Ascension 1.5

First off, sorry for not posting lately. For the past week or so I've been traveling, most notably to Florida, and while I've been doing do I've been doing a bit, as in a good amount, of writing. Which for me involves writing 1-2 pages, looking over it, than starting over either because a new idea popped into my head or that the paper didn't quite show what I wanted it to. But, anyhow, I'm sticking to the original Ascension plan, the one with the Intai'sei and the Void, but I've added a few tweaks that you may want to know first. If you don't, just skip to the somewhat unfinished writing I have below it.

- The story takes place on the planet of (insert name here) that is the home of both the Intai and the Kantras. These two empires are polar opposites, for reason I'll explain later, and were among the first species ever to experience interstellar travel. However, at the peak of their empires they engaged in a brutal war, which resulted in a rip in space and time that brought along the emergance of the Void. The Void destroyed their entire empire and forced them back to their homeworld, which they surrounded with arcane barriers to keep the void out. However, the arcane barriers are slowly weakening, and the Void is steadily invading the last haven for sentient life.

- The ecosystem of this planet is rather cool, IMO, and the best part is that I made it up without outside influence. The planet is lush, ranging from forest supporting mile-high trees to treacherous marshlands to the snow-capped mountain ranges that exist at the poles. Every species on the planet is divided into two separate branches: that of the Fae and the Kai. Fae are generally more majestic and graceful and tend to have a more peaceful demeanor, even if they are predators. These creatures are generally given a more avian or feline look and feel. Kai, on the other hand, tend to be more vicious, ravenous, and tend to have a hostile feel to them, even if they are herbivores. They tend to be influenced by wolves or reptiles. Intai'sei are the Fae version of one species, while Kantras show the Kai branch of the same species.

Without further ado, here is a bit of unfinished writing.



Once, he was something. A hero, an icon, the very symbol of everything humanity stood for. It was the men and women like him that kept the empire strong, people like him who stood as paragons of virtue, maintaining stability, peace, and order even in the most tumulus times of the empire’s history. Yet none of that mattered now. His kind, vanguards of humanities’ progress through he stars, had failed, and with that failure had brought upon the utter destruction of the entire Human race.

Legion

For centuries, his mind had wandered in a trance-like bliss, a dream state that consisted of burst of colors, flashes of memory, and long, endlessly silently stretches of darkness. It was this blissful chaos that comforted him, wrapping him in a cloak of oblivion that served to ward his mind away from the outside worlds…and it was this wonderful chaos that caused him to push away that single word, the calling that would bring about the confusion and peril of waking life.

Legion

The word repeated itself, digging inside the deepest fragments of his mind, bringing upon memories of death and destruction, famine and peril, things that he had long pushed down to the darkest depths of his subconscious mind. The memories brought feelings of pain, guilt, regret. But along with the visions of war there were ones of love, too- the indescribable sensation of a first kiss, the feeling of the arms of a lover curled around him, the face of a smiling infant. Those memories were the ones he feared the most, for those visions were the ones that caused his mind to surface from the wonderful chaos of a millennia of slumber, and no matter how hard he fought, and inner instinct kept pulling him farther and farther away from the comfort of Cryo-sleep.
He began to remember thing- his long forgotten name, Deavon, his wife and child, Seera and Markos, and how he left that entire life behind to save what little there was left to love after his family’s death. That last memory brought upon even more visions: The pain and suffering it took to become immortal, one of the Legion, and the name he took upon that sacrifice that stood as everything he had lost, and everything he would avenge: Vaec. He remembered the last moments before he submerged into the unconsciousness of Cryo-sleep, how he and his fellow immortals had left their race to burn and die when all hope of survival had fled. The final memory brought along a feeling of guilt- but also one of duty, an intense, driving rage to avenge those that had fallen.
Awaken



Vaec’s eyes slowly came to focus, the inner workings of his mind still sluggish after a thousand years of dormancy within the stasis chamber. Slowly, he moved his head from side to side, automatically noting the sensation of zero gravity that he had so often experienced through his countless years of space travel during the Scourge. Scourge- the word had entered his mind almost subconsciously, yet he struggled to understand what it meant. A thousand years, perhaps more, in a dormant state of suspended animation had stripped his mind of all but the strongest of memories, memories that drifted through his mind as simple, single words or phrases, the meaning of which were unclear to him.
War
Death
Sacrifice
Corruption
Damnation
Void

Void. When humanity had first left their home system, the location of which had been lost long ago to the passage of time, they had been chasing after an alien transmission that had made its way to their home world centuries earlier but, until then, his species had lacked the means to reach it. When the time of interstellar travel did come around, however, a thousand volunteers had manned a cruiser by the name of Ascension in hopes of first contact with an alien race.
Instead, they had found the Void.
The Void was alien, unknowable, and existed in a realm far beyond that of which the human mind could comprehend. It existed as a single, ravenous entity from beyond the bounds of our plane of existence, having brought itself into our universe through a rift in space and time created by the recklessness of a former mortal species. This abomination seemed to exist only to feed off the life force of sentient life in order to fuel its own ravenous need for living energy. It spread like a plague, sweeping through entire systems and infecting the entire population within a matter of months, slowly feeding off the being’s life energy while simultaneously warping it into an abomination of death and pestilence, turning it into one of the Scourge.
Miraculously, humanity has managed to cling to survival for the first few centuries through the combined efforts of the few species of resistance still left to combat the Void and its Scourge. Within 300 years, these species, with the human race leading at the forefront, engaged in a desperate campaign to push the Void back into its demonic realm of existence through the rift in space that was once thought to be a supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. For a thousand years they engaged in a long and bloody war, a war which would have been lost as soon as had begun if not for the Legion.
The Legion was a group men and women from every race and culture who chose to sacrifice everything that they once loved to become immortal vanguards, godlike warriors to stand at the frontlines of battle to ensure the survival of every sentient being in the galaxy, but at the cost of leaving behind everything that made them human or otherwise. But even the immortals, the Legion, began to fall to the might of the scourge. And when any hope of victory over the Void and its Scourge had forsaken the galaxy, the Legion had been put into a state of hibernation and stowed within small interstellar vessels, known as arks, and would be awakened upon the approach of a nearby world that had not yet succumbed to the Void, if only to warn the inhabitance of the terror that lay beyond the reaches of their system.


More to come