Draconis: Log Entry 1
I could smell it. The smell was worse than the sight. The blood, sweat and fear hung in the air like humidity and it suck to my nose. It smelled like death. There’s no other way to describe it. It smelled like death, and decay. Rotten and putrid. One of the younger soldiers couldn’t take it and vomited off in the corner. We didn’t blame him. Didn’t even razz him. It was so fucked up in there, the vomit didn’t even add to it. Like spitting into the ocean. Didn’t even make a difference.
We looked at them, and their sliced up bodies. Their faces seized up in expressions of pure terror. Partially dried pools of blood spread all across the floor, sticky like a warm jelly. Our boots stuck and squished as we inspected the room. The lead scientist had his eye carved out. By the look on his face, you have to suppose he was still alive when they did that. A woman in one of the side offices was jammed underneath her desk, clothes ripped off and arms broken and crunched up.
We all knew. They’d told us in the briefing who our enemy was. And we knew. But it wasn’t until we saw what they had done that we really knew. Until then, they weren’t our enemy. They were Command’s enemy, and we were their spear. But then, once we saw all that. Smelled it. Felt the atmosphere of that horror show on our skin. Then we knew.
We knew who our enemy was.
… Ugh.
…
Yeah, I’m fine. It’s my head. I keep getting these… headaches.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m here to tell you a story. A story that I think has to be told. About who we are. Where we come from. And where we’re going. A story about science and magic, the strange and the absurd. What we found out there in the interstellar void. What we found in the blackness of our own world. We gazed into the maw of myth and saw reality.
It’s been a thousand years since man first stepped off our own little rock. What we now know as the capital of the homeworld empire, known as Earth. I’ve been there. I came from Titan Station originally, but when you enlist, if you kill the right people well enough, eventually some son of a finance paper pusher with a fancy title invites you to one of the palatial estates on Earth and pins a medal on you. It was a big honor at the time. That’s how I felt, then, at least.
My name is Adam Ikari Wright, special operations agent first class of the Sol Federation Defense Force, Intelligence Division.
I traveled out to the furthest reaches of Andromeda. Out beyond the Butterfly Galaxies, into uncharted space, and I found Draconis. The planet no one thought existed. The homeworld of the most advanced civilization ever theorized, whose ruins spread out across the universe. What I found there was beyond what you could ever possibly believe.
You have to know. I have to tell you what awaits you out there.
…
My story begins with him. River Crowley. A man you called a cult leader, who was exiled by the Andromeda Primacy. Whose arms had been pried off in the EDF/Andromeda war. I was sent to find him out on the moons around Djevika 9, where his estate was built. Where his following was centered. You told me to take him out.
But things got messy.
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