The Homeswarm of the Maraya were secretive, never caring to reveal or give up too much about their intentions and how much technological power they actually wielded, but every once in a while, they would descend by skiff and hand something to the ground dwellers. This time was no different, but it was an unusual gift. To a number of Qadir, the Homeswarm offered the Tohn Satveer Manhaar, a recording loosely translated to "the fall of home", with the stipulation that they would share Tohn-Memtech conversion with the Qadir, on the condition that the Qadir would spread this particular recording as Mem-tech to any corner of the world and make it freely available to the Maraya on the ground to replay, if they so dared, with a warning that the content may be upsetting but that all Maraya should ultimately see it one day. And so the Qadir did, the recording was made available, and within days, recordings already reached Regalia and news started spreading among the Maraya colonies of a recording from home. Once hooked into the Mem-tech viewing station, the helmet on, the viewer (of any race who would be willing to see it) would be transported back in time to the Void Invasion of the Meraic Civilization. Eyes opened to a bright room. The walls were made of a gentle opalescent chrome, shapes flowing like papyrus reeds by a river, the floor made of pitch-black marble with slight cracks of gold and purple interlaced. There was a sense of dread in the viewer, a knowledge of what was to come. The inevitable. The announced. And it was today. From what the viewer could tell, the person whose memories were recorded was a female Maraya, probably somewhere middle-aged. She first entered the nursery, transferring one of the yet unborn children into a portable nursery station that her husband could carry on his back, before entering another room where a child was playing with a set of levitating crystals. It was hard to tell if this family was affluent or poor, but the apartments they lived in looked positively palatial. There was gold trim on many things, exotic plants that any viewer of the recording would have never seen or conceived of, and the windows gave such a view. Every once in a while the recording would look out the window as if to expect something, not taking in the wonder of the sun rising above the clouds. Wherever their apartment was, it was high above the clouds, thin bone-white spires with jutted crystal growths spanning as far as the eye could see, and the golden glow cascading over the cloud cover below producing an orange hue wherever the sunlight touched. The family packed up, abandoning all manner of equipment and strange crystal devices all over the apartment, and got walking. At the end of the hallway they were joined by more Maraya, each families carrying small amounts of belongings and their children, somber faces with knowledge of what was to come, some even took their dimuitive bipedal dog and feline servants with them, no larger than a modern dwarf, but much more lithe. They seemed quite easily distracted and confused about what was going on around them, too childish in comprehension perhaps to understand the gravity of the moment. Large groups of Maraya stepped onto large crystal elevators that levied them back and forth witch such astounding speed, and halting with equal abruptness that somehow did not eject all those traveling on it onto the ceiling. The families rushed down pathways that extended from the massive white spires towards open platforms. It was in this moment that one could truly see how gigantic these spires really were. The All-Beacon Temple's massive spire was a pin-prick in comparison, there must have been hundreds of residential levels, gardens and workshops built into the spires. And then, the rush started. The family realized something was wrong when the guards marched by, large imposing Maraya with purple eyes and each with a set of massive crystal punching gloves that looked almost comically large for their frames, buzzing with electric sparks and steam vents. Before long, platforms opened up on the sides of the towers and large crystal-lance like turrets unfolded from them, aiming down at the cloud cover below and initiating a fierce barrage of hot plasma bolts into the clouds below. There was no sound on the recording, but the firing must have been fierce, the kickback alone causing wild gusts of wind to funnel over the walkways where the Maraya had now started running towards what looked like evacuation platforms. More and more turrets unfolded until the towers themselves looked like they were held up by thousands of streams of light, shooting millions if not billions of rapid fire plasma shots into the clouds below, but all who looked could not see what they even fired at. Then in the distance, massive purple and red amalgam tentacles erupted from the cloud cover and a whole swarm of locust-like creatures followed up by a beak of a kind that must have been as large as the entire Imperial Palace in Regalia - which was to say massive. It crashed into one of the hundreds of white spires that presumably made up the Maraya city-spires, causing all manner of explosive flashes to erupt from the base going up. Crystal air skiffs ejected from all layers of the spire, many too late as they were crushed by the falling debris. The family inched closer to the evacuation platforms, ships coming and going, picking up a few dozen before humming off on that distinct Maraya gravity defying crystal-tech. More and more guards ran up behind the group, reaching the edge of the platforms, before their punching gloves unfolded what looked like stabilizer winglets, and rocketed down into the cloud cover below like meteors. The further they got to the evacuation platforms, the recorder could see one of the displays overhead that showed holographic information. It showed the ground cover, and a vague layout of the continents, showing vast sections the continents already in red. The vague shape of Farahdeen and Essalonia could be made out, but Daendroque and the modern Hadar region was unrecognizable. Only the Regalian Isle seemed recognizable, and it remained entirely in purple, though any viewer would not know what this mean. The area around the spires where they were was about 90% covered in red, with key points of holdouts where holographic displays showed massive crystalline structures marching over the land ejecting streams of plasma light into what the viewer could only distinguish as endless hordes of demons. The family finally reached the evacuation platform and boarded the transport, taking their seats and clasping in, the mother ensuring the portable nursery was still functioning by checking its valves. The ship took off, and then everything started shaking as large tentacles erupted from the clouds beneath. The sound was obviously still muted, but it was clear there was a lot of screaming and the cabin lost pressure, some of the seated being sucked out of the skiff to the left of the viewer, while she tried to hold on for dear life to her husband. Below, from the hole in the side of the skiff she could see the evacuation platforms smashed to pieces, and what must have been hundreds or thousands of Maraya falling down like ragdolls to the clouds below, as the tower itself shattered and leaned to the side. The plasma cannons went silent and smaller escape pods ejected from the entire spire like small little seedlings jumping from a pinecone. One of the pilots quickly deployed a fixer bot that ran into the hole and deployed an instantly hardening chrysalis that covered up the hole, stabilizing the ship somewhat to jet it further into orbit. Below, the viewer watched the towers topple one by one, and a lot of angry yelling and arguing in the ship itself. It was fairly obvious that the evacuees didn't know it would happen so soon, and everyone was in a state of shock, but arrive they did to the next checkpoint. This facility was a levitating crystal satellite in a very high orbit. In fact it was so high that all the evacuees put on oxygen masks, with the ozone clearly being visible on the horizon. It was some sort of gathering station where many evacuation shuttles emptied out into a larger liner skiff that could accommodate hundreds. The viewer walked by as they saw a few administrators carry what looked like pods of hibernation pets, the same bipedal dog and cat-likes of before, loading them into a large chassis that looked like a drop pod with all manner of technological devices secured inside before sending it off, causing it to rocket into the horizon and disappear from view. Tech storages? Resource caches? Unknown to the viewer, as there was no explanation for anything occurring. The family sat down in one of the passenger bays, completely packed with people in all manners of distress. Before the ship took off, the woman was looking at a sort of holographic display, though her view was getting watery with what looked like tears in her eyes. Her husband tried to comfort her, she steeled herself, and looked down a list of what looked like Maraya poetry. She eventually settled on a line, tapping it, where it was written: "Mal-uron Thiaar Iiannaam Sohaan, which had a Qadir translation inserted by the Mem-tech engineers to say "The one who was stolen from", part of the woman's favorite poem was presumed. The woman re-arranged some of the letters until they formed Mal-ra-Thiiaa, before she cast a quick glance to the embryo still in the portable nursery, then finally closing the holographic display and storing it away. The ship took off, but their struggle was not yet complete. Immediately after liftoff, several spike-shaped crystal ships also took off in a V shape formation in front of the ship, and before long, they dove down to meet what could only be described as flying squids with long tendrils hovering up to the ship that was traveling at high altitude. There was immediate panic aboard the ship again, with the mother and father embracing each other, as the ship's engines roared harder, shaking the ship. The mother was able to look out a port window to see the interceptor stream plasma shots at the squids flying up at the ship, shooting down several of them but eventually being overwhelmed until a purple dragon suddenly leapt out of the clouds, sending a long stream of lightning through a group of the flying demon creatures. It sped towards the largest one, clawed up against it, ripped its head off and then jumped off on it to destroy the others. The Dragon's appearance seemed to cause a cheer and elation among the people, as it started picking off the demon things one by one, the remaining interceptors returning in formation, and the aircraft speeding away from the fighting scene where the squid demons had now turned on the Dragon and dragged the fight back into the clouds below. The recording then went mostly black and showed only flashes of what followed, the craft landing in a jungle area except all the plants were orange, the family walking through two massive doors, and the inside of a Tohn vault, with families being sent down specific corridors and guards holding the front gate and keeping a lookout. The next flash was of an emergency light flashing, the front gate under attach by demons, and the family running away from it as the doors started closing, the guards rocket-punching their way through any that managed to get in. The final view was of the family sitting near stasis-pods, the child was already in one, and the father was about to enter one as well, while the mother secured the portable nursery in one of the devices next to her. She cast a final glance down the large hall where sound suddenly erupted from the recording, the Qadir having inserted a comment saying "this is where the Maraya unmuted the recording". The massive vault started going dark one segment at a time, only showing the dim lights of the pods, thousands of them. The woman fidgeted with a necklace as she muttered to herself which was translated by the Qadir Engineers: "The promise, the promise. The promise that it will all end. They promise they will wake us. It will all come to pass." - as if to steel herself for the coming slumber. She then lay herself down, casting one final glance at her husband to her side who was already in the pod, and then a final glance at the portable nursery to the other side, before her vision went black and the recording ended. And as unceremoniously as that, the visor was removed, as the Qadir had other customers to get to, as Mem-Banking was getting pretty popular among adrenaline junkies in the city.
As the Membank clicks off, the Maraya sits stunned dredging up dulled emotion. The man, in a rare moment, seemed to almost tear almost weep for his people, for what they lost. Yet something within strangled the feeling as if unwilling to risk this line of thought created by picturing the void’s destruction.
Nallamath Llannom left the Qadir-run business carefully, a single breath shuddering from him but otherwise appearing neutral on the walk home. The long walk home. The long walk home where with each step, he wished he has his To-Solar-Ohm to make this voyage faster...the walk was feeling more weighted with every second. By the time he reached his abode, his face was a glower, and he burst in, followed on his heels by the silent Chrystaltech figure of Gallasha. She slowed and stopped, curling her short tail over her feet and her trunk up under her head as he threw himself into the small living room chair. He gripped the armrests hard, staring dead ahead. The losses...the sheer number of losses. If that had been his Tohn, his...his family. He felt his tight grip released as he crashed back into the fabric. All of that. Had been theirs. And did...that woman even live in the end? That Tohn...had it been the Elaya Vault? The Tohn Kaya? So many, too many, possibilities. He pained, and hungered, and simmered at once. He looked at Gallasha. She'd not asked him what he'd seen, able to tell he wasn't in a talking mood...until this moment. "So hun...what did you see?" she said in even, gentle tones.