Chaosborne
From the void called Chaos emerged a vicious cycle: For just as Caelus did to Terra and her children, so their son Cronus did to Rhea and her children. And just as Cronus dispatched Caelus for the crimes he had committed, so again Rhea's son Zeus dispatched Cronus and took his place. And to his consorts and their children, Zeus did as his father and his father's father had done to theirs: he abused, exploited, and destroyed them. We are but the offspring of that cycle and are ourselves vested with its fate.
JUNIUS ZANSCAR
Preface
The events which precipitated the war in our own time are as well understood today as the events leading to the Great War were understood by the participants of its second iteration. In recounting the more complex engagements and the sheer brutality of industrialized conflict, linear narratives like those which open the war become so muddled that a full account of the past may at times be impossible without the aid of imagination.
Among the following pages, the reader will find little regarding the precipitating events of the war precisely because of the way in which those subjects have been covered extensively by others. The aim of this narrative is instead to follow those confused and entangled threads of history born out of individual experience. Here the reader will not be told of the grand strategy employed by the Suffolk Admiralty, or the chaotic events which played out on the floor of the new International Assembly Building in Warsaw. The narrative is instead formed around a series of events and their participants who, by the vagaries of fate and history, set in motion events which concluded humanity’s first great war in space – and suffered for it.
Introduction: Laika’s Revenge
Act I: Stasis
Prologue: “A Tour of the Solar System”
Act II: Metabasis
Prologue: “Memories of Star-Crossed Days”
Act III: Anacalypsis
Prologue: “Summer in Stanleyville”
Scene 1: Denial
Scene 2: Ray
Scene 3: Leopard
Scene 4: Apep
Scene 5: Impulse
Scene 6: Set
Scene 7: Kwan
Scene 8: Morales
Scene 9: Mars
Scene 10: Fahiri
Scene 11: Ultor
Scene 12: Zahn
Scene 13: Santa Barbara
Act IV: Antistrophe
Prologue: “Hearts of Space”
Scene 1: Tonans
Scene 2: Survivor
Scene 3: Encounter
Scene 4: Reckoning
Scene 5: Tsavo
Scene 6: Newtype
Scene 7: Omphalos
Scene 8: Dioscurae
Scene 9: Mudahar
Scene 10: Invictus
Scene 11: Resonance
Scene 12: Annihilation
Epilogue: Apoleia | The Nine Hour War
Postscript: On the Eve of War
Appendices & Essays
Islands in Space: Types of Space Colonies
The Peacekeeping Forces: A Brief History
Superweapons of the War in Space: Helion, Electron Saturation, & Entanglement
