Short settings: Mini setting writing 1: Warbeasts (part one this went long)

So... it seems I am bad at editing down for shortness. It is a skill I promise to work on! For now, here is part one, artless and a day late. Part 2 and art will be forthcoming!


"Remember now initiates. Remember now the days of Light and Fire. Before the blackening of the noontide gate and the loss of the even-star. Remember when this world was once part of something greater. A far flung space confederation, where mighty liners and star slips spanned the unimaginable distances between the stars. When distant Urth spoke in the heavens and its words were law and wisdom. Before the Fourth tide and the before even the seed fell. Remember when we came to Falland's World in glittering ships of chitin and steel. Remember when machines and beasts were seeded and bent to man's will. Remember our heritage, when the Kashaw comes to drive you from hall and home. Remember that this life of tillage is not our lot. Once we were kings. Once we ruled the stars even the god beasts cannot now reach."

Falland's world was once part of a great empire, the once universal Confederation of Man, though it would be hard to see it now. The people of the planet live in poverty, scratching a living from an alien soil which barely supports them. The terraforming of Falland's world went badly wrong in the first days, and lead to a difficult world, filled with monstrous mega fauna who need to be controlled to allow human life. It also meant that the humans had to live off of the great hullsherds, enormous beasts which can be farmed to allow humans to survive, if not thrive.

The worst was yet to come for the Fallanders, though. In the Collapse, the mighty technologies of the Confederation turned against them, sentience that controlled their machines going mad, and using the nanotech that the confederation relied upon against it. Worlds burned, ships shattered and the confederation died. On Falland's world, the world AI decided that since this was a world where mega-fauna had lived and thrived, that it would see if humanity could live without it's technology, and prove itself worthy of survival. The nanites that covered the world were given a simple instruction; to destroy any device which gave off or used too much power and was not alive.

Generators and engines dissolved. Wiring carrying the electricity of the world began to collapse, as the nanites sensed the power flowing within. Technology and the world began, swiftly to collapse.

However, the humans of Falland's world were saved by some last minute research in the few remaining clean zones. Already intense study of the creatures and how to manipulate their genome was advanced until it became possible to breed monstrous creatures that could emphatically bond with certain gene modded humans. The human would provide the will and the intelligence and the beasts enormous might. Hurrying the program forward, they created a new clade of humans; the altered.

These altered were then paired with one of the godbeasts (as they would later be known). Towering, deadly monsters. Standing taller than a skyscraper and able to shatter the armour and bodies of the native creatures of Falland's world, they came to protect the human settlements where technology suddenly could not.

At first a semblance of society prospered. The altered formed a warriors guild, keeping the people of the world safe, and the people of the world supplied the enormous amount of food that the godbeasts required to live. The cities held for a time, but as the technology failed and people forgot more and more of the sciences in an effort to keep themselves alive, city after city began to collapse, unsustainable and hungry.

One of the last researchers into the genetics of the godbeasts, with the last of his implements gave one more gift to mankind; the warbeasts. Born from a godbeast and joined with one of the altered they were less powerful, but much easier to sustain. Where the godbeasts were needed to defend the cities from the packs of predators they attracted, a warbeast would defend a town or a village.

She wrote what she knew, and seeing how mankind's technical excellence was receding without tools or devices, she began to train a priesthood as those who would tend to the warbeasts and look for the return of a day when humanity could reclaim the technical arts. She wrote what science and technology that she could in great mantras and poems, holy secrets to be memorised for a better day by initiates and trained them in how to attend the godbeasts and warbeasts humanity relied upon.

She was the prophet, and she died despairing that she had made a faith as she did.

The cities dies and the people fled, protected by the altered they began to scratch out lives in farmsteads and villages and retreated into a new dark age. The altered would become a nobility of sorts, since their traits were inheritable, and only they could provide protection from the monsters of the planet. Served by priests who attend upon their beasts and await the day that the nanites wear out, they spent a long, brutal millennium surviving and spreading their civilisation. With technology still unable to advance, it seemed nothing would change other then the intrigue of the great houses of the altered, and the slow re settling of the world.

Then the priests heard something, while deep in meditation. The lord of his order, he heard a message. The Confederation may be a lost history, but the new Empire was spreading and would arrive in less than a century to Falland's world. The old priest listened and planned, and the world changed.