We called ourselves wise, and we believed we understood. We were cautious but also confident. We made enemies of plague, industrial war, mutually assured destruction, and the rapid collapse of the climate. And each we defeated in turn. And when we’d run out of things to conquer on Earth, we imagined more and planned to overcome them as well.

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Invasions of less developed worlds were standard practice for the Empire. The established infrastructure and production capability meant that recovery and contribution could quickly follow once capitulation was complete. The claimed world retained most of its autonomy but submitted to Imperial law. The Empire invested in the world enough to kickstart a thriving interplanetary economy, which could be taxed and tariffed. In return, the inhabitants gained access to the galaxy.

Interestingly, if a world was too undeveloped, then the Empire would wait to attempt such an operation. The speed at which information travels is typically the metric by which this decision is made, affecting the campaign’s length. It is a somewhat paradoxical reality that less developed worlds are more difficult to lay claim to.

Invasions are massive operations. They require millions of soldiers and all the equipment and supplies to keep those soldiers in a useful state. The sheer distance of space travel compounds the issue. If an army were to occupy an entire planet, then typical doctrine would demand they use three times as many soldiers as there were people on the planet. Such a strategy would be impossible to maintain, even accounting for the Imperial military’s incredible strength.

Wartime invasions against other galactic powers were much more difficult. Typically, invasions in those circumstances were last resorts, only used when a bombardment was not an effective way to achieve their war goals. A fight against an entrenched enemy, with home territory advantage, was costly – both in lives and operational costs.

Conversely, with proper timing, a suitably undeveloped world could fold in months with the correct pressures. Imperial materials science had the advantage of millennia of development, and the weapons were of a similar caliber. The Imperial Army could simply roll over the more primitive fortifications and equipment of those alien worlds. A single demonstration of the difference in strength could quickly spread around the globe. And rather than sacrifice themselves in a war they could not win, the powers of the world would surrender.

Treaties were signed, fealty sworn, and the world grew, and the Empire grew just that much larger.

Primitive worlds, however, were more difficult. A world just on the cusp of an information age could be expected to fall in months, a year at most. A primitive world, where information traveled at its courier’s speed, became exponentially more difficult to fully pacify. The isolation of the different populations meant that the forces present would have to make themselves known worldwide, rather than maintain an impenetrable beachhead where Imperial influence could spread out.

Despite all this, the Emperor decreed that Laetus would be the next to join the Empire. The Emperor’s desires were aimed toward a specific valley that was host to various unique challenges. The natives called that place The Garden that Hangs from Heaven, and the Emperor christened it Caelvam. Both named the valley for the same reason:

The valley floor was an intricate, fractal web of canyons and canals, punctuated by seven circular lakes and overflowing with jungle. However, upon closer inspection, the canyons revealed themselves to be foliage choked thoroughfares framed by an ancient sprawling metropolis’s skeletons. The jungle grew from the skyscrapers and created entirely new ecosystems hundreds of meters above the forest floor. At the head of the complex ecosystem lay a golden pyramid with sides nine kilometers long.

General Actinius was the first Imperial to attempt the invasion. That fantastic landscape presented the first great obstacle: Landing sites for a Forward Operating Base were sparse. There wasn’t room to land their ships among the overgrown skyscrapers or on the slopes of the mountains that framed Caelvam. Additionally, troop movement through the jungle presented another problem.

The native population of Caelvam was arboreal in nature and could move with ridiculous agility through the jungle’s complex three-dimensional environment. Imperial soldiers were not arboreal, and a march through the ancient city would leave them supremely vulnerable. Though some arboreal populations existed within the Empire, none could match the Viribus for size and speed – both of which were important when each soldier carried a basic kit that would weigh nearly fifty kilograms on Laetus. While it was possible to train an army with a new operational doctrine, it would take decades to thoroughly do so, and there would be no guarantee of their effectiveness.

Airpower within the urban jungle would be of little assistance in troop movement. The cliff-like skyscrapers’ close confines were made even narrower by the trees growing up and outward from them. Few air vehicles could maneuver into those spaces, and their cabins did not carry more than a handful of soldiers at a time. Useful for air support, but not for mass troop movement.

The only real option was to use the water. Caelvum was crisscrossed with a web of rivers and seven lakes, all arranged in a symmetrical pattern visible from orbit. Many of the canals were wide enough that travel was possible outside of the bow range of the Viribus, so troops could travel unmolested. And every channel traced its origin back to the pyramid.

Relatively small and rare areas within the metropolis were devoid of the ruins, where jungle gave way to sparser forests that were much easier to clear. One such area bordered a lake roughly fifty kilometers south-east of the pyramid. General Actinius made his landing there and dubbed the place Landing.

General Actinius had not been a poetic Vyrăis.

Actinius was experienced, however. Actinius oversaw dozens of invasions on underdeveloped worlds and three wartime invasions. He’d won far more battles than he’s lost. Still, those losses had been against impossible odds: he faced forces that were properly entrenched, equipped, and trained to be effective against the modern military tactics of interstellar warfare.

But Actinius lost on Laetus; he underestimated this place.

The pyramid was a much more defended structure than it first appeared in orbital imaging, unlike the stack of stones overgrown by vines and trees that Actinius expected. Instead, the pyramid was surrounded by an intricate pattern of earth and stone emplacements. And while the waterways did meet at the pyramid, they spilled from shallow underground springs that most boats could not navigate.

General Actinius proceeded as planned, however, and attacked the pyramid with overwhelming force. The Viribus scattered in the face of the Imperial assault, and many escaped the attack by using the confusing landscape of trenches and fortifications. Despite its surprising lack of jungle growth, many natives were able to flee from the attack. But the battle was won, and General Actinius began constructing a second perimeter around the pyramid where he could start to explore the strange structure.

The pyramid was a marvel of engineering. It was no simple stone monument, but instead some form of gargantuan machine. The canals did originate from the temple and flowed warm and clean from an entrance that could have made Imperial architects weep in jealousy. Inside, the General realized the Emperor’s wisdom.

General Actinius flew in experts from all over the Empire. Xeno-archeologists, biologists, zoologists, geologists, xeno-paleontologists, even neurologists and engineers of every field. The pyramid became secondary in his search to claim the treasure hidden inside: the aliens that built it. In a few months of furious work, the experts succeeded in reviving a single Human.

The Viribus attacks started soon after. And when the Human escaped, the attacks got worse. The forest became a killing field of hidden pitfalls and Viribus ambushes. Equipment failed under mysterious circumstances, always at the critical moment when lives relied on its function. The sabotage soon evolved into outright traps, grenades that had gone missing days earlier rigged to explode.

Actinius’s failures soon multiplied. His experts extracted a second Human, and while transporting it to a more secure location, it too went missing. Soon after, an attack on the pyramid base was repelled. It was quickly discovered that the pyramid’s entrance had been sealed while their forces were concentrated at the walls. All further attempts to force the doors open resulted in failure.

Enraged by his General’s failure, the Emperor removed Actinius from his position and appointed a new General: Jacentarius.

Jacentarius did not rush into things. Clearly, Actinius’s failure was derived from a lack of proper planning and information gathering. Laetus was not a developed world. Its people still roamed and settled in small, isolated numbers. And though it was within their power to flatten the valley, the Emperor did not desire the melted slag that would be leftover. Jacentarius’s approach would need to be more nuanced: he would form his plan along two fronts.

Firstly, he could not risk damaging the technology within the pyramid, so he would abandon the contested territory around it. Instead, he had the experts turn to examine the valley itself. Jacentarius theorized that the pyramid’s structure could extend much farther below the ground, such as the subterranean transport systems common to similar metropolises in the Empire. Once a potential site was discovered, he would send out a heavily guarded team to cut the jungle away from a path that led to the site.

By clearing the jungle, he removed the Viribus advantage in mobility. If the Viribus wanted to attack these teams, they would need to do it on open ground. The Viribus had proven to be fierce warriors, but even copper tipped arrows could not pierce through the armor plating of a VITA walker.

Secondly, a war with the various Viribus tribes would last for many generations. If Laetus was to become a permanent member of the Empire, the hostilities between Imperial forces and the tribes would need to end. There was no point in waiting for the Viribus to surrender. Even if one tribe did decide to follow reason and surrender to superior Imperial powers, the rest would not. They were not unified. It would have to be the Empire that made the first move towards peace.

And it would be the Empire that rewrote this embarrassment of an invasion to fit the proper narrative.

Jacentarius spent almost thirty years pursuing those ends. His teams had uncovered tens of subterranean ruins, most flooded or overflowed with debris. Still, no entrances to the pyramid had been exposed.

He’d made significant progress in undoing the damage to Empire-Viribus relations, however. Tribes now regularly visited Landing to trade and receive schooling and medicine. And though the Viribus could only really trade in furs and their foul fermentations – which were sealed in clay pots that had to be smashed open to drink – they were fond of Imperial glassware and spices.

While the trade was peaceful, it had not ended the conflicts in the forest. And though the ferocity and cleverness of their traps and ambushes had waned, there were still tribes that claimed lives every day.

And still no new developments toward the Pyramid Reclamation Project. If Jacentarius didn’t have progress to show the Emperor soon, he could be removed as well.

Something would need to change.

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The structure she resided within, as impressive as it was, was not functional. There was power, but everything was off except for, presumably, the air circulation and some of the lights. The fact that they could breathe was evidence enough that something was pushing the cold breeze across her bare shoulders. Without it, she doubted the air would be breathable if they were as far from the outside as she suspected. As for light, something was just wrong. Some rooms were not lit at all, and others were blindingly bright, still more were lit almost as an afterthought of strangely placed lamps.

She rationalized that whatever did power this place, it must only just be enough to keep it livable. Presumably, whatever processes were involved with bringing her to life required a large amount of power. Likely, whatever power there was, was dedicated to the systems that required them – whatever those might be. It would explain why no one else was alive yet.

It also probably meant that this was a one-time deal. No do-overs. Which also meant that she had a lot of work to do.

They hadn’t been born with clothes, obviously, and neither had they found any. The air was cold and moved in a draft that consistently sucked the heat out of her skin. Her knuckles and her toes were frequently painfully cold, and the only way to warm them was to sit her bare bottom on the floor and tuck both sets behind her knees. She was sure it was worse for her companion, who had other body parts that would be sensitive to the chill.

Water, thankfully, was a non-issue. The great hall that they were born in had a steady supply of warm freshwater. The water fell in a steady rain from a ceiling that she could only barely make out in the gloom. It was collected into a gently sloping channel, with thin drains at regular intervals that kept the water ankle deep for a hundred meters before it disappeared into another grated drain. The only purpose she could imagine for such a water feature was precisely what they were already using it for, drinking and washing.

She had some reservations involving heavy metals, but the water didn’t taste metallic, so she hoped that was a good sign.

Food was the larger issue. She didn’t know how long it had been since they were born, but neither of them had much body fat at all, and eventually, they would begin to starve. And if they started to starve, it was her companion that would be worse off.

With that thought, she held a little tighter to his hand as she led him through the darkened halls of the structure. He was all she had. Without him around, she’d be stuck in this place all by herself. He didn’t talk much, but that was fine; she just needed him to be there. He could, and often did speak, but mostly only when he had a panic attack.

She wasn’t sure what else to call them, but they were the reason she was afraid to leave him alone. The few times she had gone exploring without him, she’d returned to find him with new self-inflicted injuries. Sometimes he cried. Other times he screamed. She’d gotten so scared he would claw out his own eyes that she’d cut his nails to the quick with her teeth, and he was so apathetic between attacks that he’d let her do it.

His arms and face still had open wounds on them, sets of four parallel, red and swollen lines.

Taking care of him was a full-time job and one that pushed her personal boundaries as well, even without considering that she still hadn’t found clothes yet. She couldn’t even wrap his injuries. Regularly washing them in the rain from the great hall was the best she could come up with. He was getting better, though, especially since she’d started something resembling a schedule. There wasn’t a way to tell time inside the structure, but he slept when she did and drank and washed when she did.

And those injuries had significantly weakened him. He hadn’t eaten anything since those injuries, and the lost blood simply couldn’t be replaced. If they started to starve, and if he wasn’t already, then he would have it a lot worse than she did.

Her stomach twisted at the thought, and she heard it growl with hunger down in her belly. His stomach growled as well, and he scowled, but he didn’t say anything.

“Let’s try this one,” she said as they came to the next break in the corridor. The room was not lit, but the hall’s dim lights were enough to cast some light into the room.

The first thing she noticed was that someone had been there before them. She gasped as she took in the woolen rugs spread across the floor, dyed in reds and purples. There were woven baskets and clay pots, clearly handwoven and shaped. The baskets had carefully arranged tools made of wood and bone, and some of the uncovered pots were filled with colorful dyes that were crusted over. A wooden frame dominated one half of the room, where more silk thread had been abandoned in the process of being wound onto spools. The other half of the room was dominated by a loom with an abandoned weaving still stretched across it.

With another gasp of realization, she let go of her companion’s hand and rushed into the room. She hissed and hopped around when her bare foot discovered a bone needle that had been abandoned on the floor. She tugged the little bone needle out of her heel, and with considerably more care with where she put her feet, approached one of the baskets by the loom.

“Look!” she called to him as she unfolded one of the silk sheets inside the basket. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed as she examined it in the dim light. The dyed silk’s fractal patterns boggled her eyes; she could almost lose herself staring at it. Everything in the basket was just as beautiful, and while they followed the same patterns, each one had unique mistakes and inconsistencies that somehow made them more attractive to her. They felt Human next to the clean lines and nonsensical layouts of the vast structure.

It was such a shame that she was going to tear one up for bandages.

She picked three of the silks and carefully picked her way back to the entrance of the room. She set them down and selected one as she approached her companion.

She bit at one side of the silk and pulled as hard as she could with her hands. The silk didn’t tear. Instead, it stretched, and she had to stop when her teeth started to hurt. “Okay, there goes that idea,” she grumbled around her fingers as she inspected her teeth. It felt like one had moved a bit, but hopefully, she was mistaken.

“New plan,” she grunted as she selected a sheet of silk that wasn’t covered in her drool and approached her companion again. “Arms up,” she ordered.

He obeyed with a reluctance that spoke to his confusion, though neither very strongly. The silk sheets were thankfully huge, like bedsheets for a king-sized bed, so she started at one arm and worked her way across his torso. It only took a wrap or two to cover the cuts on his arms and threw the rest of the sheet around him in a strange approximation of a toga. There was thankfully enough material that she was able to tie the sheet around his other arm too. Her companion had a decent covering when she was done, though it rode a bit high on his legs since most of the material went out to his forearms like silken wings.

After a moment of deliberation, she tossed the second sheet – which was only slightly damp from her attempts to tear it – over his other shoulder. This time the sheet hung below his knees, and she was more confident it would keep him warm. He seemed skeptical but remained silent.

“There, now your cuts are covered,” she said, satisfied with how the sheet clung to him. She retrieved the third sheet and did her best to mimic how she’d tied it around him for herself. “Warmer already. And as a bonus, no more flopping our bits onto the floor,” she said with a satisfied smile.

“If the candles and wooden bowls we found in the other rooms aren’t proof enough, this definitely is: There were people in here before us,” she continued with a growing smile. It was more like talking to herself than having a conversation, but her companion was a good listener. “Which also means there must be a way out of this place, too!”

Carefully, she began to pick her way through the mess of the silk weaving room. She found a basket and started to pick up the abandoned tools to hopefully avoid a step on anything else. But as she explored the dim room, a thought occurred to her.

“Now, where did they get all this silk?” she muttered. It would be odd, she thought, for anyone to bother bringing in whatever they made silk from all the way into the structure. It would be exceedingly strange if this place was as big as she thought it was. Unless there was an exit nearby, or more likely, a source of silk.

She turned her attention away from the floor, with its textured and metal and clear drainage channels cut in sharp lines along the outer perimeter, and to the walls. Several knobbly greebles came to life with a halo of pale purple-blue fairy light as she approached one of the walls. She thought that a few of the strange nodules looked like they might be gauges, although there was no glass or display other than the dancing, holographic lights that always seemed to come from nowhere. As usual, she didn’t recognize the flickering as any sort of writing.

However, as she watched, the pattern of flickering lights changed. One moment they flashed one way, and then they started flashing another. And at the same moment, she noticed a noise from above her.

She snapped her head up but couldn’t see anything in the gloom over her head. Something rustled and clinked together above her head. She stood as still as she could and barely dared to breathe as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Painfully slowly, she began to make out a repeating pattern above her head.

It was difficult to make out details, and she could only really see the very bottom edges of whatever it was hanging from the ceiling. She could see an array of rectangular panels with their tops disappeared into the dark between them, but the pattern was broken where something she couldn’t identify hung down in ragged curtains.

A panel swayed, ever so slightly, and her eyes locked on the motion. With carefully measured movements, she reached into the basket in her arms for one of the heavy wooden shuttles she’d retrieved from the floor. She crouched, painfully slowly, and set the basket down. Her feet slid across the floor with the barest sound as she took a wider stance.

Another panel began to rock erratically in the dark, and she carefully repositioned. She could just make out the space between the boards as they lined up, and if anything reached between them, she would see it.

After several moments of tense waiting, she saw it. Something moved in that little slice of the world she’d focused all her attention onto, a subtle change in the black-on-black. With a shout, she hurled the shuttle as hard as she could. Surprisingly, the shuttle went precisely where she wanted it to and shattered against the shadow.

Something hissed in the dark, and she felt more than saw the dark blur fall to the floor. Something landed across the silk thread spinning tools, and the wooden construct shattered and sprayed across the floor.

The wooden thread spinner’s shattered pieces shifted and made a terrible clatter as something oily and reflective extracted itself from the pile.

She grimaced. In the dark, she still couldn’t make out what she’d hit, only that it was low to the ground and darkly colored. All she’d really done, apparently, was piss it off and let it know they were there. She stiffened, and her breath caught in her throat as she realized she’d made a grave mistake.

Her companion wasn’t at the door anymore. He was crouched over something in another corner of the room only a few steps away from the ruined spinning machine. And he hadn’t even acknowledged the destruction. He just sat there and didn’t move – his shoulders shook subtly beneath his new silken clothing.

He didn’t even move as something slithered up his spine out of the shadows.

She scrambled into a sprint and tried to yell something creative like, “Get away from him!” Instead, all that came out was a strangled scream that didn’t quite count as a battle cry. She was across the room in moments, but not before whatever had been lurking in the shadows had slithered up and around her companion’s neck. Its body was long and disappeared into the debris behind her companion, and she could see bulging muscle beneath oily black scales as it flexed to move that bulky mass across the floor.

And just before she could leap at the thing, where its body bent and bunched next to her companion so it could continue engulfing the man, it lit up with fairy-light.

It was too late to arrest her momentum, and she crashed into the creature with all her weight. Its body was surprisingly lightweight, though the scales and muscles felt like stone against her shoulder. There was a loud, almost panicked hiss as it uncoiled from around her companion and coiled around her instead.

In an instant, she was surrounded by the threatening hissing noise the creature seemed to emit from every inch of its body. She felt its muscles bulge as it wrapped around her tightly. One arm pinned to her chest, the other forced into an awkward angle over her head. It squeezed slowly, and no amount of struggling could change it. The hissing grew more pronounced as its cold scales slid across her skin.

The fairy-light flickered across its body and then steadied. Immobilized, she had no choice but to stare forward as the head of the snake-like creature hovered in front of her face. The fairy light flickered and skittered across its scales like sparks. They formed strange swirls, and circular patterns as its arrow-like, eyeless head slowly approached her face. And then all resemblance to a snake vanished as its head split open like a flower.

Suddenly, she stared down the throat of the creature. An oddly calm part of her mind boggled at what she saw. The rest of her mind wanted to scream and start running in tight little circles, but the creature’s muscular body kept her pinned to the floor.

The beast didn’t have anything resembling teeth, and its flower-like maw hinged on intricately cut metal that folded and bent under the attention of an array of perfectly patterned muscle. Seven tiny appendages, similarly regular in their form, reached out from the mouth toward her face. In their center, a ring of oily black flesh creased and slid to cover its throat – the flesh almost seemed to roll over itself, like it was continually swallowing its own esophagus.

At that moment, she understood what she saw and heard. What she stared at wasn’t a creature at all: it was a machine. The flesh was actually some sort of strange polymer that was cold to the touch. And the hiss that the construct emitted was actually the action of its muscles as they flexed under pneumatic pressure.

Its appendages gently caressed her face in a searching, curious manner. Their touch was feather-light, and they paused for a moment over each eye as she reflexively closed them. They paused again when they reached her hairline, and she shivered as the little appendages searched more firmly through her hair.

However, after a moment, the appendages retreated, apparently satisfied that it wouldn’t find what it searched for there. Its grip around her remained steady, but it slowly began to slide across her to one of the walls. She stayed very still as the machine somehow snaked its body along the greebling and back into the rafter-like ceiling. Its body was nearly seven times as long as she was tall, and it took several minutes of uncomfortable hissing, flexing, and sliding scales for its tapered end to finally release her.

Flat on her back, she watched as its shadow weaved between the strange panels – only revealed by their swaying motion. Her attention was shifted, however, by a sniffle beside her.

She tried not to groan as she got back to her feet. She approached her companion carefully and rested a comforting arm across his shoulders. He wasn’t sobbing anymore, but as she watched, a few tears rolled off his chin and onto the bundle of silk he clutched in his hands. She gently reached down and firmly untangled his fingers from it, and the stiff silk sprang back into its shape.

A doll stitched together from blue died silk, but she didn’t recognize the creature it depicted. It had four arms and a tail that nearly doubled its overall length. And the head was almost conical in shape, with six floppy silk cuts that fanned off the back of it. It had worn stitching and was thin in places where a child had probably spent years dragging it across the ground by one lovingly stitched arm or leg.

“My fault,” he choked as another tear fell from his face and soaked into the little doll. “I remember … my fault.”