A camera drone activates on the rooftop of a building in Iddiserigard. Saede Riordan stands leaning against the rusted railing smoking a cigarette. The sky is a dusky red twilight hue and the space above swirls with the darkness of the abyss. Saede’s clone looks…rather off. Her normally coffee colored skin has turned a charcoal black like that of a burnt corpse and bone white splotches and mottling are spreading across her body. In places her skin looks cracked and desiccated in places with an unpleasant scaled texture and in others it seems to be liquifying and running. Hard crystal spikes extrude from the backs of her forearms and lower legs, and a glowing patch of flat crystal has spread out from one of her cheeks giving her a rather alien visage.
“Hello my friends, welcome back to Skarkon II.”
Saede takes a drag of her cigarette and picks up her arm from where it was leaning on the railing, frowning slightly at the handprint of melting flesh left behind.
“I seem to be melting a bit,” she remarks, examining her still-dripping fingers. “I’m surprised this doesn’t hurt. I have no idea if it’s going to be fatal or not.” She shakes her head and looks up at the sky and then back at the drone, “Anyway, I thought I’d tell y’all a story. Among a lot of the spacefaring clans I’ve come across there’s a tale of the Abyss, what some call the Nameless God, or the Ravening Spirit, of the Howling Lost. The idea is that when souls are lost in deep space, sometimes they can’t find their way home and something ends up claiming them. Not the Evil God of the Amarr although that’s a risk as well, but something that all the spirits, even the Amarr know to rightly fear. A spirit of the void, of the darkness between the stars. She, and in most of the stories she’s definitely a she for some reason, gathers up and consumes the souls of those lost to the void. I didn’t really think much of this before becoming a capsuleer. In fact, before becoming a capsuleer I was much less spiritual than I am now. There’s something about the vast distances of space, the haunted emptiness, that stirs the imagination. I went from being a staunch atheist to…well after living among the stars for as long as I have, the idea of spirits and monsters and howling abominations don’t seem so far fetched anymore.”
The camera drone looks past Saede, panning along the darkened horizon and out over the ocean. To the right side of the image part of the Ishohuolvi Penninsula can be seen, where the endless apocalypse of the warclone Proving Grounds continues to put on a silent lightshow, like a cataclysmic fireworks display.
“The story of the Abyss always struck me as particularly compelling. My clan has quite a few Honored Spirits of the Void. Allied spirits associated with space which we made alliances with during our time cast adrift among the stars before we’d eventually found a home here on Skarkon. There’s The Singer, a spirit of guidance, sort of a North Star in space. There’s the Dark Wind, a spirit of gravitation and radiation that helps protect and ferry the souls of the dead back across the River Annan, there’s Steel Coyote, a spirit of metis and war and technology who protects the living and dead from malicious and alien forces, there’s Thunder Raven, a spirit of warp cores and main reactors and engines whose fiery song keeps the ship humming and alive, and there’s Iron Fox, a spirit of starships and magic who acts as a go between for the shaman when communing with various ship spirits and more neutral spirits of the void.
"These spirits are still honored in the pantheon of my clan and even after having settled on Skarkon II they still maintained a strong position of prominence which the spirits of Skarkon never quite managed to displace. The Abyss is not an honored spirit, and in fact, a lot of the honored spirits we have are guardians that ward off the Abyss and her legions of tortured and howling dead. The Abyss is the demon goddess of deadspace, the collector of mad and tortured dead. It’s said that it is due to her eldritch influence that the dead lost to deadspace become horrifically fused together into slavering nightmares, hungering servants of She who Bears No Name.”
A distant rumble of thunder can be heard on the video, leading Saede to glance out over the ocean before continuing.
“There’s a prayer we offer up to the dead which I quite like, it goes “Dearest Ancestors, Honored spirits, please hear our humble plea. One of our number has been lost to us and we ask you to gather their soul in your embrace. Grant them kindness and safe rest, help them let down their burdens and continue their journey. Honored spirits, this soul must now pass into your hands. In peace, may they leave these shores. In love, we ask that you guide them to the next. Grant them safe passage across the stars. May they be remembered forever, until there is no more death, no more pain, and the Abyss herself shall give up her dead, and return them to us. May we meet again."
The rumbling seems to grow louder and Saede looks around, peering up at the sky for a moment but still seeing nothing but the titanic battle occurring off to the northeast.
“That prayer predates the official discovery of Abyssal Deadspace, so when the Abyss actually opened up like the widening maw of a hungry god and started spilling out Triglavians, it was…well it was very weird. Like an ancient prophecy come to life. I think that was probably the point at which I really stopped being an atheist. The Abyss was suddenly far too real, and that reality settled into me like a forgotten curse laid deep in my bones. The shamans hadn’t been full of ■■■■ after all, imagine my surprise….”
She trails off and her eyes start to widen, the roar has grown to the point where it dominates all other sound, “What the ■■■■ is that?” She shouts over the sound. The camera drone pans away from her as a massive fireball lights up in the southeastern sky, shining like a miniature sun and bringing out a blue to the atmosphere that hasn’t been seen since the transmutation of the system’s star. The brilliant and shining comet soars away to the south in a great and terrible roar and Saede braces herself for an impact shockwave that never arrives. Instead, somewhere off in the southern sand sea comes an enormous flash of superheated drive trails as what is now clearly an enormous vehicle of some sort fires its thrusters in a suicide burn that brings it in for a hellish, shrieking, thunderous landing which scorches the sand into glass for kilometers in its wake. Bits of burning metal and composite are sent flying up on long arcs as it finally slams into the sand and comes to a rest. Saede watches all of this somewhat slack jawed, then shakes herself out of it and hustles into action.
“You’ll have to excuse me folks, I need to go deal with this.”
The camera drone abruptly cuts out and the video comes to an end.