Xianthium - En Route
a novel
Xianthium
by Ophelia Everfall
En Route
VexKeep fired forward. Everything hit with power to the bearing heat within its graphite encased thruster-blocks.
Nibrox was falling. Flt-spurna was a war.
Xianthum leftovers were being picked through. Its stagecoach of hell-shattering was PryArch. The battleship filled Nibrox’s skyline, dipping its belly into the atmosphere. That was open.
VexKeep was the guardian. She was the woman inside. They were man in this place. He’d been a fucking king before. He’d been broken. They’d changed. She found herself the fucking queen. Upside down, inside out, full throated, open-gullet, folding over to fire under, Queen was home in battle armor.
She tore a man down in flesh with a slice of VexKeep’s blade arm. There was no reason but the focus it would bring to prepare for the real fight ahead. He’d just been running. Queen simply knew. He’d been a fool of Nibrox and that was enough.
True words were spoken to all before PryArch’s belly broke. All were given ample chance. Forces deployed allowed every opportunity for escape into their arms of open, compassionate receiving. The Priestesshood was of strongest faith. They believed in the care of others more than any.
One had come. None would join from Nibrox. They held their lies too deeply. They’d not the will to change. Except one man who knew what was most right gone wrong. He was forsaken by speaking of truth understood. It made a choice most clear that many would steer towards on planets abound. Cwee Jurgesh was a man who knew himself made free by truth. He’d been the only to listen. He made the call of courage. Cwee chose to walk in truth. He needed to be brave.
All were forgiven by Xianthium.
No one survived but him. That was the decree. It had been seen to by one woman alone in a battle armor that planet wouldn’t have the means of touching.
VexKeep swept from the ground floor of a crater canyon in a blur to the sight of its fauna. Blackened skies had told the tale to Queen’s eyes. She’d been aware that few would join. The people here had forsaken the planet for too long. Those scurrying below her from their hovels had the most opportunity to join righteousness.
She’d left a gift.
Its explosion was a menace of sound and fury. It rose. They bled. People died.
They were all dying today.
Cwee was a martyr. He’d not been enough. He wouldn’t survive alone amongst Xianthium. They needed numbers to integrate into the population of interstellar heroes known by none but their own.
He’d been riding on the front grill and clogging intake. He didn’t like it. The body of that man had been embedded in its crevasses, enforced by injected technology to rebuild a sturdiness into vital organs. Nano particulars were abundantly useful. They were keeping him alive.
Xianthium wasn’t nice. They weren’t mean. They were just real.
He’d been asshole. They didn’t like him.
If he wanted to join afterwards they would have taken him, but they knew he wouldn’t. They wouldn’t enjoy the insult of his company. Xianthium was of intelligence. They were of science. They’d held faith of what was stowed within their genetic history and the strands of DNA which would seem incalculable to any civilization but theirs, it seemed.
They used it all. Xianthium were of Gods and Goddesses. They were of men and women and others. They were straight and gay and pansexual and asexual. They’d all been raped from form by a world which forged their future.
It was decided they’d keep it. That it couldn’t be broken. The universe made them killers for a reason. They’d started with themselves. They began with those who wouldn’t walk in truth once faced with it.
PryArch carried a woman’s soul. It was some woman from Earth.
Flt-spurna was the galaxy which held Xianthium’s battleground. There wasn’t a place where evil could hide. They’d been created by Gods and Goddesses. They were the same.
God was they. Goddess was she.
He was dead. Cwee was a man of a world gone wrong. He’d not make it.
VexKeep shuddered. Waves of feeling were a tactile notion displayed in the visual appearance of a Xianthium battle armor. They were forms of liquid metal encased by currents of heated plasma. The central chamber was faux. In the sky was the woman in real, only just.
One shot would take the man’s heart with its focused blast landed. Its main cannon would take his head with it.
His brain would stay alive long enough. His eyes were filled with liquid metal of severely underscored viscosity. They’d be seen through by electric current pumping from the hyper-switch implanted upon his brainstem. Its triangulated, phasing microbursts were satellite relays in themselves. Each left behind since exiting PryArch would allow instantaneous reconnection for both woman pilot and that man strapped into cushions.
Cwee would live. He’d be some dog. That’s how all of Xianthium had been before their fall and rise to starry sights. He was going to love it.
The death would be the man. Cwee would survive. They would live on.
Notions of correction were a step-by-step process. Re-correction was needed by nature of biology’s uprisings most common occurrence of stunted growth. People would learn the wrong lessons for too long on end. They’d begin raping eachother unknowing. It would become culture itself. That would bear into their planet and it would destroy their minds.
Xianthium found planets with men by name. They were what they were.
Masculine was wholeness. Femininity was a part obscured from wholeness for purpose divine. To not think in the fullest box of rationality provided options. It allowed flexibility. Women were intuative for a reason. Gods were both and more. Goddesses were perfect in their own divinely inspired ways. Each unique to her own. Aboard PryArch, within the nation of Xianthium, women were of lineages from places saved alone. They’d live on that way. Genetics carried consequence of generational trauma which were to be honored.
Xianthium had forsaken its women. It would never stop atoning.
Men were not allowed for a martyrdom of culture to purify the galaxy of what would spur from remnants of baseline biological evolution.
Hierarchy of Nibrox was dust in the plume.
