Link to article: Swords unto Scramjets.
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[[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] Shades wearing night-vision goggles trek across Cherinmark through the footprints of giants. Drakes chart A3/AD bubbles in abundance, dead weapons yet swiveling along flight paths, munitions perpetually primed. Sages and seers consult the neutered intelligences trapped within each tealbox before advising pretender kings on matters of state. Silos hum, bioreactors fueled by flora alien to their engineers' hands, funneling waste into cavities deep underground. Each is certified for generations of stasis. Acronyms and kludge terms spill from royal lips as easily as gossip, as free as flattery; courtiers pretend to this bastard language lest the next war sees them discarded instead. Plagued by memories of foreign weaponry, even fingers twitch in patterns disjointed from any domestic product. Too keenly do they recall the CALO-AX, the EKE-78, the carbines and machine guns with manufacturers' marks filed clean. Such is life after liaisons from another world retreated through the once-secret gaps between them. Without arms shipments, without thirst for Cherinmark's resources, all has settled into the uneasy peace that predated their intrusion, with six powers glaring at each other across contested borders. Six powers, plus one mealworm who has taken to wriggling between bastions left behind. ------ [[=]] __**PART 1**__ [[/=]] **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/as-bruises-linger-and-munitions-molder As Bruises Linger and Munitions Molder]** > It was, of course, raining in Cherinmark. Sixteen miles from the still-glowing ruins of Fort Gräd lay a sprawling graveyard of aircraft—Foundation-provided NUZ-21s and GOC-affiliated Caterwaulers, plus the bastard generation produced by neighboring kingdoms in their fight over fertile-but-fraught territory. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/hybrid-analysis-and-advisement-hmid1014 Hybrid Analysis and Advisement - #HMID1014 ]** > Not to be handled by any member of the peasantry or those descended from bloodlines therein; any whose allegiances are reasonably suspected of falling with foreign powers; any disgraced members of the clergy; any who have defamed Her Immortal Majesty the Queen (Defender of the Realm, Executor of Seven Sacred Wills, Bearer of the Peregrine Blade, from whom all boons and blessings flow). **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/sodium-deficiency-pacing-problems Sodium Deficiency, Pacing Problems]** > Of that which curls within the Saltmade Throne, there is no apt name, no able taxonomy, no feasible retreat into esotericism. A shape obscured by faults and impurities within the looming crystal—its shell long-since interlaced with rusted pipes, then modern conduits. An existence expelled through fissures, opalescent ichor confounding generations of scholars and their tests. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/onus-entire Onus Entire]** > Stovepipe bastions rose in clusters there, housing twin orders whose charge has been protecting a coffin ever since their founder-made-hero filled it. Shards of rock flew wherever cannonshot landed, pelting their surroundings as clouds of dust merged with smog curling from the mountain's pores. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/smoke-without-fire Smoke Without Fire]** > Although Mt. Perfidy continued groaning, noisier than ever for all its injuries, the soft tink of sword leaving scabbard buffeted her far worse. A disc of static rushed out—tracing thought-made paths before filtering into the black, throbbing mass that pawed within ribs. [[size 25%]]@@ @@[[/size]] [[=]] __**PART 2**__ [[/=]] **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/littering-on-the-road-to-nowhere Littering on the Road to Nowhere]** > Rather than follow a path of felled trees that led north along the Dulltooth Range—where high peaks hosted ELINT sensors and communication hubs staffed by dutiful orks—Mealworm turned back toward the heart of Cherinmark. Its deepest reaches offered plenty of places to lose herself for another decade if necessary. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/drinking-doubt-dry Drinking Doubts Dry]** > Mealworm followed a goat trail out of the overgrowth strangling remnants of countless imperial ambitions. To tame that inhumane land. To memorialize glory everlasting. Remnants of pillars, staircases, and balconies jutted from Cherin's Hubris—those close-packed spires that rose as though extruded from continental heartland in defiance of geology as understood by mortal minds. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/prowess-pissant Prowess / Pissant]** > Kill only for coin and only under contract. This was imprinted by your many-feathered teacher, who occupies the Corvid Table's third seat and learned by shadowing the Grandmaster herself through elven nights. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/migrating-the-minefield/ Migrating the Minefield]** > Sometimes to //know// was to stare down intrusive thoughts, unblinking, unflinching, even as their presence corroded and contorted. Sometimes it was to feel her ideal self drifting out of reach, ever more touched by this place that should have been a mere setpiece for proxies moved to and fro by knowing hands. [[size 25%]]@@ @@[[/size]] [[=]] __**PART 3**__ [[/=]] **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/what-seamstress-lacks-steel/comments/show What Seamstress Lacks Steel?]** > When Aster dreams, it is not of the kernel cradling her soul closest—marrow-girded, artery-laced—but instead the superior husk constructed around it. The rumbling of a bioreactor recently fed. The rhythm of shells rotating through their magazine. The numb of electronic countermeasures firing in full. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/flowers-grown-feral-skulls-sucked-clean Flowers Grown Feral, Skulls Sucked Clean]** > THEY SAY OUR RULERS ARE WISE for settling into stasis, six states whose disagreements will never again be decided by more than swordplay and diplomacy, who will abstain from wickedness for our sake alone. > > THEN MUST WE SAY NOTHING OF THIS WAR, which only fools deny is beyond correction or control? **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/wormsign-actual Wormsign Actual]** > Pollen's haze clings to a mountainside village so remote that it barely appears on any map. A single road. Sod-topped homes. Fields irrigated more by snowmelt than rainfall. Soldiers clad in clean suits sweep through, rebreathers heaving and rifles drawn, covering every angle hidden from whirring drones as muzzles trace paths through biosmog. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/pique-proves-perennial Pique Proves Perennial]** > A cold hand brushed along her own. Another found the crook between shoulder and neck, steadying what never achieved substance. Such was the ghast that spirit steel extruded, whose damp breaths came despite an absence of lungs, whose monochrome locks drifted above a circlet of three extra eyes burning like stars barely contained. ------ [[=]] **__RELATED STORIES__** [[/=]] **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7636 SCP-7636: TAPEWORM TANGIBLE]** > Maybe it went wrong from the start. Maybe this was a fight that couldn't be won cleanly, or even a fight that couldn't be won at all. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-deicide-rain/ The Deicide Rain]** > Hounds feast at Mayrn’s feet. Theirs are bodies of seed flesh rooted in metal, muscles a sheath around alloy skeleton and chugging motor. Flat faces host tripartite lenses whose reflections expose nothing, and exhaust fans fail to break apart the bodies of betrayed adventurers. **[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-cub-hungered-once The Cub Hungered Once]** > The wolf cared not. Its heart had gone feral in this storm, chambers doubling, then tripling, ventricles multiplying to supply excess mass. Biology ran amuck along every bodily path, freed by the force that awoke in this rarest of storms. [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]