[SPEAKER_00]: Hey everyone, today we're going through the lore and history of the fall of Commander Farseite and how the Tal Empire tore their hero down from the pedestal.
[SPEAKER_01]: They put them on.
[SPEAKER_00]: we'll be going through how commander far-sight learned of what the ethereals were keeping from him and from their population.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be going through the planets that he led and created outside the bounds of the Tao Empire and his return from that exile to fight the high fleet of the tyrannics.
[SPEAKER_00]: To me, this was the more interesting chapter, or far-sight's long life, so hopefully you enjoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: As always, before we begin, I'd like to say thank you to our patrons and our YouTube members who help keep this content going.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the long aftermath of the Damakli's war, while the earth cast went about the business of cataloging the wreckage, the imperium had left behind, and the water cast went about the equally long business of explaining to the populace what had just happened to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The senior councils of the ethereos turned their attention to the matter of morale.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Tao Empire had survived its first encounter with the Imperium of mankind, and it had survived well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the survival had cost something less easily measured than ships or warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the great unspoken assumption, upon which Tao confidence had always rested.
[SPEAKER_01]: the assumption that their cause and their methods were naturally and self-evidently superior to those of any species they might encounter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had been rather seriously bruised, the imperium had been brutal, the imperium had been wasteful, but the imperium had also, in its dreadful way, been effective, and a great many-tow had seen things during those months that no amount of reassuring water cast speech could undo,
[SPEAKER_01]: Aunva, who understood such things very well, called the period the Nantka, which is to say the time of questioning, and he set himself to putting it right.
[SPEAKER_01]: what he needed he decided was a hero.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not a new one.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no time to grow a new one, but the hero the empire already possessed, raised at last to the full scale that the moment required.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the propaganda machinery of the water cast was turned upon command of far-sight, with a thoroughness it had not previously been turned upon any single warrior in living memory.
[SPEAKER_01]: Statues of him appeared in every major battle dome and pod complex and naval harbour across the worlds of the first sphere.
[SPEAKER_01]: holographic recordings of his victories at Arkana'sha and Dalith were circulated on every public broadcast network the Empire possessed.
[SPEAKER_01]: fire warriors of every rank acquired small images of him, sometimes carried alongside images of Anva and the late Anvae themselves, which was a juxtaposition that would have struck any tower of an earlier generation as faintly improper and which was permitted now.
[SPEAKER_01]: because the moment seemed to require it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Children learned his name before they learned the names of their own sects.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old veterans spoke of him in tones, they had previously reserved only for pure tide.
[SPEAKER_01]: For far sight himself, who was a private man and who had never quite known what to do with public affection in any quantity.
[SPEAKER_01]: The experience was bewildering and, in a way, exhausting.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was greeted with the formal hunters salute, so many times in the course of an ordinary day that his arm began by the second week, to ache from the constant returning of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he took to keeping the arm flexed against his side, for as long as protocol allowed before bringing it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: He smiled politely at the small children, who were brought to him for blessings, he had never asked to be empowered to give.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat through ceremonies of recognition that lasted in tire afternoons.
[SPEAKER_01]: He bore it all because the empire needed its hero, and because an ethereal master had asked him to bear it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he did not in his heart, much care for any of it, and he was glad.
[SPEAKER_01]: to be returning to a place where the only people who knew his name were the warriors who had to follow him into battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet that gathered for what came to be called the Great Reclamation was the largest the town empire had ever assembled.
[SPEAKER_01]: Battleships and escorts and wars fears, and the long sleek shapes of the manter destroyers, graphposts, and outright upper trolls, and the great bocks of the colony ships, all of them gathered in such numbers above the worlds of the first sphere that the assembling itself took weeks to complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: On way, in what would prove to be one of the last great speeches of his long life, sent the fleet on its way with the proper ceremonies.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far-sight stood at his place of honour, and watched the old ethereal speak, and listened to the cheering of the crowds, and felt somewhere beneath the ribs, a small unease he could not entirely account for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The empire was sending him out to do what the empire had always done, which was to bring the light of the greater good to worlds that did not yet possess it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the one chosen to carry that light.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was by every outward measure, a warrior at the very height of his powers, beloved of his people and trusted by his masters, and equipped with every resource the empire could provide.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no rational ground for the small unease.
[SPEAKER_01]: He noted it, and he said it aside, and he turned his attention to the work ahead.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crossing of the Gulf, which had once been a matter of considerable peril, was by then a routine if still slightly uncomfortable affair, and the fleet emerged on the far side in good order, and went immediately to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: The worlds that the Imperium had taken from the town, in the early stages of the Damocles Crusade, were for the most part, Garrison now only by planetary defense forces.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bulk of the Imperium military, having been called away to fight the Great Alien Menace that had appeared elsewhere in the sector.
[SPEAKER_01]: the tendrils of high fleet behemoth, whose assault upon the Imperium during precisely those years, was a stroke of fortune for the town of an almost embarrassing magnitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: The defence forces were brave and many of them were numerous, but they were not equipped to meet the firecast in the open field.
[SPEAKER_01]: and far-sight, who had spent the long voyage pouring over every scrap of recorded data, the war on Dalith had produced, met them with the thoroughness of preparation.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had, during that crossing, done something rather extraordinary.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had taken the patterns of imperial behavior from the Dameckler's war, and he had turned them in his mind and looked at them from every angle, and he had reduced them at last to a kind of code.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he and his lieutenant came to call the human war schematic.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a perfect code, and it did not capture every variation that an actual human commander might produce on the field, but it captured enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something close to a mathematical key for the predicting of what the armies of mankind would do, and it gave him the four each engagement and advantage that the worlds he was reclaiming had no means of countering.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drew the Imperial Garrison's out into the open with Vanguard raids, and when the Garrison's had committed themselves, he fell upon them from above, with the killing strokes of the Montcar, and he won, and he won, and he won again.
[SPEAKER_01]: World by world, the Dhamma Klee's Gulf came back into the fold.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cheering across the empire grew louder with every victory.
[SPEAKER_01]: The propaganda machinery hardly needed to do anything anymore, for the news of each new conquest carried itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a sort of warning to be heard in the records of those years, if one knows how to listen for it, and it is the sort of warning that arises when a story is going almost too well.
[SPEAKER_01]: The history of the reclamation reads in places like the history of a person at the very height of his powers.
[SPEAKER_01]: A man for whom every gamble pays out and every plan unfolds as foreseen and every enemy crumbles in the appointed manner.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are glorious to read.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was magnificent in those years.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was loved by his warriors and admired by his peers and fashioned by the careful hands of the water cast into something almost more than a man.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was already, though he did not yet know it himself, walking towards the place where it would all begin to come apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reconquests of the four principal worlds upon the far side of the Gulf were bloody in the extreme.
[SPEAKER_01]: For those worlds had been longer in imperial hands and were defended with greater commitment than the outlying colonies.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the fleet reached the system that contained the last of those worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fewer than half of the original ships still flew, and farside felt every loss with the weight that a commander feels when he has personally known the names of those who are no longer present at the daily conferences.
[SPEAKER_01]: His ethereal advisers had by then, made it quite clear that no further reinforcements would be forthcoming.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet had been given everything the empire could afford to give it, and the rest of the work would have to be done with what
[SPEAKER_01]: It was at this point, with a single world left to reclaim, and the formal completion of the ethereal's commission, almost in his grasp, that the long-range scans began to return information that no one in the fleet had been expecting.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroid belt to the east of the recaptured colonies, which had been more or less ignored during the rapid conquest of the inhabited worlds, was infested with orcs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not a small infestation, not a passing nuisance.
[SPEAKER_01]: The drone scans when they came back showed an orc presence that stretched all the way into the next system, an orc empire, if the readings could be trusted, that had grown up in the long absence of any organized opposition, while the Imperium and the Tal had been busy with one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sight read the reports in the silence of his command chamber.
[SPEAKER_01]: He read them again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He spent by some accounts the better part of a day in private meditation, which was longer than he was accustomed to spending on any single decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then he came up to the bridge of his flagship and his officers turned to him as they had turned to him countless times before.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said the thing that would in time become one of the most quoted lines in the secret histories of the enclaves.
[SPEAKER_01]: The destruction of the orcs he said is a higher priority than concluding the reconquest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a single sentence, calmly delivered, and the officers who heard it did not for a moment, quite understand what they had heard.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reconquest of Illuminus, the last world, the world whose subjugation would have closed out the ethereal's commission, with perfect tidiness, and brought the whole expedition to its proper formal end, was to be set aside.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet would turn instead to the asteroid belt.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the systems beyond it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And would pursue the Ork Empire, wherever it led, and would not return to its assigned task until the Orks had been destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first time in the entire long history of the firecast's relationship with the ethereal council that a commander of any rank had directly disobeyed a standing order from that council.
[SPEAKER_01]: There had been circumventions before, there had been tactful interpretations of unclear instructions, there had been, as we have seen, the occasional small lie told for the sake of a friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this was something different.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a senior commander of the Empire, in front of his officers, on the bridge of his own flagship, calmly setting aside a directive he had been given by the highest authority of his civilization.
[SPEAKER_01]: and substituting in its place a directive of his own.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was by any honest reading, the moment at which the far-sight we have been following ceased to be a hero of the empire in the ordinary sense, and began to be something else, something that the empire did not yet have a word for, and would in time invent several uncomplementary words to describe.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not, of course, see the moment that way at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: To him, the matter was straightforward.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was an orc empire on the fringe of town space, and orc empires, as he had learned at some considerable cost upon the dunes of Arcanasha, did not stay on fringes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They grew.
[SPEAKER_01]: They probed.
[SPEAKER_01]: They eventually came inwards, and when they came inwards they did so in the kind of numbers
[SPEAKER_01]: into besieged islands and turned reclamation campaigns into rear-guard actions for survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: The empire he loved was by his lights in danger and the empires appointed defenders were elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there was no one else to do the work that needed doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the order.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet turned, and the long bright thread of his glory, which had run unbroken from the snows of Mancangi, to the cheering crowds of the first sphere worlds, began to fray, very slowly, at the place where the order had been given.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ethereal advisors aboard his ship received the news with composure.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not protest in the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: They sent messages back across the Gulf instead, to the Councils on Viola, where the messages would be considered with all due deliberation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The deliberations would take some time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were, in fact, take longer than anyone aboard the fleet would have predicted.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the Councils on Viola had reached their conclusions about Commander Farsite and his sudden new war, the fleet would already have passed beyond the range of any communication beacon the Empire possessed, and the conclusions when they were at last reached would be conclusions about a man the Empire could no longer reach.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know any of this, on the bridge that afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew only that the orcs needed killing, and that he was the warrior best placed to kill them, and that the work was urgent.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned his aircast admiral, and gave the orders for the new course.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bridge crew bent to their stations.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet wheeled in the dark, and turned its prowd towards the asteroid belt, and the long terrible work of his last great campaign.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroid belt that the tower charts had marked as the vorac was, by the time far sites fleet reached its outer edges.
[SPEAKER_01]: No longer really an asteroid belt at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had become something stranger.
[SPEAKER_01]: The long range scans when they came back from the forward drones.
[SPEAKER_01]: showed an arrangement of bodies in the void that did not correspond to anything in the normal catalogs of space, and the closer the fleet drew, the more peculiar the readings became, until at last the picture resarmed itself into a truth that none of the senior officers had quite prepared themselves for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroids of the Vorek were not hiding the orc fleet.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroids were the orc fleet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each great pitted body of rock had been crusted over with sheets of scrap metal and studied with crude weaponry, and at the rear of each had been welded huge engines, and the whole assemblage of them hung in the dark like some long, terrible string of beads.
[SPEAKER_01]: A burning rosary of warships strung out across half a system and grinding their slow way towards the worlds, the town had only just reclaimed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far-sight studied the symbols carved into the asteroid homes, with the attention he had brought to every campaign of his career.
[SPEAKER_01]: And within an evening, he had matched them to records of an old incursion that had troubled the seped worlds many years before.
[SPEAKER_01]: The greenskins had been driven off them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had not had seemed, been driven far enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had simply withdrawn to the fringes of town space, and they had waited there in Malice for the moment when the defenders looked elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the orders, and the fleet went to work, and the work at first went well.
[SPEAKER_01]: An admiral, who had served at far-side sides since the long air cast jewels above Dalith, bought his pilots into the engagement with the elegance of an air cast flotilla that had been preparing for precisely this kind of fight for years.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroid ships were enormous and crudely armed, and they could not turn quickly, and they had been built upon the assumption that no enemy would dare engage them at the close
[SPEAKER_01]: the tower declined to make that assumption.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came in at long range and they struck the engines and they peeled away again before the asteroid ships could bring their guns to bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one after another the great clumsy vessels lost their motive power and drifted in the dark, smoking gently from a hundred wounds and unable to reply.
[SPEAKER_01]: For weeks the fleets progress could be tracked by the string of small fires it was leaving across the void behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each fire, a dying orc ship that would in time burn itself out and become merely another piece of cold debris in the long catalogue of things that had been killed in those years.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was late in the campaign when the work seemed almost done, that the news came up to far sides bridge, that no commander ever wishes to hear about a friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Admiral had been overseeing one of the final extermination strikes against a smaller cluster of asteroid ships, when a hidden missile battery, concealed within the rock of one of the supposedly disabled homes, and triggered by some orc mechanism the scans had not detected, had fired its single salvo at his command vessel.
[SPEAKER_01]: The salvo had struck, the vessel had been lost with all hands, the Admiral was dead
[SPEAKER_01]: Far side received the news in the standing manner, appropriate to the receipt of such news on the bridge of a flagship.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not sit down.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not lean upon anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: His eyes narrowed very slightly, and the officers who knew him best.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were not many such officers, for he had never been a man who let himself be easily known.
[SPEAKER_01]: Saw the small tightening at the corners of his mouth that meant he was holding something quite carefully in place.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was silent for a long moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thanked the officer who had brought him the news.
[SPEAKER_01]: He bowed with the proper depth of formality in the direction of the stars where his old friends vessel had been struck.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said that the campaign would continue.
[SPEAKER_01]: The orcs would be pursued.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every last one of them would be put to the torch.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, he asked for leave to retire to his quarters for a short period of meditation.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came back out by the records of the time, perhaps an hour later.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no outward sign upon him, of what had happened in that hour, there really was with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he gave the orders for the next phase of the campaign, with a composure that several of his officers would later describe as having been, somehow more level than was natural.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fleet pressed on.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hunt continued.
[SPEAKER_01]: The remaining asteroid ships were broken up one by one, and far-side was the same methodical commander he had been the morning before.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the hour in his quarters had cost him something, and the cost would not be paid back.
[SPEAKER_01]: It never is, with such losses.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was during the closing weeks of the Varac campaign that he began to understand that the foe he was fighting was not after all, of quite the same kind as the Orcs of Akronasha had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroid ships, when they were bordered for inspection, contained things that no orc incursion or to have contained.
[SPEAKER_01]: Captured Tao technology, repaired and modified, and put back into Orcish service.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stockpiles of looted ammunition arranged with something like an organized intelligence behind the arrangement.
[SPEAKER_01]: Charts that showed the locations of Tal colonies and the approach paths to them, plotted with a crude but recognizable accuracy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere within this orc empire, far-sight came to realize there was an orc who had been thinking.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not in the slow, brutish way of the warbosses he had outwitted upon the dunes, but in something altogether closer to the way Farsite himself thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: A foe who studied, a foe who learned, a foe who had perhaps learned from the very campaign of Arkonasha itself, and who had been turning Farsite's old methods over in his mind, and coming to conclusions of his own.
[SPEAKER_01]: The name attached to this awak was, by some awak joke that the town never entirely understood, grog, iron teeth.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the watchief of a fortress rock, called our center, and he was far side came to suspect, the architect of the asteroid fleet that the town had spent so long destroying.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two great clusters of asteroid ships still survived.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were the largest of the original Armada, and they had broken away from the Vorak, as the rest of the fleet was being annihilated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were heading, on courses that had clearly been chosen with some care, towards two different worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first cluster was bound for an artifact world called Arthur's Molok, of which Little was known.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second cluster, which contained at its heart, a single great dagger-shaped asteroid that the reading suggested was the largest vessel in the entire orc fleet, was bound for the tower-held world of Atari Vogue.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fast I thought about it for a long while.
[SPEAKER_01]: A flagship shaped like a weapon, he said at last, was the kind of vessel that would appeal to the vanity of an orc warlord.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the order, the fleet turned towards a tarry bowl.
[SPEAKER_01]: Atari Vow was a world of cities and gardens settled in the second great sphere of tower expansion, and the warriors who garrisoned it had been preparing their fleet to meet the incoming asteroid ships, as the tower had always met such things.
[SPEAKER_01]: At long range, in clean engagements, a before the enemy could close.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were still scrambling that fleet when far-sight signal reached them, warning them that the orcs were not going to slow down upon entry.
[SPEAKER_01]: The orcs were going to land the asteroid ships.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were going to drive them into the planet itself, with all the force the great crude engines could provide.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroids came down.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came down with a fury that the towel of Atari Vaux had not been prepared for.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the impacts of them across the main continent of Vaux-high snuffed out millions of lives in the seconds it took for each great rock to bury itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The capital city, the white wool jewel called Tower Ratasha, was struck almost dead centre by the daggership.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of the city, when the dust cleared, there was nothing left.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was only a vast smoking crater, where one of the most beautiful cities of the empire had been, an hour before full of light and water, and the small ordinary lives of citizens, who had been certain of the security of their world.
[SPEAKER_01]: The town of Atari Vow had hoped in the desperate moments of waiting after the impacts that the orcs themselves would have been killed by the violence of their owner rival.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had not been the shield cause within each asteroid ship had held.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Orcs came pouring out of the craters with a storm of crackling energy weapons and salvage towel guns, and the volume of fire that emerged from those craters was unlike anything far-sighted ever encountered in his long career of fighting greenskins.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were not the June children he had taught his cardres to break up on Arkanacia.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were orcs who had been taught by the mind of their wachief, exactly how the tower would respond to them, and exactly where the tower would be vulnerable when they did it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farsite's army is docked at the orbital sky stations of the planet, and through themselves into the war below.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the war did not go well.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ork heavy weapons could punch through battle suit plating in a way that the Kruda weapons of older or campaigners had never quite managed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Captured hammerheads and sky rays repainted in glyphs and re-crewed by greenskins, lurched out of the craters, firing tower plasma at their former owners, wearing copter craft hammered the tower from above.
[SPEAKER_01]: At every impact site, the same pattern repeated itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Initial tower advance, fierce or resistant, slow grinding loss of ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: And across the planet, the casualty reports climbed to figures far-sighted not seen since the worst hours of Arcanasha.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was salvation from the aircast, in the end, that broke the worst of the orc ferocity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whole shones of barracudas and tiger sharks descended from low orbit, and ship squadrons mowed down the skulking orc moms in the rubble.
[SPEAKER_01]: and a man to destroyer that slaughtered those nearest the wrecked daggership with a storm of heavy railgun fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the sunshark bombers washed the ruins clean with chains of plasma.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Orcs, for the first time in the campaign, were on the back foot.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it was at this moment with his foes apparently broken and his momentum apparently restored that farside made the mistake that would weigh upon him for the rest of his very long life.
[SPEAKER_01]: He led a cadre of his own warriors over the lip of the dagger ships impact crater.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pursued the retreating orcs down into the shattered bulb below.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did so because the moment seemed to require it, because a commander leads from the front, because a great ork warlord might be in the crater and might be killable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because every instinct his violand blood had ever given him, was telling him that the killing blow was at hand, and that the time to strike it was now.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crater was not the finishing of the ork host.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crater was the trap.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thousands of orcs who had been waiting in the rocks below, poured up from concealment as far-sight's cadre descended, and the jaws of grugger and teafs true ambush closed around the tower warriors with cruelty.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tower could not bring fire to bear in every direction at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could not break out the way they had come in.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could not buy any reading of the tactical situation, do anything at all, except die in the bottom of that crater, under the weight of the orc charge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which was when Grog himself appeared at the lip of the bowl, in his ostentatious armor, and threw himself joyfully down into the slaughter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sight gave the order.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave it because there was no other order he could give.
[SPEAKER_01]: He told his battle suit teams to engage their jetpacks and boost out of the melee.
[SPEAKER_01]: To leave the ground, to leave the fight, to leave the warriors who could not boost away with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did so, they obeyed him, as they had always obeyed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fired into the orcs below them, as they rose
[SPEAKER_01]: And they killed a great many in those parting shots, and the parting shots have been remembered in some of the more sentimental histories, as a kind of last stroke of defiance against the trap.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were a parting gesture.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors he was firing over were already dying as he fired, and they were dying because he had led them, where they should not have been led.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came up out of the crater in his battle suit, and the survivors of his cadre came up with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Oryas poor Karyon recovered them safely back to the skystations in the orbit above.
[SPEAKER_01]: The campaign on Atari Vogue continued for many further weeks, and the planet was in the end, freed of the Orkincurgeon through the costly work of the local commanders.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far side remained on Atari Vogue through the rest of that work.
[SPEAKER_01]: but he did not lead it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He acted only as an advisor.
[SPEAKER_01]: He risked himself on patrol after patrol, in engagement after engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: With what one of his left tenants would later describe.
[SPEAKER_01]: In private, as a recklessness that did not look like courage, so much as it looked like a man asking the orcs to settle a debt with him personally.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not settle it, he came through every engagement alive, he came through them all, and the matter of the crater stayed where it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened in the crater on Atari Vaughn was the first true defeat of his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had lost battles before.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had lost warriors before, a great many of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the long campaigns of the Iraqin and the deserts of Arkanaisha and the Indigo grasses of Dalith.
[SPEAKER_01]: But losing warriors is not for a commander of his caliber, the same thing as being defeated.
[SPEAKER_01]: Warriors are lost in every campaign, and the loss of them, terrible as it is, is part of the balances of war that any honest commander accepts when he takes up the work.
[SPEAKER_01]: What had happened in the crater was different.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not merely lost warriors there.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been outwitted.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been led by his own cleverness and his own pride into a position that another mind, and Orkish mind had foreseen and prepared for.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been read, the far side who had spent 30 years reading the minds of his enemies had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: on a single afternoon in a dust choked bowl on a half ruined world, read by an enemy in his turn.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors he had ordered to boost away from had been his to lose, and their loss was no greater in numerical terms than losses he had absorbed in earlier campaigns, without lasting injury to his command.
[SPEAKER_01]: But these warriors had been left behind because of his mistake, and they had died because of his miscalculation, and there were a great many of them, and the order to leave them had come from his own throat.
[SPEAKER_01]: The records in their tidy way do not speak of what it costs a commander to give such an order.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply note that the order was given, and the boost out was successfully performed, and the surviving battle suits were recovered to the orbital station for redeployment.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do not note that the man inside the lead battle suit.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the long minutes of the boost upward through the air thick with orkfire, was hearing in his coms the voices of the warriors he was leaving below.
[SPEAKER_01]: The brief professional reports of warriors who knew they were not going to be evacuated and who were continuing to do their duty in the moments left of them, and that those voices stayed with him afterwards and were still with him many years later.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are stains of that kind, that no later victory will wash off.
[SPEAKER_01]: He won other victories afterwards, a great many of them, and some of those victories were brilliant, and some of them were necessary, and some of them were greater in scale than anything he had achieved before.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of them touched Atari Vaughn.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crater was a thing that remained, and remained in him specifically.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the warrior who left Atari vogue for the next phase of his long story, carried it with him out of that system, as he had carried the broken sword out of Arcanasha, and the two waits together, were by then, beginning to bend him in a direction that he himself was not yet ready to look at.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the surviving ships of the far-sight expedition emerged at last from the long crossing of the Dammakli's Gulf and saw what had become of the enclaves in their absence, the bridge of the flagship was for a long moment, very still.
[SPEAKER_01]: The colonies they had left behind in good order, the bright young worlds that the reclamation had so recently planted upon the far side of the Gulf were burning.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroid ships that far-sighted not been able to destroy in time had fallen upon them in his absence, and the same terrible tactic that had ruined Atari vogue had been employed against them in turn.
[SPEAKER_01]: The night skies above each of the on-clave worlds which had once been hung with the soft glittering necklace of orbital bodies that the colonists had grown up looking at, were empty.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroids had come down, veolos and lubegral and tinnecler were locked in desperate defensive battles for their survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even the ocean world of Salash-hay had iron-hoed ork battleships prowling its waters, breaking seas that had never before known the smell of ork engine oil upon their salt air.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fast-eyed received the reports.
[SPEAKER_01]: He met with his commanders in the new high command of the firecast, a great disc-shaped city that hovered above the ocean of violas, at a height the local orc forces could not reach.
[SPEAKER_01]: He listened to his left-hand's explain, in careful and apologetic detail, how the war had reached the point it had reached.
[SPEAKER_01]: He asked how they could have permitted such a thing to come to pass.
[SPEAKER_01]: They told him, he listened, and when at last the briefing was complete, and the strategies for the coming evacuation had been laid out for his consideration.
[SPEAKER_01]: He rose from his place at the council table and gave a short instruction to his lieutenant, which was that they were to continue the war in his absence, and to fight it as best they could, and to expect no further word from him until he returned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he walked out of the council chamber, and he climbed into the cradle of his crisis battle suit, and he engaged the jets, and lifted off the great hovering deck of the disc city, and he flew away across the ocean towards the horizon.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Lieutenant stood for a long while watching him go.
[SPEAKER_01]: The shape of his battle suit grew smaller, and smaller against the bright sky, until it was only a dark point, and then not even that.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he did in those long weeks has come down to us in the records of the enclaves, with the slightly elevated cadence that the keepers of those records reserved for things they were not entirely sure had happened in the literal way the witnesses had described.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went in search of communion with the elements of the world he had adopted as his home, and he sought that communion in four separate places, and the four meditations together would be remembered afterwards as the turning of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment when the far site, who had returned, defeated from Atari Volk, became the far site who would lead the enclaves out of their darkest hour.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went first to the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: He flew low across the saline ocean of Yolos, the shadow of his battle suit racing him across the pale waves, and at last he tipped the suit forward and plunged it into the sea.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sank, he sank a long way, down past the upper sunlit layers, down through the dim middle waters, where the great glowfish of Yolos moved in their slow schools, down at
[SPEAKER_01]: Where the only light was the soft phosphorescence of the bubbles, bleeding up from oceanic fishes, and the occasional pale gleam of the predators called night sharks.
[SPEAKER_01]: He set the battle suit into the cross-legged heroes' posture upon the seabed, and he closed his eyes, and he sat there in the cold and the dark for seven cycles of the planet's day.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he learned from the water, in those cycles he never afterwards described, in any detail.
[SPEAKER_01]: But those who knew him best, said that he came up out of the ocean, with a stillness in him, that had not been in him when he went down.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went next to the air, his battle suit rose from the sea in a great cloud of spray and arrowed across the sky towards the volcanic ranges at the heart of the Viorloss landmass, and he climbed and climbed, until he came at last to the peak of the Dorman volcano Ores.
[SPEAKER_01]: there he hung in the high thin air above the summit.
[SPEAKER_01]: The suit jets working steadily against the great winds that rolled across the upper-outed dudes, and he opened the cradle of the suit and let the wind come in.
[SPEAKER_01]: He listened to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He listened until he had begun to understand the patterns it was making.
[SPEAKER_01]: the long, slow, jayers of the upper atmosphere.
[SPEAKER_01]: The small quick eddies that gathered in the lee of the peaks, the way one current drew another, along behind it, as a hunter draws a hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: His trance ended when he had come to know the air.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went next to the earth, he plunged into a deep canyon at the heart of the volcanic range, and from there into the sulfurous tunnels that honeycomb the underside of the planet's crust, and he laid himself flat upon his back, in one of those tunnels with the trickles of lava, moving slowly past him in the dark, and the poisonous fumes drifting around the suit's life support intakes.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there, he stayed for some considerable time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The earth, by the lights of his meditation, was not a quick thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not an angry thing in the way that fire was angry.
[SPEAKER_01]: It burned slowly when it burned at all, with a terrible heat that no impatience could match.
[SPEAKER_01]: He learned by his own later accounting to think the way the planet's core thought, which is to say to think in great slow movements that took centuries to complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a kind of thinking that is much use upon a battlefield, but it is perhaps a kind of thinking that is useful for a commander to have visited at least once.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went last to the fire, and the fire was the meditation that changed him most visibly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wars upon Viorloss had set the dry forests of the planet ablaze in a great many places, and the wildfires had grown by then into something that was less a series of separate fires than a single vast burning that rolled across the landscape with a will of its own.
[SPEAKER_01]: He flew his battle suit into the heart of one such burning.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stayed inside it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The smell of his own flesh beginning to roast, filled the cradle of the suit, and he did not cry out, and he did not engage the jets to lift him out, and he did not give any sign of distress at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat in the fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when at last he came out of it, hours later, the colour of his skin had been changed forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great pale tone of the viola native had been burned away from him, and what had taken its place was a deep, almost black hue that he would carry for the rest of his very long life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And which the warriors of the enclaves would in time come to regard as one of the marks by which their commander could be known.
[SPEAKER_01]: His crisis battle suit, when he flew at last out of the fire, was said by those who saw
[SPEAKER_01]: He returned to the war, and the war, in the weeks that followed his return, began to turn in ways that none of his lift tenants could have arranged on their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: Above the crystal plains of Tinekla, where the elegant tower fightercraft had been julling for weeks with the snub-nosed ork aircraft and slowly losing the engagement through sheer attrition.
[SPEAKER_01]: far sight appeared in the sky without warning, and gave the strangest order any of the air cast pilots had ever received.
[SPEAKER_01]: He told them every one of them, to override their consoles and release their propellant gases into the air.
[SPEAKER_01]: He told them when they had done so, to shape the release of those gases in odd patterns according to his coordinates.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, when the air above the plains was thick with the volatile emissions of every towel fighter in the engagement, he ignited the entire suspended cloud with a single shot from the plasma rifle of his battle suit.
[SPEAKER_01]: A great gale of flame rolled across the sky of Tinecler.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tower craft, riding the thermals of the firestorm and burning what little of their own fuel remained to clear the leading edge of the blaze, were lifted to safety upon the rising heat.
[SPEAKER_01]: The orc aircraft, which had no such anticipation and no such fuel discipline.
[SPEAKER_01]: were caught in the sheet of flame and consumed where they flew.
[SPEAKER_01]: The surface below was simultaneously scoured clean of the green skin spores that had been corrupting the crystal planes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tinecler was, in the space of a single afternoon, freed.
[SPEAKER_01]: upon the watery world of Salash He, where the iron-hold orc battleships had been prowling the seas with a brutal impunity for months.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fast I dove once again to the bottom of the ocean.
[SPEAKER_01]: This time carrying with him a series of disc-shaped devices that Ovesa, his old friend in the earth cast, had designed to his specifications.
[SPEAKER_01]: The devices were called seismic fibrilators and what they did was provoke the natural oceanic vents of the planet into a sympathetic resonance that turned the ordinary motion of the seabed into something far less ordinary.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thumps of the fibrilators echoed up through the dark water and the vents answered them.
[SPEAKER_01]: and within hours the seas above had risen into tsunamis of such extreme height that the orc battleships for all their iron holes were turned over and capsized one after another like leaves on a stream.
[SPEAKER_01]: Upon Lubgeror, the favored planet of the Earth cast, where the great rock spires of the landscape had become natural fortresses, around which the surviving population had clustered, and which the orcs had besieged in hordes to vast account.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the Earth cast a different order.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had the entire fleet of Tineklar, called into extreme low orbit, and he had the great over-living nodes of Lubgra, mag lifted from their positions, upon the planet surface, and held above it, suspended in the careful grivitic embrace of the orbital ships, and then, with the population safely lifted clear,
[SPEAKER_01]: He dropped a clutch of fibrillators into the great crevass called Bogol, the abyss at the heart of the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: The world shudded, the shuddering grew, and every one of the great rock spires of Lubgra, towers of stone that had stood for 10,000 years, collapsed in upon themselves, and buried the besieging orc hordes beneath 40 meters of solid rock.
[SPEAKER_01]: The living nodes were lowered back down upon the new crust.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the end of the week, the population had been restored.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the end of the month, the earth cast was already at work upon the rebuilding.
[SPEAKER_01]: Throughout all of this, Farsight had reserved one matter for himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: He hunted Grog iron teeth across the ruins of the campaigns the Watchyford set in motion.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found Grog at last in the eye of one of the artificial firestorms he had loosed upon Viholos to sterilise the last of the Ork Investigations there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Watchyf was, by all accounts, attacking his own followers in some attempt to reimpose his fading authority upon them.
[SPEAKER_01]: far sight emerged from the fire alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried with him a small object, and the object when his lieutenant saw it later, proved to be a sparkling globe, filled with fine grey ash.
[SPEAKER_01]: Upon the surface of which had been engraved the names of each of the onclave worlds that Grog had tried to ruin.
[SPEAKER_01]: of all the worlds that Commander Farsight visited in the long course of his career.
[SPEAKER_01]: The one that troubles his biographer's most is Arthur's Molok.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it troubles them not because of the scale of the violence that unfolded there, which was modest by the standards of his other campaigns, but because of what the violence revealed.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are some places in the galaxy where the curtain that ordinarily hangs between the world we can see, and the world we cannot, is worn very thin indeed, and Arthur's molloch was such a place, and what farceites saw through the one place in the curtain.
[SPEAKER_01]: ever entirely allowed him to put down again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had pursued the second cluster of Grog Iron Tief's asteroid fleet to that world some considerable time before, in the same campaign that had taken him to Atari Volh, and had been forced to leave the matter of Arthur's Molok unfinished, while he addressed the more immediate emergency at the enclaves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, with violas reborn and the orcs of the home world's destroyed, he returned to finish what he had begun.
[SPEAKER_01]: The aircasts preliminary surveys reported only modest orc activity in the planet's built-up zones and little to no other life of any kind beyond it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Arthur's Mollach was a dead world by every reasonable measure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its pre-human civilization had been ground to dust, some 30 millennia before, by hands the towel, could not name.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what remained of that civilization was a scattering of stone monuments and ruined shrines, among which only the orcs now moved.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, on the face of it, a perfectly ordinary purge, the kind of clean work that Farsight had performed a hundred times before across a hundred similar worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came down with his cardrares in the cool morning of the world, and he went to work.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Orcs were divided and largely leaderless, as Orcs separated from their watchief tend to be, and the hunter-cadrares broke them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was at the 8-pillar temple that the air cast's mapping survey had named the Great Star Dias, a low broad amphitheater of Dark Stone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Eight tall pillars at its perimeter, a great star carved into the flagstones at its center, that the day began to go strange.
[SPEAKER_01]: each orc that fell upon the day as blood, and there was nothing in itself unusual about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was unusual was what the blood did.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not simply pull upon the stone.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seemed to be drawn into the carving of the star, gathering along the lines of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as the carved star began to fill with the dark wet of the orc, dead a faint disk of multicolored light, began to gather above it.
[SPEAKER_01]: hanging in the air a few meters above the flagstones.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sight, who was overseeing this part of the purge personally, stood watching the disc for a long while in the cradle of his battle suit.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was fascinated rather than alarmed at first.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had killed dozens of the green skins on the dias himself, and he watched the way the light grew brighter with each killing, and he turned the matter over in his quick mind,
[SPEAKER_01]: What he was looking at was a portal.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was being summoned by the spilling of blood upon a place that had been carved many thousands of years before for precisely such a summoning.
[SPEAKER_01]: By entities of a kind for which the tower had at that time no name at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood was a key.
[SPEAKER_01]: The carving was the lock.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what came through the lock, when at last the disk of light stedied and brightened into something almost solid, was a host of beings that no fire cast warrior had ever before seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were tall crimson-skinned figures with horns, and they came onto the dais, bearing swords so deeply black that the swords seemed to be horns cut into the air itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: They moved with a swift, terrible grace, and they fell upon the surviving orcs without preamble and without expression.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the orcs who had been the most violent thing on Arthur's molloc and moment before found themselves suddenly facing creatures whose appetite for violence was of an order entirely beyond their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: demons of the blood God, drawn by the killing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sight in the cradle of his battle suit upon that day as did not have such a word.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had only what his eyes were showing him, and what his eyes were showing him.
[SPEAKER_01]: was that the universe contained categories of creatures that he had not been told existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: After the crimson swordsman came others, bright pink things tumbled out of the disc, with comically long limbs and high laughing voices, and they raised their hands to the sky, and sent forth flames in every colour, for which the towel had a name, and several, for which they did not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The flames did not behave as flames behave.
[SPEAKER_01]: A passing ship struck by a stream of one of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Became in an instant, a delicate sculpture of kaleidoscopic glass and shattered to the ground in a thousand singing pieces.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tao warriors caught by other streams of the strange fire became before the eyes of their comreds, statues of pale water that held their fighting postures for a moment, and then collapsed into puddles on the flagstones.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others became stone, others became most dreadfully, screaming statues of bone perfectly preserved in the attitude of their last moment, which continued
[SPEAKER_01]: Demons of the Changer of Ways, drawn by the rupture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farcei did not have words for these either.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had only the fact that some of his warriors, a moment before, had been warriors, and now were not.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the order for retreat, and his cadre's responded with the discipline they had spent their lives building.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the survivors began to lift away from the dius towards the safety of the obitu ships above.
[SPEAKER_01]: He himself, alone of all the warriors present, paused at the edge of the dius and looked back.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he looked into the disc of light, he saw by his own much later account, a vast wound in the substance of the universe, a rip in the fabric of reality of a scale that no part of his training had prepared him to comprehend.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw, very far away across that wound, what seemed to him to be the whole of the galaxy, turning slowly within it, and he saw a place at the heart of the wound where a great cyclonic storm of unmaking had been turning for longer than any civilization the town you are had existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw a trillion deaths within the wound, each one calling his name.
[SPEAKER_01]: he saw perhaps worst of all that the wound had noticed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: A small thread of blood began to run between his eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The place that the towel reverends as the seat of perception.
[SPEAKER_01]: The place that opens and closes when an ethereal speaks.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blood ran down across his cheek inside the cradle of the battle suit and the world began to dim.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the suit's automated systems engaged just before he lost consciousness altogether, dragging him up into the air upon their own initiative, and carrying him in a long shallow descent through the ruins of the city, beyond the diers, until the suit at last came to rest, half buried in the cobweb dark of an ancient tomb.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not wake for some considerable time,
[SPEAKER_01]: When he did wake, in the med bay of his flagship, his first instructions were that the evacuation of Arthur's mollock was to be cancelled.
[SPEAKER_01]: His warriors had caused the rapture, and his warriors would close it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ethereals attached to his expedition agreed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The firecast returned to the diers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second engagement is described in the records with rather more clarity than the first, perhaps because by then they were dealing with something they could at least categorize
[SPEAKER_01]: The Orcs, drawn by the noise of the previous engagement, and by the natural orcish enthusiasm for a fight, wherever a fight was being heard, had converged upon the dyes in great numbers, and were busily hurling themselves into the demonic host that was still pouring out of the disc.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farceite tasked one detachment of his force, with destroying the Orcs at extreme range, and
[SPEAKER_01]: and brought his battle suit Cadre forward himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was during the worst of the second battle, when one of the great winged demons that had come through with the swordsmen was attacking him in close combat, that far-sight was knocked backwards by the creature's clawed feet into the rubble of an ancient toppled statue.
[SPEAKER_01]: The statue had once held a curved sword in its outstretched stone hand, and the sword had fallen free of the rubble when the statue broke.
[SPEAKER_01]: And far-sight, rolling sideways out of the path of the demon's brass axe, snatch the sword up, and brought it round in a wide swift arc.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sword cut.
[SPEAKER_01]: The demon recoiled.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fight moved on.
[SPEAKER_01]: He kept the sword.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not at the
[SPEAKER_01]: except that it had been to hand when he needed something and had served him well, and that there was something in the weight of it, as he carried it back to his battle suit's cradle, that suggested it was not an ordinary blade.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would in time be called the Don Blade, and it would become the thing that sustained him beyond the natural span of his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it would prove to be a great deal more than he had bargained for.
[SPEAKER_01]: But on the afternoon when he picked it up out of the rubble of the toppled statue on Arthur's mollock, it was only a curious old sword that had happened to be there when he reached for it, and he carried it back to the lines without giving the matter much further thought
[SPEAKER_01]: The closing of the rupture was managed at last by a pair of strange medallions, found in the hands of two further statues, among the ruins beyond the daers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The medallions were marked with a six-sided sigil, whose lines went far side looked at them, seemed to settle the pain that the rift had set ringing in his head.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not understand the sigils, but he understood that the medallions were the answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gathered them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stormed the deers with his battle suit, with his fire warriors holding the perimeter against the orcs, and at the moment when three of the great winged demons came down upon him from above.
[SPEAKER_01]: He flick the sword in his hand in a small, lazy gesture, and sent them a Dalian sailing up into the disc of light at the center of the deers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rift closed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The demons disappeared, and the sky is cleared.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the dust had last settled, and the survivors of his expedition began the work of accounting for who was still among them, the news that came up to him was not the news of his victory.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the news that all three of the ethereos who had accompanied his expedition were dead, or three.
[SPEAKER_01]: On loss had been cut in two by the great brass acts of one of the winged things in a fountain near the diers.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the halves of him had bled their last into the water.
[SPEAKER_01]: On Dem had been gode to death by another of the creatures in the wilderness beyond.
[SPEAKER_01]: The third ethereal had been found, headless, in a circle of his unconscious bodyguards.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no ethereal left to lead the expedition.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was no ethereal left to consult on what had happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: The enclaves' entire spiritual leadership for this campaign had been removed in a single afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: with such surgical needless, that far-sight, who had spent his life learning to recognize patterns, could not avoid the understanding that this had not been an accident at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is at this point in the long story of far-sight's life that he experienced a thought cascade of the kind that visits a careful mind when one of the foundational stones of that mind has been removed and the rest of the structure has begun slowly to settle in the absence of the stone.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Atherios had not been surprised by the demons.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had watched the recordings of those final moments from the bodyguard's helmet feeds, and the ethereal's faces in the seconds before they died.
[SPEAKER_01]: Had not held the expressions of beings encountering a thing for the first time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had held the expressions of beings who had recognized what they were looking at.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had known, they had known what such creatures were, and where such creatures came from, and what kind of place lay beyond the rifts that summoned them, and they had not, in all the decades during which they had advised him and his fellow commanders, ever once mentioned any of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they had known about the demons and said nothing, then what else had they known about?
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sitting in his command chamber on the long voyage back to the enclaves of the strange storms that had spat the imperial fleet through the fabric of space during the dameccles crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of the strange psychos whose presence on the battlefield had so badly confounded the swords of pure tide.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of the way the orcs shamans had occasionally seemed to make weather happen, merely by demanding it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of the rust devils he himself had glimpsed once or twice in the deserts of Akanasha.
[SPEAKER_00]: The small, whirling presences that had seemed almost to want something.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of all of these things that he had been told, throughout his long career, were odd unexplained features of an essentially material universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of how often the ethereos, when these matters had been raised in council, had gently steered the conversation elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: he thought too of the obedience.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had served the ethereal cast all his life, and he had served it gladly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the obedience he had given had always felt like the natural obedience of a warrior to his rightful masters.
[SPEAKER_01]: But sitting now in his ship, with the news of three dead ethereals weighing upon his conscience and the carved sword from the toppled statue resting upon the table in front
[SPEAKER_01]: He began to remember small moments from his career that he had never quite questioned at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Warriors who had gone unnaturally calm in the presence of an ethereal.
[SPEAKER_01]: decisions accepted with the swiftness that could not entirely be accounted for by their merits.
[SPEAKER_01]: The peculiar way that the founding myth of his people, the story of how the ethereals had appeared from the stars to broke a piece between the warring castes in the course of a single night.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sounded less like an internal resolution among the Tao, than like an external force having been applied to them, from somewhere outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned each of these moments over in his mind, and the more carefully he turned them, the worse they began to look.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a kind of grief that visits a faithful man when he begins to understand that the loyalty he has spent his life giving, has perhaps been given to something other than what he believed it was being given to.
[SPEAKER_01]: It does not arrive quickly, it does not arrive all at once, it comes in pieces, over the course of days and weeks and sometimes years, and each piece settles into the larger structure with a soft, awful click.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the last piece was in place, far-sight was not the warrior who had set out for Arthur's Mollock.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had become a man whose mind contained things that could not under any circumstances, be allowed back into the heartlands of the empire.
[SPEAKER_01]: For if he were to bring such thoughts before the ethereal council, if he were to sit before Anva himself, in the great chambers of the home worlds, and say what he was thinking, what would happen?
[SPEAKER_01]: Either Anva would explain, and his explanation would either confirm what farce I feared,
[SPEAKER_01]: or Anva would not explain, and would have far-sight removed, and the matter would be ended in the way that such matters were ended.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or worst of all, far-sight would speak the truths he was now carrying, and they would spread, and the populace of the empire would hear them.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the structure of Tao civilization, which had been built upon the assumption that the ethereos knew best would begin to crack along lines from which it might never recover.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Mon Tao, the time of horror that had come before the ethereos first appeared, might come again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He understood, sitting alone in his command chamber, with the carved sword in front of him, that the most dangerous threat to the Tao Empire, he had served all his life, was no longer the imperium of mankind, and was no longer the green skin hoards upon its fringes, and was no longer the laughing demons of the Dias.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He returned to violas, he gave orders for the continuance of the enclave's defences.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, with the same unannounced manner with which he had once flown out across the ocean towards the horizon, he left his command.
[SPEAKER_01]: He stripped off the battle suit that had carried him through so many wars and gave it into the keeping of others.
[SPEAKER_01]: He put aside the trappings of his rank.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he walked away into the searing wilderness of the Theolos planes, where the sun was hot, and the dust was deep, and there were no comms relays and no honor guards and no ethereals to read his face, and there he made for himself the long exile that he had decided in his way.
[SPEAKER_01]: was the only way he could be allowed to keep what he had now come to know.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took the carved sword with him, he still did not, at that point in his life, no quite what it was, but he took it all the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: The years that followed FarSight's exile were, for the wider Tower Empire, years of something they were not accustomed to feeling, which was grief.
[SPEAKER_01]: The probes that had been sent across the Damakli's gulf, to maintain communication with the reclamation fleet, stopped, won by one, returning anything at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The communication beacons that had been so carefully positioned at the edge of Towerheld space, sent their signals out into the dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: and received after the appropriate interval, only silence in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: The water cast, who had been the primary architects of the Great Public Love affair between the Empire and its hero, were the first to begin preparing the citizenry for the worst.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did so gently in the way they did most things.
[SPEAKER_01]: and over the course of several years, they let the bright certainty of his return be replaced, conversation by conversation, and broadcast by broadcast, with the slowly settling acceptance that he was not coming home.
[SPEAKER_01]: When it last the formal announcement was made, the grief that followed was not the grief of an empire that had lost a useful soldier.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the grief of an empire
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been the bright thing the water cast had pointed to in difficult years.
[SPEAKER_01]: The figure whose victories had been rehearsed at the dinner tables of three generations of cow children, and his loss left a shape in the public life of the seped worlds, that no other warrior was quite the right size to fill.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old veterans of campaigns he had touched only briefly, wept openly when the announcement
[SPEAKER_01]: Children too young to remember any of his actual battles, wept because their parents were weeping.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anvah himself, in a speech of considerable dignity and considerable craft, paid the long formal tribute that the moment required, the empire mourned, and it mourned sincerely, and for a long while, the matter was settled.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was settled that is, until the probe came back.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was nothing very dramatic, the probe, a small routine outrider of the kind that the long range patrols dispatched as a matter of standing procedure, and which were assumed to disappear into the Gulf and never return.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one, by some small grace of the Gulf strange currents, did return.
[SPEAKER_01]: It came back in good order.
[SPEAKER_01]: and its sensors had recorded on its long automatic loop through the far side of the anomaly.
[SPEAKER_01]: A series of images that the analysts at the receiving station did not at first quite believe.
[SPEAKER_01]: The far-sight enclaves were not empty.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not the silent ruin of a heroic last end, as the official histories had settled into assuming.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were thriving.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their cities had been rebuilt upon the worlds the orcs had once burned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their fleets moved in good order between their planets.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sept colors of their banners had altered, in subtle but unmistakable ways, from the colors of the home worlds remembered.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the small ceremonial markings of their public spaces had grown in directions of their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: And amidst the small details that the probe's cameras had captured in one or two passes over the central cities, there appeared to be a figure in an early pattern crisis battle suit, dark skinned even by the standards of those who served beside him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who walked through the public places of the enclaves, in a way that suggested he was not merely tolerated there, but he did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farseite was alive, the enclaves were alive, and they had with what the probe's images suggested was entirely deliberate determination.
[SPEAKER_01]: the fury that took hold of Anva.
[SPEAKER_01]: When this news was brought before him, was not the fury of an angry man.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something much colder than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had spent considerable years arranging the public morning of a hero, he had himself created, and he had done that work in good faith, because he had believed that the hero in question was beyond the reach of any further trouble.
[SPEAKER_01]: To learn that the hero was not only alive, but had chosen to remain alive somewhere beyond the reach of the Council's correction.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a thing that Alan Verde did not permit himself to react to in any visible way at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat with it, he thought about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when at last he gave his orders, the orders were of a kind that the Empire had not previously known.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's supreme ethereal to be capable of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farseite, by formal decree of the ethereal council, was excommunicated from the greater good.
[SPEAKER_01]: The phrasing of the decree was carefully crafted to leave no room for sentimental reinterpretation.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a renegade, he was a traitor.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had abandoned the cause to which he had pledged his life, and he had taken with him a great many warriors who should have known better.
[SPEAKER_01]: with as much thoroughness as possible, that he had ever been a part of it at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The statues came down, they came down across every seped world that had once raised them, and the holographic recordings of his victories were removed from the public archives, and the children's books that had been used to teach his deeds were withdrawn and poked.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hunters' salutes that had once been offered to his image in passing were forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old veterans who spoke to fondly of him in the wrong company were taken away.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the gentle euphemistic phrase the water cast preferred, for sessions of questioning, and many of those veterans were not after would seen by their families.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a brutal purge in the way that the Imperium would have understood brutality.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something subtle of that, and in some ways more thorough, for it set out to remove not the man, but the memory of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only on Viola, where the love for him ran deeper than the love for the council.
[SPEAKER_01]: what people who were prepared to confront directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And here, there was a single statue allowed to remain.
[SPEAKER_01]: It stood outside the great battle dome of Monterey, where he had first been inducted into the academies of the firecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: To pull it down, might have caused a backlash that even ANVA did not quite wish to provoke, and so the statue was permitted to stay.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was permitted to stay under a new and rather different reading.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was no longer a monument, it was by official designation, a grave reminder.
[SPEAKER_01]: It stood now to instruct future generations that even the finest warrior the empire had ever produced could be turned from the light if he was unwise enough to step beyond the loving guidance of the ethereal caste.
[SPEAKER_01]: The statue was the same statue it had always been.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story attached to it was now a different story altogether.
[SPEAKER_01]: Across the long span of the Dammakli's Gulf, the enclaves themselves new very little of any of this, and would not for some considerable time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had their own work to be getting on with.
[SPEAKER_01]: The world's far-sighted restored to them, were flourishing under the careful stewardship of a generation of commanders who had grown into their authority during his absence.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the sect identities of those worlds were settling into shapes that were not quite the same shapes as the home worlds had known.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were small differences in the way the four cast spoke to one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were small differences in the way the children were taught the founding stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was above all the simple, hard fact that no ethereal walked among them.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the ethereal's attached to the original expedition had all died at Arthur's Molok.
[SPEAKER_01]: and no others had come to replace them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the long absence of that guidance had begun to grow into a new kind of presence of its own.
[SPEAKER_01]: Varsite himself, in those years, was less and less seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had returned briefly from his exile to do the work the enclaves had needed him to do, and he had then, in the gentle way of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: slipped sideways out of the daily life of his colonies and into an existence on the periphery.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors of the enclaves all knew in some general way that he was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was not, for those long, middle decades, and daily figure in the affairs of state.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the generations of his people who grew up during his withdrawal, grew up with him as a kind of distant beloved presence, rather than as a leader they actually saw.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was in their minds increasingly more legend than man, an old hero in the wilderness whose return, when they thought about it at all, would presumably come if it was ever needed, and who in the meantime did not
[SPEAKER_01]: It came, as such things tend to come, without much in the way of warning.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Hermit who had made his home in the high desert places of violas had been watching the sky with attentiveness for some weeks before he understood what he was seeing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And even then, he did not at first quite want to believe it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The clouds had begun to take on a sickly purple great hinge at their edges.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the way that clouds sometimes do, when something high above them, has begun to interfere with the ordinary light of the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cacti and creepers that had been his companions through the long years of his exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: and which had given him the small precious quantities of water that had kept him alive, had begun to swell and bloat and grow into shapes that were not their proper shapes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shapes that suggested an outside hand was reaching down into the very chemistry of the soil and gently rearranging the rules of what was permitted to grow there.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat in the mouth of his cave one evening, with a creeper in his hand, whose tendrils had developed small, bony hooks, where no hooks had been the week before.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he turned the creeper over in his fingers, and he thought for a long while about what kind of hand reaches down out of the sky, and makes such alterations to a world.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could think of only one kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had read about them in the records of the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Empire had fought against High Fleet Gorgon some years before.
[SPEAKER_01]: In those long evenings of his Hermitage, when the records were the only company he kept, and he knew what the swelling of the cacti meant, and he knew what the purple scum meant, and he knew sitting there, with the small, wrong creeper in his hand, that the time of his exile was over.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took a long breath, he set the creeper down carefully upon the stone, in case it was still in some way a living thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he rose in the slow way of a man whose joints have not been asked to move quickly in some considerable while.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he walked down out of the high desert towards the cities of his people.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came at last to the doors of the great viola's museum, where the crisis battle suit he had once worn through so many wars was kept upon a tall plinth in a hall of honor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he asked with the gentle politeness that had always been his, even in his most difficult moments, that the battle suit be returned to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The young curator at the door, who had been born some considerable time after far sites
[SPEAKER_01]: and who had only the faintest second-hand memory of what he was supposed to look like.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did not at first know what to make of the dark-skinned old warrior at her threshold?
[SPEAKER_01]: There were any number of perfectly ordinary madmen in those weeks, who turned up at the doors of public institutions, claiming to be the long lost commander of the enclaves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the curator had been instructed to handle each of them with as much patience as she could manage, and to send each of them on their way.
[SPEAKER_01]: She began gently to do so.
[SPEAKER_01]: The old warrior listened to her courteous explanation, and he nodded, and he asked with no apparent annoyance at all, whether she might be willing to perform the genetic tests that the matter formally required.
[SPEAKER_01]: She considered him for a moment longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was something in his bearing that she could not quite explain to herself.
[SPEAKER_01]: She agreed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tests were of course conclusive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Word ran through the on-claves that day, faster than any official broadcast, and more reliable than any formal channel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the time far-sighted been suited again into the cradle, that had been waiting so many years for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: His lift tenons were already gathering in the high command, and the firecast was already redoubling its efforts in the sky and on the ground, lifted by the simple and somewhat childish joy of knowing that the old hero had come back to them when they needed him most.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war did not, however, go well at first, far sight, returning to command after his long withdrawal, did what far sight had always done.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned his quick mind upon the foe, and he studied its patterns, and he devised the killing strokes of the montica that had served him so well across the long course of his career.
[SPEAKER_01]: He hunted the leaderbeasts of the heart of each tyrannid swarm, the great synapse creatures whose presence held the lesser broods in their fighting cohesion, and he killed them one by one, with the pinpoint application of force that had been his signature for the better part of two centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: It should have worked, it had worked in some form, against every other foe he had ever faced.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the tyrannids were a different kind of foe altogether, and the leader beasts were not single irreplaceable commanders, but merely the current expression of a deeper coordinating intelligence somewhere far above.
[SPEAKER_01]: And every leader far side killed was replaced within hours by another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dropped from the swelling sky in a fat-bodied mysetic spore, and stitched by the hive mind, into the same role its predecessor had held.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Montcar was striking, and the strokes were finding their targets, and the targets simply did not stay struck.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat in the council chambers of his command afterwards, in a private silence that his
[SPEAKER_01]: He had spent 200 years winning wars by the doctrine of the killing blow.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had pursued that doctrine across deserts and oceans, and the burning skies of three home worlds.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had loved it the way a craftsman loves the tool he has shaped his hands to, and he had refined it in himself, until it was the way he saw battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, on the last and perhaps the most terrible foe, he would ever face.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Ovesa, his oldest friend among the earth cast, clinging now to a great and honorable age by means of a cocktail of regenerative drugs of his own invention, and not entirely the man he had once been, but still in possession of the careful mind that far sight had relied upon for half his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: who at last raised the matter that no one else had been quite willing to raise.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the killing blow were not work my friend, the old scientist said, in the gentle voice that he had perfected in the days when far-sighted first known him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps the moment has come to try the more patient hunter instead,
[SPEAKER_01]: Far side grimaced.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chroniclers of the enclaves note the grimace specifically, because it was something that even his closest aides rarely saw upon his face.
[SPEAKER_01]: To use the caryon was to acknowledge that the Montcar had failed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: To use the caryon was, in some small private way, to use the doctrine of his old comrade Shacera, and to do so on a battlefield, where
[SPEAKER_01]: to use the caryon was, perhaps worst of all, to admit that his master, upon Mount Kanji, had been right.
[SPEAKER_01]: All those long years before, when he had hoped that one of his pupils might learn to fight in the manner of the others, far-sight had not learned.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had refused, with all the warmth of his viola and heart, to learn.
[SPEAKER_01]: He grimaced, and then after a long moment, he
[SPEAKER_01]: What followed was the defense of the small earth-cast research facility, called Fior Rotor, in a deep valley in the dust country of Jholas, and it has been remembered ever since in the records of the enclaves, with the fondness that the chronicles reserve for the engagements they have liked the best.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had emptied the rest of his world.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had ordered the entire civilian population of violas to evacuate.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the evacuation had been carried out under the protection of his warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the eighth day of the operation, there were only 12 towers left upon the entire planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farceite himself, his seven most trusted commanders, the venerable Oveza, and three of the
[SPEAKER_01]: The tyrannids, drawn by the rich biomass of an inhabited world, came down upon them in their millions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the eight battle suits arranged themselves around the small, modest building of the research facility, and held the line, and bought the scientists the hours that the scientists needed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The history books describe each of the seven commanders with care.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oblutai, that is to say the Engram suit, Oblutai 9-0 into which the recorded mind of far-sight's old XV-8-8 mentor had been carefully transferred, took up his position upon the roof of the facility, and bullseye leader beasts at extreme range.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 7th of those who had borne the title of Commander Bright Sword, cut through the great battering round beasts at the gates with his fusion blades, the alien i-core evaporating and choking clouds around him, as he felled one creature, boosted away, and slashed through another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Old Chavastos, who had survived the lobotomy decreed for him so many decades earlier, only because far sight had once told a careful lie to an ethereal at a doorway.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fortside by side with the young commander Torchstar, the two of them sweeping the lesser weapon beasts from the rocks with great rolling sheets of flame.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wise commander Arakon, whose calm voice, the cardrares of the enclaves had been learning to trust for many years by then, orchestrated the whole defense as a conductor, orchestrates and orchestra, distributing the firing solutions and adjusting the rhythms of the engagement as each new ingress opened in the perimeter.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there was brave storm, who has perhaps the most tender entry.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warrior whose body had been so badly broken in some earlier battle, that he had been permanently interred within a life-supporting battle suit, kept alive only by the careful machinery of the suit itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: When a towering monstrosity at the heart of the swarm killed Shasovaka by burning him to death inside his riptide, with a blast of bio-electricity, brave stormed if the thing that he could perhaps only have done, because he was already in the deeper sense, a man who had lived past his own death.
[SPEAKER_01]: He charged the great tyrannid biotiton beneath its midsection.
[SPEAKER_01]: He powered his ancient onage a gauntlet to its maximum setting, and he punched out the creature's thorax in a single great salute in the name of his fallen comrade, and stood there afterwards in the wreckage of the thing breathing the heavy mechanical breath of his ruined lungs, while the battle continued around him.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Ovesa, at the very last, who delivered the death blow to a squat-bodied brood beast, that had been birthing lesser tyrannids directly into the corridors of the facility.
[SPEAKER_01]: The old scientists did so by remotely engaging the interface of Vargas Fallon Riptide, and bringing its weapon systems back online with his own naveled fingers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Firing the suit of his dead colleague one last time, so that the colleague might claim
[SPEAKER_01]: The manter destroyer, or is for Kaurion, descended in a great cloud of dust, and the surviving warriors lifted into its hold.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the research facility behind them was buried under leaping tyrannid bodies as the door closed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of the brave Earthcast scientists, only Ovesa came out alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: what the others had done in their workshop while the eight battle suits had been holding the line outside, was the thing that ended the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had developed a suite of self-replicating necrotic agents.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had fashioned them carefully and tested them and prepared them for release.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, knowing precisely what they were doing, they had imbibed the agents themselves,
[SPEAKER_01]: When the tyrannid stripped viola s at last of its biomass, when the great ribbed mouth parts of the hiveships descended upon the empty world and rendered every remaining living thing into the digestion pools of the swarm, they took the bodies of the scientists with them, and they took the poisons within those bodies as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: The agents activated upon the time delay the scientists had set them to.
[SPEAKER_01]: They spread through the digestion pools, they spread in vapor and in fluid, through the great vessels of the hive fleet itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from his position in the high orbit above his ruined home, far sight watched the bioships of the tyrannids begin, one by one, to rot.
[SPEAKER_01]: It happened quickly, once it began.
[SPEAKER_01]: a black stain spread across the flank of the leading bioship, then across the next, then across all of them, until the entire fleet was discoloring and writhing and falling in upon itself, like fruit decomposing in a single afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Within an hour, the tyrannid presence above violos was gone, and the world below had been stripped to bear rock, and the long vengeance of the earth cast had been completed.
[SPEAKER_01]: far-sight stood in the bridge of the manter and watched it happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had spent two hundred years in the company of warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had given his life to the firecast and had been given much in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had come to think of the greater good as a thing primarily expressed by warriors in the work of war.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ethereals had spoken of it more loudly, of course, and the watercast had explained it more eloquently.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the politicking of the homeworlds had used it as a kind of currency for as long as he could remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he himself, when he reached for the meaning of the phrase in his own heart, had reached for the warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors fought.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors died.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors gave up their lives so that others might live.
[SPEAKER_01]: That to him was the greater good in its purest form.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw, watching the tyrannid fleet rot in the high orbit above his ruined world, that he had been wrong about that, or not wrong, perhaps, but partial.
[SPEAKER_01]: The earth cast scientists, who had drunk their own poisons, and gone willingly down into the digestion pools of an alien horror, had not been warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had been careful old men who had spent their lives in laboratories and who had developed a single elegant solution to a problem that no battlefield doctrine could have solved, and who had then offered up their own bodies as the vector by which the solution could be delivered.
[SPEAKER_01]: they had done so without ceremony.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had done so without fanfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had done so in fact, without his even knowing they had done it until the moment when the bioships began to fail.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what they had done was the greater good.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a form so pure that the politicking of the homeworlds, the inflated speeches of the water cast, the grand pronouncements of the ethereal council.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of it seemed, set against this small, terrible sacrifice to be a kind of noisy decoration around a thing that had been simple all along.
[SPEAKER_01]: The greater good was not the speeches, the greater good was the willingness of three old scientists in a small workshop, in a dust valley, on a world they had loved, to drink the poisons they had made and walk knowingly into the mouths of the tyrannets, so that the rest of their
[SPEAKER_01]: He understood, standing there in the bridge of the manter, with the smell of his ruined planet, faintly reaching him through the recyclers, that he had been carrying a wound about the ethereos for a very long time, and that the wound had been souring his vision of his own civilization, and that the scientists' sacrifice had cleaned the wound a little, not entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not enough that he was ever again going to send the enclaves home to the embrace of Anva.
[SPEAKER_01]: But enough that he understood, perhaps for the first time in many years, what it was that he was fighting for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The flame of his ambition, which had burned low for some time, Kindle did again that afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had seen what the greater good actually looked like, when one stripped away the politicking and the propaganda and the speeches, and he found that he loved it as much as he had ever loved anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he knew that the enclaves would need a leader if they were going to keep faith with what those scientists had done.
[SPEAKER_01]: He turned to his officers.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the orders for the rebuilding to begin, and the long last age of his life, the age in which he is still living, so far as anyone has been able to determine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Began upon the bridge of that manter, in the minutes after a high fleet had finished rotting, in the sky above a world that would be reborn.
[SPEAKER_01]: They remain at the close of any honest biography of Commander Farsite, a number of questions to which the records do not return clean answers, and the gentlest thing a chronicler can do after so long a journey through the certainties of his life, is to set those questions down, honestly upon the page, and admit that they have not been resolved.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first and largest of them is the simple question of his life itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has, at the time, these words are being set down, been alive for something a little over three terren centuries, which is considerably longer than the natural span of any tower, save the unknowable ethereos.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are theories in the long records, and each theory has its supporters.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some believe that the earth cast of the enclaves has developed in the careful way that Ovesa once worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some technological means of extending his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: that he sleeps perhaps in the long stretches between his appearances, kept young by machines, we have not been told the workings of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others suspect the matter is simpler and harder than that, and that what we have been calling farceite for these last centuries is in fact a long line of successes.
[SPEAKER_01]: each one taking up the name and the battle suit and the bearing of his predecessor.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that what the Unclaves love is lesser man than a torch passed from hand to hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there are those, the most thoughtful of them, who suspect the answer lies in the carved sword he carried away from the toppled statue at Arthur's Molok, the dawn blade as it came in time to be called, and in what that blade is and what it gives and what it asks for in return.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of these theories is proven.
[SPEAKER_01]: None has been quite ruled out.
[SPEAKER_01]: The records are silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: The onclaves for their parts still stand.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have stood through the long silence of the ethereal council and through the wars that have come to them since.
[SPEAKER_01]: they are not the empire he was born into.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are something a little freer.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ethereal council does not write to them, and they do not write to the council, and the great gulf between the two sets of town, separated by the damaclies, and by all the years, and by the unhealed quarrel about what was said at Arthur's Molok, and what was not said before it.
[SPEAKER_01]: remains as wide as it has been for a very long time, whether it will narrow in the years to come, no honest chronicler can guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: What then, in the final reckoning, is he?
[SPEAKER_01]: He is not the hero the Empire raised its statues, too, in the bright years of the reclamation.
[SPEAKER_01]: That hero was a kinder and simpler figure than the man we have spent these pages with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the water cast's careful version of him left out to great many of the things we have come to understand he was.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is also not the traitor, the empire tore those statues down for.
[SPEAKER_01]: That figure was angrier and more selfish and less devoted to the greater good than the man whose long life we have followed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth of him, so far as a single chronicler can perceive it, lies somewhere between the two.
[SPEAKER_01]: A warrior who loved his people very much, and who came to suspect that loving them required him to step away from them, and who did so at considerable cost to himself and to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The towel, have not yet in the wider empire, found a name for what such a person is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps in time they will, perhaps the language for it has not been invented yet, and is waiting somewhere in the long workshops of the future, ready to be put into the mouths of towel, who do not yet exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: One can only hope so.
[SPEAKER_01]: He deserves a better name than the one that Council gave him, and a more honest one than the one the water cast gave him before that, and the duty of finding such a name will in the fullness of time, fall to those who come after.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a statue, still, outside the great battle dome of Montir on Viola.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was raised when he was young, and it was preserved through the years of his glory, and it was permitted to remain when the order came down to remove all the others.
[SPEAKER_01]: It stands now, by official designation, as a reminder of the dangers of stepping beyond the loving guidance of the ethereos.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the dawn comes early on viola, and the first light of the great hot sun touches the statues face, long before it touches anything else in the courtyard.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there are mornings when an old veteran of one of the seps' regiments will pass by upon some errand, and will pause for a moment in front of the statue, and will perform very softly and very briefly.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hunters salute that has not been performed in public, on viola, for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He will lower his arm again afterwards.
[SPEAKER_01]: He will continue on his errand.
[SPEAKER_01]: The statue will go back to being whatever the council has officially decreed it to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the morning will have happened, and the salute will have been given.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it will not be the last such gesture, and the statue will continue to stand.
[SPEAKER_01]: The amber light of a small reading lamp falls softly upon the desk, and the fire closes.