Omake: Perdition's Rift
Deep below the cyclopean support pillars and mammoth infrastructure of most Hive Cities, underneath gigatons of steel, plascrete, and ceramite, often lie immense caverns, the likes of which no human mind could ever truly fathom. Carved not just by erosion and human sculpting long ago, but the working of alien life, and possibly alien minds.
This is an inevitable consequence of how Hive Cities are built, and the processes afterwards. Though the newly poured foundations may be solid and uninterrupted, the drip-drip of oceans of perpetually reclaimed water, wastes, and other, more effluent toxic substances, wear down even the hardiest of humanity's engineering accolades, and so erosion, entropy, and simple human neglect doom all. The first generations filled channels and rifts in plascrete, reforged rusted components to their new state, and polished the earth below until it shone in divine perfection, but eventually, whether through calamity or the passage of eons, even the most tradition-bound and anal retentive to the point of psychosis of a hive's maintenance caste will begin, perhaps, not to go the UnderDark, for it is dark, dangerous, and heavy lies the mountain above their arched bodies and minds.
Where earth parts, life follows. This in an inevitable axiom of the cosmos, for building all Hive Cities is the process of constructing artificial mountains, and the doing of such breaks the circle of life many times over. As false gods descended across a newly tamed starscape on pillars of fire, the pitiful bands of elasti-deer, Neuro-serpents, and the xeno life of a thousand thousand worlds ran. As the roads spread, the mines ripped into earth, and the pit grew and grew, life was pushed back in an accidental holocaust the gods proved ignorant of.
But, life perseveres. Those Hives, filled with newly gestated teeming masses in the better days, filled with and were infiltrated by another kind of life. Not sealed in like true Arcologies, Hive Cities proved that all life proved indomitable, not just those strange creatures from the distant world of Terra. They oozed, slithered, and crept their way in through the slightest openings, and new homes were made in the artificial abyss.
This abyss had gone dark and stayed dark for many millennia. The wars of the Underhive did not percolate down here, and over many centuries life had grown, bitter and sullen, in the rust-filled catacombs. Exposed to forgotten ruptured industrial wastes and radioactive tanks long exposed from rusty erosion, shells grew unnaturally dense, claws sharpened to razor sheens, and minds, cold and alien, grew cunning, swift with retribution.
There were Gangers of course, the most mutated of mutants, ignorant of civilians, desperate of criminals. Humanity slowly, painfully, recolonized a realm they had themselves made, not realizing that they walked up on the bones, now dust, of generations of men, betrayed by steel and preyed upon by pincers.
Now, though, the darkness bloomed with lights and sensoria that even the oldest of the clans, the mightiest and largest of the Elders that lay slumbering in the watery depths until upon, did not remember. There were none of their chittering kind who did, having forgotten the sunlit seas of the surface before the Fire Gods came, long burned away.
Light, sounds, the clanking of steel, cable, and artifice, evoked ancient hatreds however. No life would ever forget the day the Fire Gods came, for even if not in their subconscious, even if no dreams bloomed in these cold alien tissues that held no love and dreamed no futures, their genes remembered the slaughter, the deletion of life. And they knew no rest, until the light would go away, and the silence of undisturbed waters would return.
Attacks were launched, and retribution came. Many were slain, of the most recent generation, and the dozen behind them. They came in metal boxes, platforms, and strange suits, with roaring steel that threw fire and light. They roared, squeaked, and screamed in the style of the land dwelling, which the People ignored. Their hatred, simmering in ten thousand years of genetic vengeance, would have none of it.
Newcomers came, variations on a theme. Green, shambling, roaring with stone, metal, and fang, even more chaotic than the metal ones. They swarmed, beat, and did not just kill, but to enslave the People, shackled to frames and beaten until shells cracked! Even the Metal Ones knew no such vileness! Theirs was a horrific fate, any fate not just eaten, but slowly dismembered, until even their pain resistant hides knew true suffering for what had been done to the People.
Now, this newest group, inheritor of all the hatreds. They were like the Metal Ones, but smelled WRONG, tasted WRONG, emitted WRONG. Strange sensoria from a dimension beyond time and mind, the realm that brought down the Fire Gods, drew them to a pause. These...were the worst. No attacks succeeded, only feeding this blight on the waters. And now artifices both terrible and deep, arcane and blasphemous to reality and All That Is, were rising at the edges of the aquatic realm. And the feeling of WRONG would only grow.
This was too much, an edge tipped. Three groups, four if the Old Metal Primordials counted, and now this...Blight.
The Elders would have to be awakened, perhaps even the Eldest. May the Land become the Sea, and the People see the World Restored.
***
An omake told from the Gigacrab's perspective. One of the latest omakes had signs of intelligence from the behavior of "thousands of adolescents watching silently from the waves". It gave me ideas.
So, the Elders/Eldest. The People don't ever stop growing (like, their most recent born generations are raised in the shell-homes from the shed exoskeletons of the Elders who are that big), so...
Elders=Kaiju/Godzilla, and Eldest=Azathoth IE "if it wakes up it could flip the Hive City over and shatter it". Yeah it's an apocalypse for The People as well, but they're now waging war against Old Metal Primordials (GAOT AIs/machines), Green Ones (Orks), Metal Ones (us), and WRONG Ones (Dark Mechanicum), and they can't win bc they're spread too thin against all this, so...why not? Breaking their world means that whoever survives inherits the shattered drowned ruins, in which they would naturally prosper. And their world would be theirs, once more.
@Lord Necromancer , for your perusal. Another potential apocalypse to deal with, lol. And maybe opening the door for future communication with The People, maybe?
