Hey Peyton

[Erdawn Il Deus]

The shuttle had piled itself haphazardly, lying inert like a broken toy or a shorted-out oven, its extremities bright with the white-hot of melted slag and steaming shrapnel. Smoke as black as pitch boiled out from a funnelling wound near the engine-block, rising up into the sky, greying out into this world’s vapid atmosphere. The wreckage introduced itself for something like a mile give or take, drawing a ragged incision across the unadulterated, Escher terrain of the countryside like the burn-mark of a lit cigarette. It was a standard transport truck, not fit for more than two-crew and whatever valuables selected. But despite the civilian simplicity of its exterior, small customisations made clear this was no every-man’s space-winnebago. Reinforced plate-armour alloys forming an exoskeletal defence system around the exterior hull, mounted small-arms systems and a sophisticated shield generation engine (which flickered in and out of being like colourless television static concentrically forming an egg-shell around the vessel) suggested something of far more expedient worth – an ornate metallurgy around the port and starboard hulls, as well as the entry hatch and loading platforms (effigies of a Greco-Romanesque dreamscape of stallions and centurions and champions and historical artwork) suggested welth or réputation or both.

He made no time for this.

Hydraulics sizzled and hissed like fried fats from the steal guts of the machine as the entry hatch opened, vapour trails framing the moving part in billowy stratii of steam. He emerged from the smashed darkness of his transport, pausing for nothing, heaved on the bow of a golden chariot made bright with the winking silence of electronic lights and the bubble of a quantum shield-window. Eight horses – eight massive war-stallions, flickering with the tell-tale light signatures of solid holography, foamed and charged and snarled, vicious looking warrior-mounts muscular and lean in body leaving burning hoof-prints of material light across the shredded landscape. He held all under reign with a single, Herculean forearm – the other lain indifferently aside and wielding in it a lance of alien make and beauty. It stood as tall as a man, the fiercest javelin to ever grace the flesh of mortal hands – the Gae Bolg. It was made from the fused bones of unimaginable beasts from the solar systems of black suns, killed in mortal combat with another, the foam of their carnage boiled upwards into the vacuum and leaving the remnant traces of their being behind as haephastean artefacts. It gleamed, coldly, without empathy, a thing of reactive metals alien to the periodic tables of the known universe.

This man was Cuchulainn. Behind his head his hair swept windblown, a mane of ochre-gold and forge-bronze, each strand burning like a candle-wick from the crown of his skull molten-aureate in brightness. His flesh rolled spectacularly off his body, god-like, almost golden in sheen and bunched up with muscle like lumps of cooled ore. His face was as stone, empty of the empathic reflex innate to mankind, detached from them in some fundamental, terrible way. His eyes thundered across the scape of an alien world, haemorrhaging with iron-blue ferocity, cold with the same emotional distance that separated him from any rooted genetic ancestry. The anti-gravity engines of his chariot thrummed like beating hearts, generating quantum distortion in waves which carried the craft above the earth, blasting rock and dust and wind backwards in his wake for a kilometre. He sped across the earths with savage velocity, sweeping left and right for the trace of his enemy. His aura was terrifying – power radiated off him like sweat, sundered whole fields of living animals. They reacted with the instinct of cowardice. They knew a predator had come among them, a predator greater and worst than any before, and they fled his arrival by the hundreds.

Great Cuchulainn, the king of heroes, and his wrath knew no bounds. A mesh therm-skin covered his body, recycling heat and oxygen into his blood and grafted upon the cartilage of his nervous system. His every reflex hummed with reactivity, a systematic network of fibre-optics and bio-generated nano-technology impressing upon his senses a wholly different spectrum of time, his eyes sweeping clean across the baroness of the land and dissecting it with overlapping spectrums of vision so far set above human limitations his status as demi-god seemed understatement. His flesh forged by the human beings which he lorded over, risen from quantum mechanics and independently sentient bio-genetic engineering, combat-evolution personified. Aureate plates of flak-armouring covered him strategically, making him more impressive a figure, even as his robe – woven intricately into the tartan pattern wholly his own and unlike any of the thousands of clans before him in underlying shades of crimson and scarlet – fluttered menacingly about him.

His determination was almost robotic. Somewhere here, an enemy had fired upon him, brought him down to the surface of this outer-world, and he demanded death. There was no vengeance about it – it was the only sensible conclusion. Cuchulainn came, and the world trembled before him.

--- --- --- ---

His enemy, however, was also far from human. His eyes, too, swept across the tumultuous earth of an alien world, but his were eyes of metal and energy and flickered with dials of light. His flesh writhed, a musculature of inter-weaving metal fibres and iron kinesiology. He, too, was shaped in the likeness and form of a man, but slender where Cuchulainn was broad, almost effeminate, his appearance a suggestive series of brush-strokes in gun-metal greys and chromes.

He waited beneath the shadow of an immense tree which seemed exclusively fabricated by inter-locking roots, the lattice-work bulging upwards towards the canopy, forming a colossal bulb of vines and fleshy cable. The roots made up the terrain, as huge-around as subway tunnels, coursing through splintered rock and fracturing mineral deposits like the veins and arteries of some vegetable monster.

But there were others here, too. Complications. The world to him was a tapestry of equatorial calculations and dynamic mathematics, a being of artifice run mad and homicidal all at once in terrifying matrimony. His enemy was the perfect enemy, played against the tampering with human DNA and the engineering of genetic perfection, building a machine made of flesh. So immaculate was Cuchulainn the quantum probability of his death, even defeat, in combat was insignificant, border-line impossible.

Uncoiling from the core of his palm his fingers extended, each a coal-strike of charcoal grey, each thrumming with the white power which had lashed out through stratosphere and orbital shadow and opened wide the ship of Cuchulainn - crackling like overloaded circuit-breakers.

Nothing was impossible. He would let the king of heroes come to him.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

OoC: It should be noted I was listening to Tyler Bates' "Returns a King" the whole time I wrote this. Also, bump.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Bump.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

His hair boiled from his skull, burning bright in three shades of bronze so that it flashed ochre-gold, molten-brass, and fiery auburne all at once as it caught the light. He was an Irelander - possibly one of the most imposing she'd ever seen although physically not the largest. He was there as if he'd ever been, holding tight the leash of an Scottish Danish hound and let me illustrate - this hound was larger even than a small calf, its fur such a dark tint of green it was black or chestnut and its tail fabulously braided. The beast was large enough to devour whole a man, its eyes cool and impassive.

He was Cu Chulainn, the king of heroes, robed only in his own tartan of scarlet and bronze, holding at bay the baying Cu Sith with a Herculean forearm that seemed wont to burst out of its flesh with inlaid ropes of muscle, which rolled spectacularily beneath his tanned skin like the tightened fists of a giant. He bore no helm - it lay discarded, magnificenty gleaming by his glaived and sandaled ankles - only laurels of fig and ivy, and in his other arm yet he loosely clutched three polearms of varying size and significance - one being an infantryman's eight-footer of ash and with a narrowed bronze point, the other a javelin that seemed more a darning needle than a proper throwing spear, and the third a metallic weapon of make alien to the craft of Men, hewn from the bones of mythic Coinchenn, the Gae Bolga.

He stared at this girl - this portly midget of a thing - with a face of marble, his eyes almost tragically lacking in that empathic reflex so signature of mankind, haemmorhaging with mute ferocity and bored, robotic hubris. He said nothing, did not acknowledge her because he had come here to kill the greatest of champions, not the meekest of girls, and had no bussiness with such a person.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

OOC: BUMP ORCHIS