The Redwalkers

   Sayven and his band of fellow refugees emerged from the red desert expanses of the East to find themselves, once again, at a desolate valley. This time they seemed to have stumbled upon industrial ruins. The place was littered with metal waste, possibly remains of a destroyed factory complex. The ground seemed to be marred with ashes and scorch marks, most likely produced by heavy bomb fire. The group was easily able to guess that the area must have been a battlefield of some kind.

    Violent worker revolts weren't at all uncommon in Martian industrial complexes like this. The Martian labororer were always treated not much better than slaves. Terran military workers were paid by the factory owners as overseers of the employees. They ruled with the most iron of fists, spending every day harassing, threatening, beating, and verbally abusing Martian laborers. They would mke a habit of intimidating the workers as they walked to and from work, pointing their big Terran guns directly in their faces, especially the faces of children. Martian children would ritualistically gain their first taste of true horror on their first day of work as they stared down the barrel of a 12 gauge automatic rifle.(overseers used old type bullet guns, the Terran military's precious heat rifles were much too valuable to waste on what they called "the red waste") The overseers would shout threats to them, wildly threatening to "make you dirty Reds dead!". The conditions within the physical factories were no better. The buildings were engineered to run as cheaply as possible. There was no internal temperature control,(room temperature would entirely depend on outside weather) the work areas were horrifically cramped, with each square inch filled with as much laborers as structurally possible, and any workplace health conditions were virtually nonexistent. It wasn't uncommon to have a laborer die or contract an illness while on the job nearly single every week. Death and suffering were made regular occurances in those metal hellholes.

     Laborers were forced to face all of these horrors for a meager pay of 150 credits a week, barely enough to pay rent for the on-site housing that employees were assingned to live within. The horrors of Martian laborer life naturally served to incite rebelliousness within the workforce, especially among the brash adolescents. Some labor communities would eventually manage to reason away cries of rebellion, citing excessive violence and risk as reasons for remaining complacent. Others did not. Others looked at the wastleland in which they had been born in, looked at the monsters they had been forced to serve from childhood, and felt that they must burn, that it was their duty to make the Terran enemy feel the wrath of the once proud Martian proud Martian race. They felt that they needed to feel the edge of Martian blades and bleed blood colored the same as the skies of the planet they dared tr to oppress. These rebels let revenge and ambition lead them to draft great plans and strategies for a massive labor revolt . They would spend months, even years in planning and anticipation for their revenge, and eventually they would take up arms. They often had no appreciation of guns, an exclusively Terran concept, instead opting to take up the old type weapons that were valued by their ancestors:spears, axes, hammers, all types of swords, and sometimes even makeshift specoichs, the lost favored weapon of many great ancient Martain civilizations. They wouls take their tools and make their stand, assemble in sound and fury, with all the rage and ambitons, to face their oppressors and in turn regain  the prestige of their ancestrals civilizations.

     And they would fight.

     They would destroy.

     Sometimes they would even burn down the industrial complexes that housed their oppression.

     But they would never really win.

     They would die.

     They would die in mass.

     They would burn and fall, their blue Martian blood spraying across the ground and factory walls, their spirits beng crushed by the mighty Terran boot.

     They would die by Terran bullets and bombs.

     Their screams would fill the air. They would die crying out their great war anthem, Fhrakxios Khaszia

         But they would always be silenced. They would die.

          Every single time.

     Sayven knew of this great dying much too well. He looked at the desolate ruins and saw, in stark clarity, the shadows of his past. Of his adolescent years as a angered revolutionary. As a disgruntled laborer who screamed cries of revolution, who banded others to his cause and convinced them to take arms. As a witnesser of the great dying, the great Terran guns and bombs.

     As a lone survivor.

     As a broken man.

     Sayven quicky stopped himself from dwelling back on the past. There was too much too much tramau in those days. If he was going to continue on, if he was going to find a way to survive, he was going to have too abandon those ghosts. He looked up to the distanceand saw Hedge and Jambo, two of the other refugees, exploring the area up ahead. He ran to catch up with them, and while he was running he noticed a red mark on a nearby wall.. He stopped to investigate and saw that it was a message. Written in Terran red blood. 

       "Khaszia", it read.

       The Martian word for self, directly translating to "redwalker".

       It was the final cry of these fallen patriots.

       And it was a the same times as Sayven saw this Hedge and Jmabo heard the explosion and gunfire in the distance and the mettalic cry of the Behemoth.