Lost in Time

Vol 3: Fiendish Foe

 Fiendish Foe Part 1

Ye children of woe, watch out for the fiend,

Make them not a foe, but one you call friend

Yuck. There was dust everywhere. The air was teeming with motes upon motes of it, floating, frolicking, pirouetting in pompous curls. Clouds of it scooted about and sailed aloft into the thick, misty atmosphere. 

Nia padded her hooves out of the mushroom of dust spurting out from under the soaring wings of the interceptor, Boneshaker. Its engines whirred in a potent purr, and it rose like an eagle, tucking in its wings and flitting for the grey cover of clouds.

She found her footing a couple of yards away. She pulled up the sapphire headscarf with tawny garnish crisscrossing on its plush surface, covering half her face. She took in the striking scenery of the strange new world.

Lilac lavenders, pink dahlias and tulips touched with a tinge of scarlet stretched out in rolling fields before her, marking the grand entrance to the Empire of the Qiquia civilization. A fort stood in the distance, its quaint sheen shimmering bright like the glint of quicksilver.

Zulu and Yilda, Lieutenant Commander Yilda, joined her on the edge of the serene paradise. They stood on the boundary of two worlds in one. The dead, desolate dystopia of the Quia giants lay behind them in a wasteland that straddled in undulating deserts and rolling dunes as far as the hazy horizons allowed the eye to see.

The Quia had been at war with the Qiquia for eons, annals of their history mottled with the stain of bloodbath and the stench of feud.
The way Nia understood it, the giants inhabited the planet first, wandering from hemisphere to hemisphere in pastoral treks as they scavenged for food.

One warm evening a rogue comet careened across the silky skies, shrouded in hellish tongues of fire and slammed into the planet of the Quia. A capsule, bedecked with unalloyed sapphire and touched with sequins of spinel was nestled at the heart of it. Plants with an alien sheen and fragrances of jasmine and lavender sprouted in the deadlands around the crater. The plague of flora infested the barren lands, spreading like wildfire in the heart of summer. The capsule then popped open and a thousand dwarfs hobbled out. That was the birth of the Qiquia civilization, a new life that saw the rebirth of the dying planet riddled with decay and disarray.

Well, the original inhabitants of the planet were not...in no uncertain terms, pleased.

Until recently, a thousand years ago or thereabouts, the giants had the dwarfs on a run of their lives. Something had happened, an awakening of celestial proportions, and suddenly the Quia could not cross the border into the serene lands of the Qiquia. Not for lack of trying though.

An empress had awakened, or matured...took them a few millennia to hit that sweet spot of maturity. She had amassed a force unseen before, and defended the lands their ancestors had shed their precious blue blood for. She'd put up what Nia could only describe as wards, defending the Kingdom against the sporadic assails of the primitive giants.

That was not why Nia was here with two of her crew, though.

"Saddle up ladies, we go in, get it done and get out. Clean as a whistle." Nia started, her voice vibrating in sweet harmonic waves that sailed across the boundary. She unwound her paisley headscarf and threw it above her chestnut hair tinged with a tincture of gold. With her locks secured in place, she stepped across.
Game time.

This was a diplomatic mission-on paper. The planet of the Quia and the Qiquia was the last habitable place in the Northern quadrant of the Adenda Spiral. Nestled in the thick of the Sirius-Cygnus X-1 binary system, it was shrouded by the combined luminosity of the blue-white star and the constant x-ray bursts of the space-mongering black hole.