Lord Nergal, Black Black Clansmen, Lord Vishnu, Nobunaga Vikings, Odin, Loki Versus Madhu, Kaitabha, Tarzan, Korak and the Cannibals. Orion Wars Part I: The Harvest World - 8096 CE-

In the year 8096 CE, nobody remembered Earth. Not because it had been destroyed or forgotten, but because twenty thousand years of victories, extinctions, migrations, star collapses, and manufactured histories had buried it beneath layer upon layer of civilisation. The Orion Reach stretched across thousands of inhabited systems. 

Entire suns existed only to power cities, artificial nebulae illuminated trade corridors, and worlds were bought, sold, terraformed, consumed, and rebuilt. Yet despite all the wonders of the age, there remained one fact nobody dared discuss publicly.

Humanity was losing. Slowly. Relentlessly. System by system, world by world, generation by generation. The citizens of Korakael believed they were free. The great orbital broadcasts said so every day. The harvest quotas said so. The governors said so. The priests said so. The giant monuments surrounding every city said so. 

Freedom was repeated so often that nobody noticed the transport columns, questioned why people disappeared, asked where the labour convoys went, or spoke about the silent districts beyond the horizon.

Fear had become part of the atmosphere. Like gravity. Like weather. Like death. Far above Korakael drifted the Charnel Moons, living structures large enough to eclipse continents.

Their surfaces crawled with biological machinery, and their interiors pulsed like gigantic hearts. The Cannibal Legions of Korak lived within them, not because they built them, but because nobody knew who had. 

Nobody even knew how old they were. The Cannibals merely inherited them, the way a predator inherits teeth.

Korak himself stood nearly four metres tall. His armour was grown, not forged, and his eyes glowed with the pale green of harvested neural fire. Entire populations trembled when his image appeared across public networks. 

Children were taught to obey before they learned language. Mothers whispered warnings, fathers lowered their eyes, and cities surrendered before Korak's fleets even arrived. At the centre of the occupation sat Tarzan, not the Tarzan of ancient stories, not a man, not entirely, but Tarzan-Ascendant: genetic warlord, apex sovereign, Lord of the Cannibal Clades.

He viewed civilisation the way wolves view fences. 

Something to be broken. 

Something standing between predator and prey. 

Beside him stood the ancient entities Madhu and Kaitabha. 

Nobody knew their true origins. 

Some claimed they were older than humanity; others insisted they had once been human themselves. 

Whatever the truth, entire star nations had disappeared beneath their rule. Where they conquered, knowledge vanished. Libraries vanished. Languages vanished. Histories vanished. Only obedience remained.

Yet among the conquered there persisted forbidden stories, carried through families, hidden in songs, hidden in code, hidden in dreams. Stories about a war that had existed longer than recorded history: the Orion Wars. 

And names forbidden throughout occupied space, names capable of earning execution: Nergal, Odin, Vishnu, Loki, the Black Black Clansmen, the Nobunaga Vikings, and the Afronauts. 

For years these names had sounded like myths. Then, without warning, the myths arrived.

The first sign appeared above Korakael's northern hemisphere. A star disappeared. Not exploded. Not collapsed. Disappeared. Millions watched in silence. Astronomers screamed contradictory explanations, military command centres entered emergency protocols, and religious movements declared prophecies fulfilled. Then a second star vanished. Then a third. Panic spread because stars did not simply disappear. Not naturally. Not in this universe. Not in any universe.

The answer arrived three days later. The stars had not been destroyed. 

They had moved. An entire fleet emerged from darkness between realities, thousands of vessels, though "vessels" was too small a word. 

Some resembled floating mountain ranges; others resembled cities wrapped around captured storms. Several looked alive. One appeared to be woven from black lightning. 

Another seemed constructed entirely from music. 

The occupation authorities froze. Every strategic computer in the sector produced the same impossible identification: NERGAL ALLIANCE.

Tarzan laughed. Korak laughed. The Cannibal Lords laughed. They possessed more worlds, more soldiers, more resources, and more territory. Numbers favoured them. History favoured them. Fear favoured them. 

What could a returning myth accomplish? 

Then the Black Black Clansmen made planetfall. Nobody saw them arrive. That was the problem. One moment the occupation government existed. The next it didn't. Administrators vanished, military archives vanished, propaganda networks vanished, prisons opened, and slave registries disappeared.

For the first time in centuries, the population saw the truth. Every lie. 

Every theft. Every massacre. Every hidden grave. 

The Clansmen did not conquer territory. They exposed reality. Uprisings erupted across continents. Cities rebelled, harvest facilities burned, and transport networks collapsed. Korak deployed his elite legions. Millions died. Yet the rebellion only grew because people were no longer fighting for survival. They were fighting for memory.

Then the sky split apart. The Nobunaga Vikings entered the battle, descending from orbit in colossal war-citadels. Armoured warriors rode gravitational storms through the atmosphere. Entire Cannibal divisions vanished beneath impact waves. Mountain ranges cracked, oceans boiled, and the world shook beneath the largest military landing witnessed in ten thousand years. 

And still the enemy advanced. Madhu awakened. Kaitabha awakened. The two ancient entities rose from beneath planetary crusts where they had slept for centuries. Their shadows stretched across continents, their voices echoed through oceans, and for the first time since the invasion began, the rebellion faltered.

Even hope seemed small. Then something happened.

Something no historian would adequately explain. 

A single figure stepped from a vessel suspended above the atmosphere. No escort. No bodyguards. No ceremony. No declaration.

Lord Nergal. Millions watched. The enemy watched. The entire sector watched. He looked neither young nor old, neither king nor soldier. His face carried the exhaustion of someone who had buried civilisations and still remembered every name.

He stared at Madhu, then at Kaitabha, then at the burning world beneath them.

Finally he spoke. His voice travelled across every network, every battlefield, every city, every refugee camp, and every occupied world listening in secret. 

"You were offered stewardship." The stars themselves seemed to tremble. 

"You chose consumption." The silence that followed felt larger than space.

From somewhere beyond visible reality, new signals began arriving. 

Signals impossible to trace, impossible to intercept, impossible to understand. 

The first carried Odin's seal. The second carried Vishnu's. 

The third carried Loki's. 

And all three contained the same warning. 

The Harvest World was never the true target. 

The first battle of the Orion Wars had already begun somewhere else. And humanity was already losing.

End of Part I