Draken

”The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

• Antonio Gramsci, loose translation by Slavoj   Žižek

***

Once upon time… there were monsters. And there will be monsters once again.

The Elravians spoke of corpsereavers, burrowing beasts who dragged away the bodies of the dead. The enormous IQuath still stalks the Royal Preserve of the Drin monarchy’s compound, devouring those foolish enough to climb amidst the lush jungle canopy. There were tales of fallen gods, resurrected dead, and entities so far out of space and time that their mere presence could drive someone to madness. And those were just the creatures and supernatural forces; the galaxy was full of plenty ordinary evils.

All of them, though, have another story, uncannily shared across great distances and disparate societies. The names are different, the places spanning across the galaxy; but they all coincide across an ancient age, and all speak of the same creature… something foul… something vile…

Something monstrous.

The Isopterians called it Cahm-na-rost, literally “That Which Kills.” The Drin elders had no name for it, but told tales that the beast’s presence in the lush forests of their adopted world of Eovis nearly drove them from the planet - and, at least in part, led to the Drin’s scouring of the surface. The Soleans called it a “Spine Crawler,” and feared the creature so greatly that half their population fled to the stars. Those that remained would become masters of plasma energy, one of the few weapons that had any effectiveness against the invasion. Once they developed space flight, the Kraeth bombed entire worlds that showed signs of infestation, naming them “The Marked.” The Gd’enshu were pushed to the brink of extinction, first by the beasts in the dark they called “Seers,”  then by the Kraeth’s misguided orbital bombardment. They would hold a grudge against both enemies for millennia.

The Elravians established roving death squads, groups of pyromancers equipped to stop the spread of these abominations. They referred to the creatures as “The Bloom,”  and the voyages of these elite teams spurred much of the Elravians’ quest to establish an empire.

But it was on a Thrakian moon, amidst a torrential downpour in a dark and humid jungle, that the monster would receive its most well-known title… the name that would pass into history and legend, begetting imitators and myths, and even a surname tied to the beast.

The Thrakians called it DRAKEN.

***

When stretched to its full height, it was over ten meters tall. Its lanky arms, each adorned with a bony spike, allowed it to nimbly hang down from amongst the trees. Powerful legs gave it the ability to pounce great distances to bring down prey, or crouch down and run down any opponent. Its jaws were filled with a mess of razor blade teeth, with a bite force capable of cracking even hardened steel plates. It could “see” in the dark; special sensory spots on the head could detect the shape and movement of anything giving off an electromagnetic field, while the chitin carapace of its body was sensitive to even the smallest changes in air pressure.

It could hunt. It could kill. And it did so remorselessly.

What made the Draken so terrifying, however, wasn’t its predatory prowess - although that certainly added to the horror. It wasn’t that its body armor was nearly impervious to the swords and axes of the day, even able to shrug off the crude firearms of ancient times. It wasn’t its speed, or size, or the sheer number of spikes emanating from its reinforced skin.

It was the spores.

Blades were rarely an effective weapon in killing a Draken, but they could work. However, their use came with its own problem - a double-edged sword. When dismembered, the Draken unleashed a cloud of spores from glands throughout its body, trailing them like a shadow. While the spores were not long-lived, they didn’t have to be; sprayed onto a living being, the spores settled and began to grow. They attached themselves to the host being with a tenacious, and microscopic, grip. They would slowly feed, then corrupt, lowering inhibitions and anxiety, allowing themselves the chance to thrive. By the time the infection and had grown large enough to be noticeable, it was much too late.

Once large enough, the infected host would secret itself away, gradually drained of life, before being sloughed off the newly risen Draken.

And the cycle of misery would begin again.

Many species, too many to count, are lost to history; they may have destroyed their attackers initially, but failed to contain their spread before being overcome. Other civilizations were more successful: the Elravians had their elemental powers, and quickly discovered that fire was a potent cleanser. The ancient Solean inventor had tinkered with rudimentary plasma technology, which came to be his species’ defining galactic contribution, and their salvation against the ‘Spine Crawlers.’ Some species were clever enough to discover the spore problem early, and built hermetically sealed armor to encase and defend their soldiers from the parasitic splash back.

How they had spread so far and wide in ancient times was unknown, having jumped planet-to-planet in a time before drag transit gates and FTL drives. Some speculated meteors, others Dim portals, while some ascribed their coming to divine retribution.

The Era After Opening brought with it new pathways to infection, with first contact between species becoming increasingly common. But so, too, did the knowledge necessary for combating the creatures. Technology proliferated, knowledge spread, and gradually, the Draken faded into legend.

Years passed. Civilizations rose and fell.

History obscured. Tradition became legend.

Legends, however, only die if there’s no one left to tell them. Several elite military units on dozens of worlds adopted depictions of the Draken - some wildly incorrect - as unit insignia. A common bedtime story told to children throughout the Old Codridactics talks of the Draken hiding under the bunks of naughty children. A semi-successful fighter in the Dodecahedron named her character after them. And Ven Draken, former-Wraith-turned-arms-dealer, had the creature as the basis of his surname, itself derived from a mythical hero-hunter who saved ancient Thraksik from the beasts.

Thousands of years passed, and an existential threat to all intelligent life faded into myth and memes.

Until recently.

***

A group of scavengers exploring a downed ship on the rock-strewn moon of Clofaen came under attack by… something. The lone survivor managed to incinerate the wreckage and escape off world. He was so traumatized, he could only utter a single word when questioned…

On Ethriada, a small colony of fervent Exclusionists completely vanished. It went unnoticed for months, thanks to a combination of their isolationist beliefs and the dire consequences of The Crossing. Whatever had occurred, it had left only gore and death behind.

The Rangers of the Deep were called in to assist with the medivac of passengers who had fallen ill aboard a luxury cruise ship passing near De Anzu’s Gate. When they arrived, the ship was ablaze and inaccessible. The logs that could be salvaged indicated that some passengers had gone on an unscheduled excursion to an uncharted planetoid during their journey. Where they had disembarked was undetermined. What had attacked them seemingly confirmed a terrifying fact…

A deluge of stories began to trickle in, hard to parse in the chaos of the collapsing Concordance and the Dim invasion. So many strange, violent events happening everywhere, all the time. But a pattern began to emerge from within.

Something, matching the description of a long-lost horror, was attacking without warning. Something, shrouded in myth, had become very real, and very dangerous.

Something had come back.

There was one final report that brought with it more concern than all the others. Unlike so many of these situations, there were survivors. Ones with footage and data.

In the days before The Crossing, a Concordance Department of Allied Militaries special operations team performed a rare, sanctioned incursion into the Dim. Usually forbidden, they were granted permission in order to rescue survivors of an illegal, and ill-planned Dim Walker expedition.

They found the Dim Walkers. But something else found them.

The footage was in poor shape, and recollections sketchy, but there was proof from the DAM team: within the Dim, they had been stalked by unknown forces. Those forces, including a legendary figure referred to as “The Dim Queen,” had possessed superior weaponry and arcane magicks. And they had been attacked by a monster thought long lost, corrupted and twisted by the strange energies of the Dim - yet still recognizable. It had been tamed by the dark forces trapped within this twisted dimension, but its ferocity had not lessened. It still hunted. It still killed.

The team, at great cost, had brought back proof: the Draken was back.