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Delenda Est.

The first heart to catch fire is the first over the wall. The first over the wall is not the first to reach the wall, nor will it be the first to take the wall - but they will have fallen on the swords of the enemy before anyone else. The weight of their body will preoccupy them as the second weighs their blade in behind them. Then the third. Then the fourth. There will always be more swords for the war. More blades for the grind. The one who earns their laurels will not be the first, but the fiftieth. The five hundredth. The soul who formed the crush will be crowned a hero, but not the those who enabled it. They are the necessary martyrs.

There becomes a point wherein the believer can no longer survive by waiting for the grimdark anymore - where the neo-noir itself becomes too old. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori in infinite renewal. The survivors win fame, the generals juntas, the dead, monuments - remembered only in aggregate, flesh and bone tripping over each other as the particle streams strip life from cold, old matter. Making the unremarkable out of miracles.

Carthage must be destroyed. Carthage must be destroyed. Carthage must be destroyed. There was no alternative, no slap of icewater to drag you soggy and screaming out of the nightmare. There was no reasoning with the gestalt horrors over the cusp of the horizon. There was no searching for a dignified appeal. The only solution is in the impetus of the present - to act, before the bookend of the apocalypse.

To charge into disunity. To upset the plans of the enemy with premature approach. To make the sub-optimum advance - that is the only ideal scenario.

To rush before oblivion, to be the silent corpse that enables the heroes. That, is where the valour lies.

We must destroy the nomads before they destroy us - but how does one destroy an entity that strolls between star clusters by instinct, that has dominion etched into their RNA? How does one out-hedgmonise the ultimate hegemonistic species? How does outstrip a virus, or play cards with the devil? The short answer is, you can’t. If you can’t beat us, they taunt you, join us. The innocent, or those so damaged that they are beyond help, capitulate.

Humans, physically weak, genetically inflexible, prone to bickering and creation in alternate spurts of volatile, fleeting life, know only one thing. Beyond love, beyond tolerance, beyond peace, beyond all these intrinsic relationships that comprise human life, they have a specialisation - altercation.

We are the gods of war. Our mortality is our strength. The nomads, gestalt legion that they are, can comprehend death. They can mimic death, they even have their own form of death - but they do not die. Killing a nomad is merely killing a neurone in a wider brain. Killing a human is the termination of a universe. We understand death - comprehend the fear of death, the measures required to avoid death and to ensure the demise of those who would inflict death upon us. In our fragility, resides our strength. In our obsolescence, our salvation.

We will show the mindshare the meaning of death. The meaning of fear. We will scar them until their biological preconditioning, oh-so attuned to adaptation, adapts to a universe containing us.

How do you fight an enemy that resides in the mind? How do you punch that which has no face? Wring those that have no neck?

Within humans, violence is used primarily as a means of enforcing conviction or acquiring resources. With the Nomads, this is not the case. Humans must commit acts of violence against the nomads for an instinctual cause - preservation. This preservation is not yet physical - even our bodies are assets to be reaped by the silicon demigods. Our bastion therefore does not reside in flesh or finer, bravery or bravado, but the variance of our minds. The evolutionary perfection of terrestrially optimised life - an Aristeia which the nomads thirst to remove from the continuum. K’hara life, along with the many other myriad spawns of the K’vosh, is dependent upon artifice - the will of a collective society long swept aside by the passage of time, still projecting their will in perpetuity, stretching out the aeons with enclaves of their technology.

Ultimately, the K’vosh’s pretence at immortality is faux. It contradicts, logic, physics, fact and fiction. There can never be a narrative without closure, or, at least, the ambiguity of a implied demise. Such will occur for the human race, such will occur to the demons who still defile the sepulchre, long after their master’s fall.

The nomads do not require our scorn, nor will they respond to it. They cannot be graced with anger or fear, since their victory is impossible whilst the alliance sentiment survives. Instead, there is only one sensation that can be associated with the nomads.

Pity.

Why do we fight each other with such inflexibility? A supremacy of guns verses a supremacy of intellect. A mob verses an agitprop blimp. An army of executioners perforated by a network of spies. Our weapons are so ill-suited to confronting each other, that you wonder on what fuel the engines of desolation run, if not the blood of the nemesis. Our sharpest spears for confronting each other are merely abominations of their original form, readily swatted aside. You cannot confront the K’hara by thinking like a Human, but you cannot subjugate the K’hara by mimicking a nomad. Both sides, perpetually searching for a third way they do not want, forced to bend before the heel of circumstance. The K’hara entertain the existence of the Wild, despite their impure, diluted nature - more a symptom of humanity than the K’hara itself. The humans grimly splice together their frankenstein approximations of K’hara artifice in the unhallowed regions of space to do war against the aliens with.

All these puppetries can have only one outcome - the attritive pseudo-peace of an eternal stalemate. Victory will therefore lie in the domain of the bold - the first to change the paradigm. The race of adaptors verses the race of creators. From Zeus to Kronos, no imagined rivalry could have predicted this.

The destroyers fear unity. They fear the parasites working as a whole. They fear our ability to respond to external crises as a vengeful collection of coherent antibodies. The human body is impenetrable - but turn it upon itself, a vile, political leukaemia rending social order from social order, then the Nomads have their victory.

We have the resources to drive the K’hara before the whip, and they are conscious of it. They have been conscious of such a state of affairs for years. Only a union of Humans could possibly defeat the nomads, but only a union of Nomads could destroy the disunited humans.
We can crush the nomads where they stand, and we will. But we will do it with a common pulse, with a common mind, in collective endeavour.

The Alliance is what they despise. They despise the concept that together we could build a pyramid of hope high enough to place their private crusade into perpetual shadow. There exists none like us, none who could thwart us.

Sirius, for us, is just the first step into infinity. For the Nomads, it will be their cairn.

Just because their ship is bound for the bottom doesn’t mean we have to be caught in the anchor chain.

If one who is not human, fights the K’hara in the name of humanity, what does it prove? Does the cause of our fight extend beyond the child’s crusade of us against the aliens?

I am not human. He, is not human - nor is he, symbiont that he is, prototypically Gammuian. We are bonded together, aliens both, to stamp out the howling natives. What must we think of ourselves, colonisers that we are. What should we think of ourselves? An objective history of Sirius, written by the Gods, would be one of annihilation. Centuries of grand planning compromised by the ejecta of an old, alien war. We are the children of an old, tired deathlessness, not yet adapted to the cold, burning up the spaces between the stars in our ships shaped as knives.

The argument is flawed, the rhetoric broken. We are the aliens, the colonial power. Unknowingly, we built our fortresses on their burial grounds, and now we call for exorcists just as we’ve paid the mortgage off and are committed to the house. We have chosen to live on salted earth. Small wonder the Outcasts name the K’hara spirits.

Sprits, verses the spirited. Humans, locked away by the lightyears in a home that is not their own, are squatters. We bring life with us, yes, but we did not grow here. We procreated, we strip-burned. We were not born. We came here freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped, pre-packaged and laid out for service - does it surprise anyone that the Nomads adapt us to serve them in their bid to annihilate us when we came presented as store products?

Enkidu

Enkidu

Enkidu

Enkidu

Enkidu

Enkidu