Story: The Eve of the War
The War in Heaven begins.
Chapter 1
Glorious and peaceful, ten billion spacecraft floated through blue space, ten billion ships drifting off to war. The universe warped smoothly around their engines, and supernovae lit up their silver bows. They remained in perfect formation, ten billion destroyers of worlds in the darkness.
Amongst them, the crackling forms of Free Minds, all shapes and sizes, enervating lightning streaking through the pitch black. Trails of blue and white, sparks of constant brightness...
Ahead lay the Msra lines, untold units visible, their outlines grey against the stardeaths that they had caused. Even from these ranges, parsecs between them, they conflicted. An unseen battle, revealed only by the occasional massive explosion of a ship.
Chainspace cannons began to fire. The Iephi ships responded in kind, and between the two forces space was shunted back and forth. One moment, two kilometres lay between them, the next a galaxy's radius of sheer existence.
Here, an Exa enveloped a Msra, tearing it apart with outflying shreds of blazing light. The same Mind detonated a second later, transmuted into nothingness, the force of ten million suns... and that light, the constant light of the dying, the reborn... blue became opaque light...
Ships and Minds fell, but equally they reformed amongst their own ashes. An eternal war, darkened and holy...
Where they fought, there was death, worlds the collateral damage. They cared not for the potential civilisations, their cradle and their future gone in a moment's blink.
This was the War in Heaven, and no mortal was meant to see.
Chapter 2
"It is to our mutual gain." The Sii grasped the hand of the Telleni, and they were together.
"This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. We fight because we must, and need has never been greater."
"Let us save the stars together."
Rianna and Vaeros ceased the transmission, and the two fleets mingled above their worlds, the ships filling the void from one star to the next.
Aether Ships and Telleni Versecraft accelerated as one, a mass of black and gold that crossed Empyrean in an eyeblink.
The War had a third player, and the merged lines of battle met a new force.
The lights of birth and death grew stronger. Wormholes, new stars, new space was born between the armies, and then destroyed immediately as weapons powerful beyond imagining crossed them through. Ships hurled galaxies at one another, and universes merged at the beckon of these warring gods.
Where these universes hit Empyrean, shockwaves of pure force shook the dimensions, the most powerful of strikes making the entire Empyrean shiver, and crack slightly.
In the further dimensions, fractals broke and reformed, infinities died and the very fabric struggled to remain together, saturated in stolen energy. The rates of death and birth remained the same, and new craft joined the fight, warping in from 'verses unheard of in the modern day. The Veiled Ones might some day recover a little of the glory of the gods, but this was the apex of civilisation, the true glory of lifekind.
Each Msra had died a hundred times, yet they fought on. There was no winner, but there was no stalemate- at once dead and alive, definitions failing, broken by science...
Chapter 3
Breaking off from the opacity of Olympian war, Msra scattered in all directions. Such a war as they were fighting would continue forever, and they knew it well enough.
The confrontation had only been carried out to assess the strength of their foes, and they had been found equal. Msra dug into planets, and a minute later the mass of a world was become a million new units.
Iephi ships split to form two, as microbes, yet so far beyond them. Every second they split, and the wall of craft doubled in size every moment.
Sii ships swelled up with indrawn space, and their Telleni allies shot out new Versecraft from generation cannons. Empyrean would soon run out of space, so they engaged again.
The battle spilled over as they sought strategic positions. The Crossverse was a fair scene of war, and the lights of infinite Riftstars were outshone for the first time in trillions of years.
Pantheons threatened to awaken, and the Plans of the Multiverse rolled over in their sleep, the destruction of universes a slight irritation in their metaphorical ears.
This war was fated to end in ruin.
