Chapter 1 – The War of
Abundance
The year was 2357 and the mountain air was thin that night, sharp with frost as if the world itself
held its breath. High above the forests, where the sprawl of ruined cities no longer reached, the
old observatory still stood. Its dome creaked like an ancient ribcage, metal grinding against
metal as it turned to follow the stars.
Inside, Elira Veyne sat alone, her hands steady on the brass controls, her eyes fixed against the
eyepiece of her telescope. She had long ago stopped believing the night sky was silent. Too
many times she had seen the flicker of something moving—too fast, too smooth, too deliberate
to be falling rock or wandering satellite.
Tonight was no different.
There—a flash. A glint like quicksilver sliding across the firmament. Gone before her heart could
beat twice.
Elira pulled back, her breath fogging in the cold. She reached for the leather-bound journal at
her desk, its pages swollen with ink and years of doubt. Her handwriting was sharp, hurried, the
script of someone desperate to leave evidence behind.
"They return again, the Watchers. Always at the edge of vision, never speaking, never touching ground. They watch. And wait. For what, I cannot say."
She paused, her pen hovering above the page. A frown creased her brow. She tapped the nib
against the parchment once, twice.
Do they truly exist? Or am I chasing illusions across the sky?
She let the ink settle in the margins, a whisper of doubt written between the lines. It was not the
first time she had seen them, these fleeting silver discs that carved the heavens. Nor would it be
the last. And yet, with every sighting, she wondered if it was her mind inventing patterns,
weaving myths from shadows.
Still, she named them.
"The Watchers."
The word carried a chill, as if naming them gave them weight, gave them power. It was a name
both reverent and accusatory, born of nights spent beneath their silent gaze.
Her candle guttered, throwing her shadow across the walls lined with old star charts and
sketches of impossible geometries. She dipped her pen again and added a final note before
closing the journal.
"If they are here, then they have always been here. And if they watch, then surely they wait for
something. I only pray it is not for our end."
Outside, the wind howled against the dome. Above, the stars burned indifferent. And far beyond
them, just for an instant, the silver disc shimmered once more—watching.
Earth was a dying paradise.
To its children, it seemed barren—strangled by famine, burning with feverish storms, choking on
its own smoke. But to those beyond the stars, Earth was not failing.
It was ripe.
For unlike most worlds in the cold stretch of the void, Earth had never been stingy. It was a rare
cradle of excess: forests stretching wider than seas on other planets, rivers swollen with fresh
water, minerals buried in endless seams beneath its crust. Gold, cobalt, uranium, isotopes so
rare entire civilizations had killed for a fraction of what Earth kept hidden like marrow in bone.
Humanity's curse was that it had been born atop a treasure hoard it could neither guard nor
preserve.
Even before the skies split, the world was already breaking. Oil fields bled dry, once-green
farmlands withered to dust under a sun too hot to forgive. Nations warred over dwindling
harvests, over poisoned seas, over gasping aquifers. Desertification crawled across continents
like a plague of ghosts.
But to the great powers of Earth, the collapse was not cause for unity. It was cause for division.
They carved borders with drones and fire, drew lines across oceans with blockades, starved
entire populations to secure their own survival.
That was when the first ships were sighted.
Not the Watchers—those silent phantoms came and went like mirages, leaving only questions.
These arrivals did not hide. They descended openly, like kings entering a conquered city.
The First Architects.
They were clad in radiant armor, their ships crystalline and gleaming, powered by engines that
pulsed like stars caught in cages. They came not with conquest, but with bargains. They
promised energy drawn from light itself, machines that could heal the poisoned earth,
harvesters that could pull water from barren skies.
They asked only for trade. Minerals. Isotopes. Samples of DNA.
To some, they were saviors. To others, thieves.
And still the wars raged, only now with weapons bought from Architect hands. Alliances
fractured faster than they could form, each nation scrambling to secure its piece of alien
technology, its slice of survival.
But the Architects were not the last to come.
The Ophilim followed—taller, prouder, clad in golden raiment that seemed plucked from the
myths of gods. They did not bargain. They declared. Their voices thundered like scripture,
proclaiming themselves the return of divinity, the rightful rulers of Earth. Where the Architects
asked, the Ophilim commanded.
Behind them came others—the Drakari. Whispering shapeshifters, their bodies bore scales like
obsidian glass that shimmered faintly in shifting patterns. Where the Ophilim sought dominion
and the Architects sought trade, the Drakari offered something else.
Earth bled.
And through it all, the Watchers circled above, silent and distant, their discs gleaming briefly in
the smoke of burning skies. They never landed. Never spoke. But they were always there.
Watching.
The skies burned the night the Ophilim revealed themselves.
They came not as diplomats, nor as traders, but as conquerors wrapped in fire. Their ships were
vast crescents of gold, gleaming as though forged from sunlight itself, blotting out constellations
as they broke through the atmosphere. Where the Architects had descended with quiet
grandeur, crystalline and measured, the Ophilim arrived like gods reclaiming stolen thrones.
For days, the Architects had guided their radiant fleets above the cities of man, harvesting trade
and uneasy partnerships. Energy stations pulsed with alien engines, rivers churned with
Architect machines drawing fresh water from poisoned ground. For the first time in decades,
humanity had glimpsed survival.
Then the Ophilim came.
Across the world, millions gathered on rooftops and shattered highways to watch the golden
ships fill the sky. Some fell to their knees, praying to names not spoken in centuries—Zeus,
Odin, Ra. Others shouted curses, calling them invaders, colonizers draped in celestial costume.
But it was not humanity the Ophilim had come to address.
It was the Architects.
The two fleets faced each other in the upper atmosphere, crystalline arcs glittering against
golden crescents, the world beneath them holding its breath.
A voice thundered across every open frequency, echoing in a dozen languages at once.
"We pushed you from this world once before. You shall not claim it again. Annunaki."
It was the Ophilim, their words reverberating like scripture across the comms of soldiers,
scientists, and terrified civilians alike.
The Architects responded, their tone cool and without grandeur.
"We do not claim. We trade. Your dominion is a shadow of a forgotten age. The children of this
world are not yours."
The Ophilim answered not with words but with fire.
Golden lances tore across the stratosphere, spearing into the crystalline bulwarks of the
Architect fleet. Shields shimmered, cracked, and refracted the beams into a rain of molten light
that streaked across the heavens. Cities below gasped as the sky itself ignited.
The first day of the war between gods had begun.
In Washington, the Situation Room rattled with static as feeds from satellites went dark one by
one. Generals leaned over glowing tables, watching as Architect and Ophilim fire lit the map like
a storm of falling suns.
"Collateral damage reports are spiking," one aide stammered. "Unidentified energy strikes in
Europe, Africa, the Pacific Rim—"
"They're not even targeting us," another barked, "and we're being annihilated."
On the ground, humanity's response was immediate but hopeless. Fleets scrambled from
airfields, jets streaking into the chaos above with contrails sharp against the burning horizon.
Missiles screamed skyward, tracking the golden crescents overhead.
None reached their mark.
The Ophilim swatted them from the air with walls of light, entire squadrons erased in moments.
Architect defenses shattered the rest with crystalline scatterfire, never meant to harm humanity
but devastating all the same.
From the ground, it was a nightmare painted across the heavens.
In New York, towers collapsed as golden plasma carved the skyline like a blade. In the deserts
of Egypt, storms howled where stray Architect fire struck sand into glass. The Pacific boiled as
two ships crashed into the ocean, their collision sending tidal waves into the shores of Japan.
Everywhere, people watched the war of gods unfold. And everywhere, they understood:
humanity was less than ants beneath their feet.
In a bunker deep beneath Colorado, a different kind of war was discussed.
"We cannot fight this," General Strauss said flatly, his jaw tight as footage of the devastation
looped on the wall behind him. "Our arsenals are useless. Our fleets, gone. Every day we delay,
we're ground further into the dirt between their heels."
The room was silent. Only the hum of filtered air and the distant quakes of orbital detonations
filled the space.
Then Strauss turned, his eyes locking on the President.
"There is one option left."
The table froze. They all knew the file. They had all read the reports.
A black binder slid across the table, its label stamped in bold letters: PROJECT KRYSKO.
"Unstable," an advisor muttered. "Experimental. Untested."
Strauss's fist struck the table. "It doesn't matter. If we do nothing, humanity dies as collateral in a
war not our own. If we approve this—" he jabbed a finger at the binder "—we may stand a
chance. Not to win, but to survive."
The President's hand lingered on the binder for a long, trembling moment. Then, with a grim
breath, he opened it.
"Approved."
The war did not pause. It did not relent.
In the weeks that followed the Ophilim's first strike, Earth was torn apart. Cities that had stood
for centuries were unmade in moments, glass and fire where towers once kissed the clouds.
The great capitals of mankind—New York, Moscow, Cairo, Tokyo—became scars visible from
orbit.
At first, the casualties were numbers on screens. Ten million. Fifty. A hundred. But soon the
screens went dark, the satellites shattered, and numbers became whispers of ruin carried by
refugees staggering from the wreckage of their homes.
By 2360, humanity had lost more than half its population.
Nations fractured. Governments dissolved in chaos as leadership bunkered down in steel
vaults, leaving billions to fend for themselves. Entire swathes of Europe were uninhabitable,
turned into wastelands where golden firestorms had burned the soil to black glass. The Pacific
coasts of the Americas were drowned beneath waves from orbital collisions, cities swallowed by
water and silence.
The United States—once a titan—was nothing but a husk. Its breadbasket was scorched to
desert, its cities hollowed by orbital strikes, its people reduced to desperate enclaves
scavenging among ruins. Roads became graveyards of steel, cars rusting where they had been
abandoned in the chaos of evacuation. Washington still breathed, but barely, its leaders ruling
shadows from underground, watching their nation collapse mile by mile.
In Asia, the devastation was worse still. Beijing burned. Mumbai drowned in smoke. The great
industrial belts of China and Russia lay in ruins, their factories cracked open like carcasses,
their lifeblood of oil and ore stolen or destroyed in the crossfire of alien war.
Above, the Ophilim and Architects fought without pause. Their weapons split the heavens,
tearing holes in the atmosphere that glowed like festering wounds. To the gods of old reborn,
humanity was not enemy nor ally. It was collateral.
And yet, humanity refused to die quietly.
From shattered silos, nuclear fire was launched into the void, desperate salvos clawing at
Ophilim crescents and Architect arcs alike. A few struck home—one crescent fell blazing into
the Indian Ocean, another Architect ship detonated over the Sahara, carving a new crater that
glowed with fire for weeks. But the retaliation was merciless. The sky rained vengeance, and the
nations that dared resist vanished beneath storms of plasma.
In Beijing, the last council of China gathered.
The city around them was already rubble, its skyline gone, its streets burning with refugee
camps turned to riots. Above, Ophilim crescents prowled the skies, hunting what little resistance
remained.
General Wu, his uniform scorched and torn, slammed his fist against the map table.
"We are already ghosts. Our armies are gone. Our people slaughtered. But we can still make
them bleed."
The room was silent. They all knew what he meant.
For years, buried in the icefields of Manchuria, China had hidden a weapon. Not a missile, not a
bomb, but a death sentence for the sky itself. A pulse so vast, so absolute, it would strip the
heavens bare of fire.
The EMP.
A last gamble, forged not to defeat the gods, but to blind them. To tear their weapons from the
air and cast their fleets into silence.
The council voted without hesitation.
General Wu gave the order.
The launch came at dawn. A single missile streaked into the bruised sky, trailing smoke and
flame. It rose past the shattered ruins of satellites, past the burning wrecks of ships, higher and
higher until it vanished in the glare of the sun.
Then the world went white.
1A wave of silent lightning rolled across the atmosphere, unseen but absolute. Every circuit
burned. Every machine died. Across continents, lights guttered out, radios screamed static and
fell silent.
In the heavens, both Architect arcs and Ophilim crescents faltered. Shields collapsed. Engines
dimmed. Weapons froze mid-fire. Ships fell from the sky.
In one fragile moment, the war of gods stopped.
Earth lay in silence, powerless beneath the sky.
Everything went white.
DARKNESS.