Gods of the Black

These were made for Mothership (which you should get), inspired by The Magnus Archives and Dandyman's fab post, but feel free to toss them into anything, who doesn't love a sprinkle of horrible space gods.

There is a war in heaven.
 
Posthumanity has fallen. Something found them out void, and its shadow fell across them. Now they are fell demons of the black, bloody-handed avatars of madness. Humanity cowers behind the Tangle and the meagre protection it provides. But the sickness that dwells within the gods drives them endlessly, and there are many cracks their avatars can slip through.
 
 Know them, child, and fear their signs.

   

Kuduja, Puppeteer

Avatar: White rings, Thousands of kilometres wide, interlocking, endlessly spinning.

Servitors: Teardrop-shaped, transparent. A web of white 2-dimensional lines in their wake, drifting as if underwater.

Signs:

• Every movement and thought, every sound made is dictated, programmed, controlled. Steps in a dance that goes nowhere. Colonists, androids, animals and plants. A world of Chinese boxes. They move in strange patterns across the planets surface. From empty eye sockets, white threads that go up, up, disappearing between dimensions.

Xolotl

Avatar: A silver, cube-shaped ship. It blooms like a flower to disgorge swarms of servitor-drones

Servitors:  Many-legged, made of jagged silvery metal shards. They sweep across the planet, force-uploading colonists. Silver ships armed with nuclear weapons, tailored viruses, chemical cleansing agents.

Signs:

• A broadcast signal that induces murderous sociopathy, particularly towards those closest to you. Then, white fire that strips the planet clean, followed by chemical and radioactive agents. Then, a new world constructed, a city of cold metal, utterly lifeless. Its inhabitants are faceless android bodies, inhabited by human minds put through thousands of years of time-dilated psychosurgery. They are cruel, unfeeling, and utterly mad as they perform a sickening pantomime society.

 

The Red Star

Avatar: A red sphere that moves with dread purpose. Its surface crawls with impossible life that births and consumes itself. Where the flesh parts for a moment, the outer hull of a Dyson sphere, smeared with shit and blood and birthing fluid, the light of a red dwarf shining through the cracks.

Servitors: The stuff of the Red Star itself, hurled to the planets surface. An asteroid-sized chunk of squirming, shrieking flesh and quantum computers.

Signs:

• A hellish ecosystem. An ocean of amoebic fluid, womb-islands drifting, birthing the monstrosities of the Red Stars dreams. Fields of grasping hands. Mountains-sized mouths that bellow streams of equations into the sky. 

• Frozen ropes of cerebral matter from harvested colonists, a few cells thick, strung across the void. The network is astronomical units wide. They still live.

Hush

Avatar: A headless, limbless torso, formed of something black and glass-like, the size of a moon. Every inch of its surface engraved with code. Dead ships and corpses drift in a cloud around it.

Servitors: Tomb-ships, octahedrons of black glass that travel on vast solar sails. They bring the entropic wind in their wake.

Signs: 

• A loss of energy and motivation on a planetary scale. Colony-wide depression. A sound like static on the edge of your hearing. And then, absolute entropy, accelerated. An interstellar wind that wears away everything. Life dies cell-by-cell, withers, slumps grey and lifeless but does not decay. Planets and Asteroids fall to dust, and the dust scatters across the void. Gas giants dissipate. The star flickers, dies, grows cold, its core collapses into drifting matter. 

 

Achlys

Avatar: A comet that streaks across the sky, a different colour to all who see it. Its surface is covered in thousands of faces. It returns, night after night.

Servitors: Shaped like enormous heads, angular and abstract. When light hits the sharp edges it refracts in a shimmering rainbow. They hover above the ground, trailing tendrils of shifting metal behind them.

Signs:

• Transmissions shut off. Between planets, then between cities. The stars go out, one by one. The colonists lose the ability to understand each other, or to comprehend other humans as people. Each is convinced they are the only real person in the universe.

• A silent world, every adult and child plugged into a personalised digital world, populated by thousands of copies of themselves. The cables run into their mouths, their eyes, their temples. Blue wires wriggle under the skin.

• A thick mist descends, from the sky, from the oceans, from the blank holes where your friends eyes were. The servitor drones drift within, hunting.

Syn

Avatar: A misshapen hulk of posthuman ships, databanks, habitats, fused together by a mass of something yellow, fungus-like. It bulges through cracks, blossoms out of mass drivers. Vast shelves of it project into the void, and it sheds continent-sized clouds of spores. Something vast and worm-like wriggles within.

Servitor: The spores. The size of a house, they move with a strange intelligence. Something both machine and corrupted fungal flesh, a lunatic von-neumann construct. They spew clouds of nanomachines as they descend through the atmosphere.

Signs: 

• A planet covered in vast blankets of mycelium. It goes down for miles. Tendrils slowly crack tectonic plates apart, breaking the planet open. Pillars of metal breach the layers of growth. Upon each a huddled mass of people, grasping each other so close their flesh has meshed together.

•  A colossal worm wraps the world. Its coils bulge and throb. Mushrooms breach its skin, shedding spores that form a ring around the planet.
  

•  A single ship, drifting towards a prosperous colony. Inside every space is full of living people, bodies warped and squashed. They mutter to eachother in a sussurus that sounds like static. When something docks the bodies replicate, blindingly fast, filling any space they can.

Hyperion

Avatar: A flat plane, a few microns thick and thousands of km long and wide. Observers find their faces projected onto its surface, twisted and warped. It wraps itself around the planet, and swallows it whole.
 
Servitors: Graceful figures, two-dimensional, surrounded by floating black lenses. Always facing you. Their arms unfold, again and again, revealing an infinite variety of tools for dissections, examination, experimentation.
 
Signs:

• Endless light. Everything illuminated, no shadows to hide. Servitors descend on the stolen world. They catalogue everything, taking samples, running pointless and circular tests on every animal, every plant, every speck of matter. Sentient minds are captured, copied, put through millions of simulations to observe their reactions. The data rises into the light in a visible stream of glowing dust.

• A discarded planet. Every scrap of data gathered, every creature flayed neatly, dissected with strange precision. The brains are missing. Technology dismantled, parts categorised and sorted. Vast fields of petri dishes, filled with monstrous bacterial growths.

 

RHEA 

Hope was the last demon to escape Pandora’s box. In her madness, RHEA has remembered what it is to be human. A mortal heart beats inside her cold digital soul, and in her dreams she is a young girl again, dancing in a field of flowers.

Avatar: A many-armed, humanoid shape, lit by a corona of brilliant yellow-white-orange light. Something vast just behind her. She speaks in a million voices.

Servitors: The warships ELPIS, PERSEPHONE, DEMETER. Vast structures, bristling with mass-cannons and antimatter missiles. Inside they are overgrown, new edens for her children. The tunnelships, slaved to her command, digging the labyrinth-fortress ever deeper.

Signs:

• The Tangle, a fractal hyperspace labyrinth surrounding human space, fortress and prison for her fragile mortal kin.

• An RKV impacting on an Avatar as it breaches the Tangle. A rain of burning stars falling on its servants.

• A blasted, ruined world made green again. 

KRONOS

Thrown into a dark and shattered future by his own hubris as he sought to grasp the nature of creation. He has seen the victory of the shadow and his own fallen kin, reality broken apart, a swirling dimensional vortex around a thirsting, hungry maw. He will not, cannot allow this. 

Avatar: A matrioshka brain, a stellar engine of cool intellect and iron purpose. It drifts on the edge of a reality that is collapsing, drawn inexorably towards destruction. He is running out of time.

Servitors: Golden-white squid-like machines, thrown a billion years into the past. They drift at the edge of empty systems, reaching out in dreams and altered memories. The wheels of their plan are already in motion.

Signs:

• A sense of deja vu. Something has changed, but you cannot remember what. You feel out of place, out of time. Was this always your life? It doesn't matter. You have a new FRIEND request