The mother of entropy gave her children dominion over life. These engineers shape in ways no mortal can achieve. What else could design the beasts of the sea and the spirits of the air? Though the gods and goddesses of war live and die in the plains of Kath’le Kal, their creations bleed over into our world. Have you ever seen a whale, fought a lion, or heard the snapping pinion feathers of a harpy? I know their work, though I see no stitches. Engineers don’t use needles or thread and I dare you to find the seam in their quilts. Beware these warriors: while they hold dominion over life, they think only of death.
Icarus slept for days, gathering his strength in the hollow cavity of a fallen hive. Every two hours he woke to peel the tar off his back. The substance itched like fire, but hurt when he tugged on the loose pieces, ripping out his scales and fur. Piece by piece, he tore away the black sheetrock until his skin was free, scabs poking out of the soft tissue with calcified seeds to replace his scales. Then, wisps of hair returned, covering his neck and around each scar. He flapped the useless stumps across his back and touched his fingers. That part of him would never be whole again.
The rains came two days after he took shelter—a torrential downpour of red fluid that was the lifeblood of all engineers. Names were not the only gifts provided by the Great Devourer. From that crimson rain were shaped the larval worms of the horde.
But first, he needed a proper hive.
Icarus put his fingers to use, carving out a system of caverns so that the liquid could pool inside. Tiny fractures in the rock were easy to exploit, creating a network of arteries and veins. Soon, the scarlet rain began leaking through the ceiling and poured onto the floor, running between his toes. He cupped the fluid in his hands, which turned to clay beneath the luminescent digits of his spirit. Icarus coated the rocky walls with the substance that quickly turned to flesh. Then he constructed deep vats to hold the scarlet rain and seeded it with his blood to prevent it from coagulating. He needed time to shape his handmaidens.
Finally, it was time to build the kiln. No other part of a hive was more important than the kiln. Icarus used the deepest part of the cavern, a towering atrium with salt deposits at its base. He mixed the clay with calcium and drops of milk from his ear, molding bricks with a hollow center and a thin glaze with pockets to breathe. Icarus then stacked them along the walls, filling the empty spaces with pale sap from under his tongue. The mixture hardened into rubber cement, holding the bricks in an elastic web.
A single drop of his blood was all it took to start the fire. He tore at the scar over his wrist until a drop, ruby red, spilled onto the floor. Suddenly, the mortar quivered, and the bricks soaked up his blood through tiny pores in the make. That’s when the walls thumped, sweat beading across Icarus’s brow as mist gathered in the open corridors. He tasted the walls with a forked tongue, sweet and sour with a dash of iron. Perfect.
With the kiln ready, his true work could begin.
“Now, Fortessa, to repay you for your poor hospitality,” Icarus said, swirling the red clay between his fingers.
He clicked his tongue and thought about what designs to choose. What about the Black Rock Spider? Icarus once used them to bring down the walls of Numeria’s garden. The blueprint was practical, but the legs were tricky to get right. He bundled muscle fibers into springs and cross-stitched adrenal glands into each joint. The portions were thick, and weaving motor neurons into loops was like stringing a needle through a strand of hair. If done right, the spider came out able to leap high and into the neck of its foe. Venom was easy enough to make from the cyanide pouches lining Icarus’s gill. However, the design was lightweight and the flesh soft at the ankle. Fortessa’s ants were too numerous to strike one at a time and took advantage of delicate predators.
The spider simply wouldn’t do.
Oh, what about the Bull? A massive six-legged beast with a curved horn, split maw, and chitin so hard the shell broke Dagda’s teeth and shattered her spine. The trick was in the bake. Most engineers waited till the shell was golden brown, but Icarus knew to overcook it. Let the material twist into a gnarled branch and turn black before cutting from the kiln. Indeed, properly baked, the beast was hard to kill but, now thinking about it, it was much too slow. Fortessa’s army would climb through its joints and disassemble his creation before it reached her flank.
The Bull simply wouldn’t do.
No, no, he needed something that could clear cut a forest making his sister’s numbers meaningless. Icarus paused, red liquid dripping down from his fingers. Ah, but of course, the Gluttonous Maggot. It wasn’t an elegant design but would do the job nicely with a few modifications
Icarus smiled as a hundred fingers molded, pressed, pushed, and pulled, creating organs, muscles, and bones. He rolled the dough, making a thick bulbous body and a cavernous maw. The epithelial layer of the maggot was a simple stitch, crossing the weave into a thick hide. Then came the tail, short but strong, with ordered muscle fibers bundled together like dried wheat stalks. Last was the stomach, a wide rubber-like pouch able to expand, filling the entire abdominal cavity. There was no room for a liver and kidney, a pancreas or omentum. The glutton had a ravenous appetite, but the design needed a slight tweak. He ripped out the intestines and reversed the stomach. Now these beasts would vomit pools of acid as they charged into the fray.
Satisfied, Icarus wrapped the maggots in chimeric folds of silky flesh and hung them from the bricks in his kiln. The larvae required a slow bake, turning the flesh golden brown but leaving the stomach soft with a pink center. He could hear them take their first breaths as the crimson coloration of their flesh darkened and black fur sprouted from their backs; his signature recipe.
Sitting back on his haunches, Icarus scratched his chin. He needed something more to shake up the battlefield. Fortessa always preferred building her hives deep underground. Hives with roots so deep they are buried into their mother’s endothelial layer. How many times was he going to teach her the flaws of her design? Hopefully, she had learned from her previous mistakes, but Fortessa was a poor study. Ah, he knew just the thing needed to deal with stubborn children.
The sidewinder was a design he took from Persephone long ago. He remembered them as they were, small, delicate, and soft. They traveled through the world, burrowing through red clay far beneath the Overworld. They saw so much while their enemies were blind. Using sidewinders, any engineer could scout an entire battlefield or reveal a sunken hive unnoticed by all.
Icarus admired the design. A sleek serpent that could move at speeds few could match.
However, there was always room for improvement.
In his hands, Icarus peeled back the soft flesh and molded gills into tiny sharp feet that kicked and scraped, able to score even the most burdensome stone. Using reserves of red ichor, he filled the cavities with hardened bone and stretched the liver, knotting it inside the marrow ensuring tissue regeneration. He then pulled the skin tight like a tanned hide and stretched the beast to its limits. These serpents of his were enormous and needed to be cooked all the way through.
Icarus’s maggots were the first to wake, squealing like stuck pigs as he cut them down from the kiln. Without a name, their minds were weak, and he leashed them with the luminescent thread tied between his knuckles. His soul was absolute, and the maggots gathered in order when he cracked the whip.
One by one, they were bound to his demands; yet the larger creatures were much more challenging to control, and his mind ached from the effort. He still needed time to grow into his power. That would have to wait.
With the resources of his home used to the last drop, there was no point in staying. So, Icarus and his horde abandoned the hive, its walls decaying to ash. Soon, not a trace would remain save for the salt deposits and arterial network in the stone.
No time to be sentimental; the winds favored him when his enemy was on the defensive. Now, where was his sister hiding?
Swinging the glowing whip between his fingers, Icarus unleashed the sidewinders, and several colossal worms dropped below the sand and rock. He drove them towards his birthing sight—the place where he left his yolk behind. Fortessa had found him so quickly he was sure her hive was close. Indeed, he was correct.
Soon, his serpents slithered around a solid structure embedded in soft sands. Through the tiny silver threads of his whip, Icarus could feel the heat from within and hear the clicking noise of a thousand mandibles in the dark. Fortessa’s hive was a crooked porous pillar like the taproot of an enormous tree. She had built the spire in the bowl of a great valley. Icarus recognized it; a crater where Xerxes summoned his tempest and broke the land. A fitting tomb for his sister.
Still, as much of a mistake as her hive’s construction was, Icarus understood Fortessa’s fear. Hiding beneath the sands protected her from an attack above. Xerxes’ harpies still made her tremble; they still made her conscious of her failures, and that’s why she hid away. Surely, she could still hear the flap of a thousand wings and the rumble of lightning in the distance. Icarus smiled.
Let the battle begin.
Crack!
Down came the glowing leash as he ordered his sidewinders to carve a path through the unsuspecting hive. The beasts shifted, massive, serrated vertebrae poking through their sides and cutting through the chambers of his enemy’s lair like a sword through paper. Then, in the blink of an eye, the entire valley collapsed in on itself, the very top of the spire sinking beneath the disturbed rocks.
For an instant, he could see the creatures responsible, two towering serpents with scales peeling away from the black fur that erupted beneath. It seemed as if the entire valley would sink deep into the Devourer’s belly. Icarus designed them well.
The valley filled with his enemies’ screams, their home caving in from above as larvae squirmed to the surface. Jagged rocks pierced their soft shells and pinned them beneath rubble and sand. Icarus could see the frayed leash of his sister’s spirit snapping like cheap wire. Just as planned, the remaining forces were in chaos. Caught unaware, her confusion broke the tenuous link she shared with an army so large.
Without Fortessa’s guidance, her forces lashed out at friend and foe like drowning animals struggling for the shore. Before they could form a line, Icarus ordered his newest creations into the fray.
From the valley’s top, came behemoths with mouths as large as their bodies and teeth nearly dissolved from leaking acid. These creatures, designed to be free of pain, charged forward with a single purpose.
As they reached the confused forces below, they emptied their stomachs, launching a putrid yellow liquid that burned through anything it touched. Even with six legs, the skittering nameless of Fortessa’s horde couldn’t escape the raining death that poured from above. So effective was the acid that even the bile beasts themselves fell prey to the liquid that melted through the softer tissue in their mouths and esophagus.
Icarus took note and would design the next batch to have a more robust epithelial lining above the stomach.
Soon, the ground, once teeming with life, grew quiet. Fortessa’s army fell with ease despite outnumbering Icarus ten to one. He found her body still quivering in pain upon the uprooted rocks that had once been the walls of her hive. His maggots steered clear, creating a pocket around her body. She deserved to die at the hands of an engineer. Though she was weak, his sister tried and so deserved that honor.
Fortessa shuddered, coughing up blood and struggling violently at the sight of him. Only two of her eight legs remained, with the others little more than liquified nubs. The delicate fingers that she had once used to build her forces were all gone. Her body was useless now, and death, mercy. She was simply too inexperienced. Even with her large army, there was little variety in her larvae. Icarus hoped she would learn from this death and, perhaps, would make use of the designs he had taught her.
“Better luck next time, sister.”
Removing the head was the only clean way to kill an engineer. All of them possessed many hearts, lungs, and other vital organs. The redundancy was a powerful defense. Even so, they only had one mind, and it was the seat of their name. When Icarus tore her head from her body, Fortessa was set free, her porous spirit slipping down below the sands to wait in the dark world once more.
Icarus felt it now, that pang in his belly, that itch across his spine. The cries of battle dulled his appetite, but not for long. Indeed, only one thing could quench his thirst; the sounds of battle and the liquid kiss of adrenaline as spikes dug into his ankle.
By the next day, his forces had all but cleared the shattered halls of that broken hive. Within the collapsed tomb, they discovered vats of the crimson fluid that were still fresh and ready for use. Icarus stored it all within the cavernous bodies of his sidewinders.
Within those mobile fortresses were the cries of his defeated foes, who were being reworked into suitable allies. They would become the caretakers of the next generation. After all, Icarus had new ideas and needed a blank canvas to paint. Perhaps he would build his next hive in the base of a mountain, or the endless rivers of pus below ground.
As his forces moved on, Icarus looked towards a distant blue star, which brought pain to the vestigial bloody limbs on his back.
“Persephone, Xerxes. I hope you’re ready.” He said, tossing his sister’s head in the sand.
The battle was over, but the war had just begun.