The Fire and The Storm - The Nexus of Kellaran #2

Chapter 127

Part 19

The view in the Revealing illustrated all that the voice explained, and it was impossible to tell which

parts of the viewing had been recorded, and which had been re-created from memories or historical

records.

“I am ready to begin our presentation.” First Mauve stated. “I suggest that I project it further down the

beach, and that you Kellarani move there, so that each presentation does not distract from the other.”

“Agreed.” Six nodded again, and they followed First Mauve about a hundred meters down the beach,

leaving the rest of The Triax watching the Kellarani presentation.

First Mauve’s display was far more basic than the advanced Revealing that Six had cast, but it

conveyed understanding readily enough. It was somehow obvious that she had not recorded it in any

way; she simply told the story and illustrated it with a large round Illusion cast against the relative Property © NôvelDrama.Org.

darkness of the trees at the top of the beach.

The Triax were not a very warlike race. They were the only intelligent race on their mostly-aquatic

world, and for the first two hundred and fifty-three thousand years of their recorded history, they had

lived in peace. During this early golden age they developed a rich and artistic culture that prized

knowledge and understanding. Their first technologies; aquatic farming of plants, domestication of

animals, recorded communication, and metallurgy done by chemistry, led to an impressive hydraulics-

based industry. The pumping of water and other liquids within vast networks of metal pipes provided

power for machines and fast transportation. The pumps were originally turned by muscle and animal

power, then ocean currents and large vertical flows were captured with huge water-screws. Liquids

under high pressures in pipes became a medium for long-distance communication that was almost

instantaneous, and complex pumping and networking schemes led to the use of intricate valving to

calculate complex mathematical problems.

At the end of the first Triax golden age their population was many billions, and the oceans of their world

were unrecognizable from their natural state. Their surfaces were covered with domesticated plants,

most natural plants and animals were either domesticated or extinct, and the Triax civilization was a

dark and gloomy industrial place lit by artificial light in the murky waters beneath the closely-packed

plants.

Overpopulation and starvation finally brought war to The Triax, initially consisting of theft of one

another’s food plants and sabotaging one another’s hydraulic networks, then open warfare began.

They attacked each other with their machines, their domestic animals, projectile weapons powered by

compressed gases, blades, and teeth. The first Triax war devastated their aquatic world, leaving it little

more than a wasteland. Only one in every two hundred and thirty Triax survived that war and the social

and environmental collapse that came with it.

After a long recovery, stability returned, along with another period of peace and prosperity marked by

strict population controls and the restoration of much of the natural state of their oceans. The greatest

advance of their second golden age had been the discovery and utilization of rare heavy materials

called ‘hotrock’ that gave off vast amounts of heat and other dangerous energies when the material

was refined from its natural ore and concentrated. Eventually all of their industry was powered by these

amazing but dangerous substances.

However, a series of industrial accidents released large amounts of poisonous hotrock residues into the

waters of The Triax’s world. Many died, and the entire population was sickened for many generations,

along with most of the wild and domesticated plants and animals. Society collapsed, and small bands

of survivors often fought one another for the few remaining resources, usually with quite primitive

methods.

After another period of slow recovery that lasted for millennia, Triax society rebuilt and reformed. The

use of hotrock was forever banned, and they reverted to the techniques they had used before its

introduction; taking energy from currents and flows to power their society. Eventually they added wind

power by building windmills in the shallows. They invented suits that allowed them to survive out of

water, and the land masses of The Triax’s world were finally explored and utilized for the first time.

Only after more than eight hundred thousand years of recorded history did the Triax discover magic.

One of their land explorers discovered it by accident as she was falling from a cliff. In her panic, she

willed herself to fly, and while she did not truly fly on that occasion, she discovered Movement and used

it well enough to slow her fall to a non-injuring speed.

Unlike the Kellarani, The Triax were never religious about magic; their study and use of it were

academic and practical from the beginning. Perhaps because of this, their expertise in magic

developed quite quickly. Within four centuries they had developed all the major spell categories except

Translocation, and within a millennium the use of magic had permeated every aspect of Triax life. After

a further six hundred years they had their first magic war, the first of several over the next two and a

half millennia, but none of them were globally devastating.

Four thousand years after they developed magic, the first of The Triax to become a god achieved

Ascension. However, they did not consider him a god as the Kellarani used the word. The Triax word

for gods meant merely ‘the Transformed’, and they never established religions or were worshipped.

They did lead Triax society, and they kept the peace for almost thirty-two thousand years. But when

they finally went to war it was a disaster of unprecedented proportions. There were only fourteen Triax

gods at that time, but their power combined with all-out magical and technological warfare among the

populace killed almost every mortal Triax in less than nine hours. Fewer than one in two million

survived. That was the last war that The Triax ever fought among themselves.

Then they had peace for millions of years, though their prosperity was interrupted by two great crises; a

nearby star exploded, and it would have sterilized their world had their astronomers not seen the

changes in the star that were the explosion’s precursors. They had the Kellarani equivalent of a year

and a half to prepare, and it had taken all the effort of their gods and their people to shield the world

well enough to preserve life, and a quarter of them were still killed. Millions of years later volcanoes

began appearing on their world with increasing frequency, and they suffered a period of incredible

volcanic activity and earthquakes that lasted for thousands of years. At the worst of it there were

ranges of closely-packed volcanoes as big as continents spewing rock and poison and ash into the air

and waters. At the end, the last refuges of tenuous life on the world were on the warm borderlines

between the inferno of the volcanoes and the dark and frozen wasteland that was the rest of the planet.

They fought it for centuries, gods and mortals working constantly to clear the air and waters so that

sunlight could still reach the life-zones. Then they finally admitted defeat, and gathered their remaining

populations into sealed, self-sustaining habitats excavated beneath the center of the hardest and

thickest continental bedrock.

Millennia passed, and eventually their world stabilized. They assisted their world’s natural recovery

processes, and slowly their own civilization recovered. But the techniques they’d developed for living

beneath the rock were to prove useful again eons later.

This part of First Mauve’s presentation had taken just more than an hour, and much of that had been

devoted to weaponry and military techniques.

Then she showed the attack of a horde of demons that descended on their world from the skies; some

by flight, some by Translocation. They had come to the world of the Triax in a gigantic vessel they had

made from a metallic asteroid, and hidden it from detection until their attack was well underway.

The Triax fought and lost, then hid themselves away from the demons in habitats deep beneath the

rock under the deepest oceans. They remained hidden for generations, fearful to emerge, and when

they did return to the waters and the surface they found that all life had been exterminated and

consumed by the long-departed demons.

Some of them wanted to rebuild their civilization yet again, despite the colossal effort it would require,

but after centuries of debate they chose another plan.

They recognized that if they remade their world and filled it with life again, eventually the demons would

return to consume it all once more. So they constructed the first of their great spherical void-vessels

and moved their entire remaining population into it, with all of their artifacts. After three more centuries

of traveling around the planets that circled their sun, preparing and training intensively, they set out into

the void to hunt the demons, beginning with the horde that had destroyed their world.