NPC Storyteller
The Brotherhood called this time their "Age of Hunger".
Like a warrior left famished after fighting for his life, the belly of the Mawite war machine was empty. The mounting casualties - countless losses of ships and personnel - in the brutal, grinding struggle for the Core Worlds had left the Brotherhood weakened. They were burning through their reserves too quickly, depleting the supply of materiel and men alike that their conquered worlds had to offer. If this persisted, they would collapse in on themselves, devouring their own figurative body like a starving madman driven to self-cannibalism. There was only one way to prevent this dark fate: to secure some fresh source of troops and supplies, an injection of fuel for the machinery of war.
That was why they had taken the leap through the Bakuran hypergate, the reason they had guided their fleets deep into the heart of the Eternal Empire. For even as the sinister
Kyrel Ren
sated a more literal hunger, preparing to rip out and consume the life energy of an entire planet, the Brotherhood sought to sate their figurative ravenousness. For them, Panatha was only one part of a greater campaign of brutal raids. While the leaders of the Eternal Empire were gathered here, fighting to repel the Maw and prevent the dark nexus that had emerged here from spreading, the Brotherhood was despoiling the rest of the Pacanth Reach. Like a swarm of stellar locusts, they would denude these planets of resources one by one.For the first time in many years, the dark fortress known as The Underhold bustled with life.
"Load up the ones strong enough to work!" bellowed Overseer Varakh, his powerful voice carrying across the ruined fortress. "Throw the rest of them into the forge. We have no need of weaklings." His marauders scrambled to obey, walking up and down the lines of captured miners who had been dragged off to this place. The sick and wounded were dragged away a second time... and from this re-abduction, there would be no return. The screams of men and women, long wails of horror as they were pitched over the cliffs and into the lava far below, filled the derelict corridors of the former Graug stronghold for nearly an hour. There were a lot of captives to sort through.
The Zambranos might be gone from the Pacanth Reach, but their dark and destructive legacy endured. When the God-King Kaine Zambrano had conquered Fornow, casting down the brave but doomed King Dorn Haberon the Uniter, he had awarded the lush forest planet as a prize. He had given it to his faithful servants the Graug, and they had promptly remade it in their own image - which was to say a harsh, desolate wasteland, a ruined shell of what it had once been. They had ripped down the trees to expose the raw stone of the mineral-rich mountains beneath, cracking the planet's surface so that its magma flowed like blood bubbling up from a series of shallow wounds.
When Kaine had been driven from the Pacanth Reach, he had taken his Graug with him, leaving behind the planet they had ravaged into an unrecognizable shadow of its former self. But despite the death of the planet's beauty, its usefulness was not at an end. Even the industrial-scale mining of the Graug had not depleted the planet's deep reserves of valuable mineral resources. When the Eternal Empire had conquered the region, they had established a number of mining outposts here, isolated frontier communities that dotted the planet's surface. They played a small but important part in the superpower's economy, providing a steady stream of riches ripped from the earth.
This made the planet a perfect target for the resource-hungry Brotherhood of the Maw.
Overseer Varakh, commanding Splinter Fleet Sheol, had descended on those mining outposts like a mythical angel of death. With the Eternal Empire's forces distracted by the unfolding catastrophe at Panatha, not to mention simultaneous Mawite raids all across their core sectors, there had been no one available to help this minor and isolated planet. Perhaps some few of the colonists would manage to survive, escaping the attention of the Mawites by hiding in caves or trekking out into the wastelands; the Brotherhood forces could not linger here for long, for they were too few to stand up to a full response force from the Empire they were trespassing against.
But in the time they had available for this raid, they would be as thorough as possible.
Varakh watched as the Mawite transports, their loading ramps yawning open like ravenous mouths, were stuffed with the plunder of Fornow. Pallet after pallet of crates bursting with industrial ore. Entire towns' worth of mining equipment and labor droids. And people. So, so many people, slapped in chains and shock collars, marched up into those ships from which there was no return. They had come to Fornow seeking new lives, new opportunities out on the fringe, maybe even a chance to strike it rich out in the mines. Instead they would be worked to death in the brutal industrial machine of the Brotherhood. Their chances of ever returning home were all but nil.
Their last sight of their adopted planet would be this dark metal fortress.
It had been empty when they arrived. Now their own homes would be left just as empty.
