They serve today as enforcers and shock troops for the Syndicate, obeying orders without question, genocide included. Their exact role in the atrocities at Triskelion remains murky, though a deeper inquiry seems unlikely ever to be conducted; no one who survived that battle came away sane enough to give a rational account of it. Only madmen and traumatised children walked out of Triskelion, and I do not recommend troubling either for their memories.
If I were to offer one kind word, it is that they are loyal, and unnaturally hardy. They are said to survive the vacuum of space for hours, swim through lava, and shrug off blaster fire that would cook a human to the bone. I do not vouch for the truth of any of this. But one is wise to be careful regardless. They may be brutish, but in a tight corner they are more than capable of ending a squadron of soldiers with their bare hands, and (this part I can vouch for) they have been known to eat what they kill."
Commander Herman Wrath opened his eyes onto what looked like an unfinished render of a city: flat blue hexagonal towers of every height, stacked without any logic he could find, under a sky with no visible source of light and an air that did not move at all.
"Don't call me Herman," he said, climbing to his feet in the too-still air. "I prefer Wrath."
The voice belonged to a floating grey orb, roughly the size of a football, that had apparently been waiting for him to notice it.
"No. Just Wrath. I want no titles."
"Am I dead?"
"No thanks. I'm done. Send me wherever I'm meant to go."
"Some kind of eternal sleep, hopefully. Though I'll take hell over becoming somebody's ghost in an attic."
"I told you. I'm done."
Wrath straightened and looked at the orb properly for the first time.
"Since when do mass murderers get sent to the good place?"
"Fine. Agreed. No promises beyond that."
"I still haven't heard an offer."
"What do you mean, your watch. Are there other places like this one?"
"You mean what I found aboard the Omen."
"Revenge is a waste of a life." His jaw tightened. "I spent half of mine chasing a ghost. Caught him, in the end. Felt nothing but empty afterward."
"If you care so much about saving them, why not simply stop me from making the wrong choice."
Wrath looked up into a sky with no stars in it, then around at the unfinished city that wasn't really a city at all.
"What's the catch."
"Then I want the Skyforge," Wrath said, before the orb could finish its own sentence. "Repaired. Given to me."
"That it's a mythic-class object the size of a small world. That the Enjarians built it to raise ships, kill stars, and move whole planets between systems, before they disappeared without a trace." A pause. "That's more than most people know, and enough for you to answer the question."
"No."
"Yes."
The orb said nothing further. There was no burst of light, no chorus, no grand unveiling of a destiny: only the sense of a great, patient hand closing gently around something small and setting it down somewhere else entirely, and then nothing at all.
A man in dark, flowing robes ran full-tilt through the desert night, fast enough that the wind howled in his wake and kicked up a low storm of sand behind his heels. He made for a small, isolated hut at the edge of nothing, and when he reached it he pounded on an ornately carved door hard enough to bruise his knuckles, until a curved black blade appeared under his chin, seemingly from nowhere, held by a hand that did not shake.