away of what is cherished? And what is a sacrifice, but an expectation of reward?
Veridia will be the reward, the storm that writhes within its material bounds the great gift. Veridia, the Giving Star, the Ushkul Thu and Pardom Bant and Gebben Skal, the white-blue beacon of glorious revenge and euphoric revelation.
All will see it, all will heed it, all will-
-Visions of the Ushmetar Kaul
"The Valley of the Jedi is not the only site of its kind, but might be said to be the most potent. I have spent long in meditation on the meaning of these places that sing - or scream - in the Force. My feelings tell me that these echoes live only in the hearts and minds of the beings that walk the petrified earth or trod the thick mud amidst wafting mists. They tell me that the Force is too great to be scarred by the actions of a single being, no matter how evil - or good - they might have been. That is not the Force that I know, that I have always felt singing within me. There is death, yet there is the Force. There is emotion, yet there is peace. How then can the Force be struck to sing only one tune in these places, to reverberate across millenia, even after the Sith or Jedi that pulled on its chords are long since dust?
I do not have the answer. I will meditate further, and I will seek more places that the Force grows close and wraps like a mantle. I will meditate there, beneath the boughs of old trees and in the winds of old meadows, and I do not think I will ever have the answer. But I will look, because it is in the search for truth that the Force is best served, I think."
-Recovered letter from Master Cynuol, approximately 884 BrS
They brought the finest gifts, when in hooting train they arrived from the stars on flickering wings and huffing bladders, when they walked inked in wondrous colours through our fair garden - those Yuuzha'nn Vong, celebrants of the high skies.
-The Oldest Memories
"It is necessary under some circumstances, even – in extremis – actions of compliance, to methodically destroy an opponent's infrastructure along with the opponent himself. Sometimes an emphatic military victory is not enough: sometimes the very earth must be salted, as the ancient texts put it. The principal arguments for this kind of action may be psychological (against a defiant people or species) or a matter of security (in that you are purifying a region of something too dangerous to exist). Neither of these arguments is especially comforting to a pragmatic commander. War is about accomplishment as well as victory; it should not be about supreme destruction. This kind of total war, this process of razing, is most commonly seen with shock or hyper-aggressive forces. The warriors of Angron, my brother primarch of the XII Legion, refer to it as Totality, and even they employ it rarely to its full extent. From my brother Russ, and the Wurgen war-cant of the Vlka Fenryka we borrow the term Skira Vordrotta, which may most usefully be rendered as System Kill."
-Notes toward Martial Codification, Part 4.1.ix
"...following the Battle of the Taldik Suggaja, estimates on the battle-readiness of First Battlegroup provide optimistic outlooks on the total strength of First Fleet. So far, First Fleet has remained generally uncommitted to the war in whole, leaving available, sortiable fleet assets at roughly eighty-three percent. Guardian and Lusankya remain fully battle-ready and well stocked, and are noted as critical morale assets [here].
Losses taken during the Battle of Fondor and related actions have attrited Fifth Fleet significantly and even with Kuat's increased output and generously subsidized contracts our best estimates place full recovery of Fifth Fleet to be three to four years away. Hakassi's work to supplement Kuat and Dac is invaluable, along with their previous experience in the original outfitting of the Fifth. That said, even assuming maximal production from Hakassi, Kuat and others, there are too many material demands to expedite the Fifth's recomposition.
Third Fleet has managed to remain engaged in skirmishes and border policing, outside of losses sustained in support of Fondor and the Corellian Gambit. Similarly, Fourth Fleet remains at relatively high operational capacity.
Second Fleet has taken the most consistent and sustained losses, even despite the recall of most battle groups away from the Outer Rim and the corridors of the Yuuzhan Vong advance. As it stands, the Second is at under half capacity, resulting from long-term wear and battle damage repairs along with combat exhaustion among crews. Credit to the Remnant for supporting several battlegroups of the Second and relieving their withdrawal in recent months, which has stymied slightly the bleeding of talent and material.
Ultimately, the fact remains that the Galaxy has too many strategic assets to protect and we do not have enough ships to fill their skies. Local forces are unreliable at the best of times, and have decayed in the years of peace under the NRDF. The Second Fleet cannot be pulled any farther back than the Expansion Region, specifically due to the encroachment of the invaders toward Bilbringi, Arkania and Reecee. Third Fleet must remain operating to maintain the corridor through the Slice, keeping Mon Calamari, the Tionese and Corporate Sector connected to the greater galaxy. The Fourth Fleet threatens the southern offensive of the invaders from Bothawui and to be redeployed would likely lead to general collapse of the southern Slice.
Effectively, this leaves the First Fleet and Fifth Fleet as our remaining options to safeguard the Core.
Unfortunately, given counts of Yuuzhan Vong fleet assets including Addendum ix.SRPDL, it is the opinion of this analysis that should the northern offensive and southern offensive join forces, supplemented by new material provided by the conquered worlds of Hutt Space, Belkadan, and other newly founded 'shipwombs', that First and Fifth will be wholly unable to match the potential tonnages brought to bear. Even if Fifth Fleet had avoided the losses at Fondor, and was at full pre-war strength, it is the opinion of this analysis that the observed Yuuzhan Vong fleet assets would still far outstrip both First and Fifth Fleet.
Therefore, this study suggests that at present, despite advancements in technology and strategy to counter Yuuzhan Vong biotechnology, that the defensive orientation of the Colonies and Core are inadequate to prevent a thrust directly toward Coruscant."
-NRI-NRDF Joint Brief to the Advisory Council, 62:2 GrS, 27 ABY
"You know, we still don't know where the yammosks all went."
-Colonel Garik 'Face' Loran, 62:2 GrS, 27 ABY