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| Castelle's Revenge Artstation |
"Mars is a name steeped in myth. It hurtles through story, legend, truth like a great Surpass Ship gone skyward - teetering on a faster-than-light precipice, then tipping, sink-scattered, and after a silent, cacophonous shatter, a million tunnels of winking prismatic waste thrown through the reaches of space and time. It is such - tangent, unknowable, potent in its many settings.
So it was with Starbank. The name Mars meant war [to them] (as it often does). Not war as a vague symbol, a violent spectre, but as the fist of one known and dead. Desdaom Squire. Hers were red banners. High, snapping at the wind howl and gunmark. She concocted a bureaucracy of conflict, a brutal, social machinery built on the corpses of kingdoms conquered. That tradition - that ingrained thought - was carried through Starbank history by spartans and sects, flash empires and institutions eternal, to the modern day. It was called “Mars Mara”, and we (from our modern, genteel perspective) can liken it to the broad social levelers we are familiar with: the desire for children, the sense of shared accomplishment/companionship one finds in contributing to a common cause, national pride, the desire to win a competitive challenge… to the people of Starbank, the Mars Mara was among these things - a path one could take, an experience that could be lived.
I have devoted the rest of this chapter to a lengthy recording of notable groups/works/themes/figures in Starbank history embodied by the Mars Mara. The Desdoam Heirs (a term used by local historians from ~3200 to ~3500) were...
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The Mars Coptence
At the time of their popularity in local legend, the Mars Coptence were relicts, remnants of the War, one minuscule fragment of that great beast’s corpse. Now adrift. We can call these creatures what they were - Sparing Square Occupants, one class of the many Triple-Dense artificial intelligences brought to, and eventually built on, Starbank's surface - but to the people of the planet (and in the later era of which we speak), they were creatures like any other.
Tall, humanoid, sentient creatures. Pale and pitch smoke steaming off halocap pores. That sweet smell, of a caged thermal cycle, and perfume packets pumping to compensate. Paneled ceramic, bundlewhim joints, contoured to fit the aesthetic design of some long-forgotten custodial engineer. The Mars Coptence traveled alone and carried several hermetically sealed cases. Within these, a release from disease: Pastel Mastodon, that pathogen of ethanol white. Highly addictive.
They established themselves a mile or two outside the limits of a city. Rumor would spread, petitioners would come. The Mara Coptence offered power, for a price. To take the Mastodon was to know strength - a body immune to disease and age, a heart quickened and a power gained. It was also to take the nail, for the Coptence administered the pathogen by nailing a pure sample straight through the breast. Few survived the initial administering. Those that did enjoyed three years of strength - weapons of Pastel (the archetypal dagger and stone), speed, power - while their body grew more and more dependent. And then, at the end of those three years, another nail. Another three years. Another nail. This cycle... or death. So addled would the body be, that the absence of the Mastodon would mean rampancy and decay.
Those that followed this track were called Nail Witches - horrible, amoral, always chasing the next conflict. Career soldiers. The greatest slight one could commit against a member of this class was to prevent them from renewing their lease, from claiming another nail. Such was the case with Later Castelle, a veteran Nail Witch and enemy of the Southmarch Bastion. So the story goes: one day, a splinter group of Southmarch tradeswomen conspired to slay the Mars Coptence that lingered outside of the city’s borders. They did this just as Castelle was preparing to accept a third nail. At least six months' journey from the next great city and with only a month of power left, Castelle was doomed. Her vengeance was swift and… horrible..."
*************** End Record ***************
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