Very cool, more tonal piece. I presume this is one of the fractal moments in the Civil War of Humanity, where the God-Queen began, and connected with the Dwarven Radience machine, bringing humans to Sirius. Really ambitious to take on a retelling in 1k words! I think you do a really good job. I especially love how you play with words like "It," in passages like, "It may have guided them as they traveled," it is unclear if you mean the Radiance, her drawing of power, or the cosmic lustful "It" entity. Really dig this ambiguous use of language; feels appropriate for a demonic-influenced retelling.
I love this one. It may be my favorite of the submissions.
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Thanks. My brother recently introduced me to OPR. We have been googling lore as we go. It seems like there are some pretty big plot wholes in the over arching lore I just couldn’t ignore. I assumed the conduit was like the emperor in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series so I played off that. And it looks like the queen eventually kills the god of lust (40k’s Slaanesh) so I tried to tie that in. But I’m not a fan of the monochromatic gods in 40k so I tried to leave the door open to make it a little more interesting. I was thinking maybe the god of lust really falls for the queen because she is the only one who can resist him. Not because she is a boring manufactured grey knight. But because she is a hard core badass who has been pushing back against the pressures of reality from childhood.
Or maybe she ends up dominating the god of lust and he becomes her tool and eventually good friend and they end things mutually to balance out the universe.
Or maybe they are so tied together and that’s why she over compensates with her order of nuns. But in the end she takes her own life to finish Lust off like some kind of Harry Potter and Voldemort moment.
Ya! There's something I really like that was said about 40k's novels when someone asked, "Is this canon?" The reply was, "Everything's canon; but not everything is true." I think it's really cool to play with deceit, reality warping, confusion, hallucination etc in order to establish a fleshed-out world that still has a lot of room for things to be filled in.
The original lore as I understand it (for this particular event), is that the queen escaped from a civil war in Spain. Flies with some refugees to the most powerful ship in the bad guy’s (the founder) fleet and takes it from a bunch of armored super troopers called… the battle brother. Then the founder chases after them, and boards their ship and the queen inexplicably obtains magic powers, kills the founder and the whole fleet teleports to another galaxy because of a painfully convenient plot device and or maybe just because …? The fleet of humans then becomes a series of complex nations over the next thousands of years and kinda dominates the political landscape of that galaxy that was previously controlled by well established alien races? Some where in there the Founder clones himself and maybe become immortal through that process. And the queen becomes immortal because the writers say so. Then she murders the god of lust and dies in the process. To me that feels pretty messy and not terribly well thought out. I’m not an expert though. I know there is a lot in the universe going on outside this story and I know I’m probably missing a lot even within this story.
So I tried to clumsily tape it all into a shape that was maybe a little more engaging and grimdark.
Somehow I haven’t read or heard anything about the Dwarven Radiance. Maybe that’s the thing I’m missing that will make all this lore work a little better in my head. What is the Dwarven Radiance? Tell me about it.
As far as I know, the understanding from the Sirius side of the universe on the Humans arrival is that the Dwarves constructed a doomsday machine to fight back in a war they were losing against the orcs. Activating it resulted in a huge catastrophe that decimated many races and star systems in Sirius, especially the dwarves and orcs, and also somehow brought humanity and something called "radiance" to Sirius. Radiance being a sort of "voidstuff"radioactivity that corrupts and twists man and machine. The Radiance Machine pulls from a lot of Dwarven archtypes; Heart of Lorkan or the Balrog in Moria.
As to how the radiance machine led to the nexus of humanity's civil war being yanked wholecloth into Sirius, that's a mystery of the setting.