Second, the Jure’lia are not from Sarn. Or, at least, not from any part of it we know about – not from the surface of Sarn . . . do you begin to see the problem? Every few centuries or so, they appear in our skies apparently from nowhere, and begin the relentless destruction of our lands, our cities, our people. I say ‘our’ here in the broadest sense – the Jure’lia focus their attacks on no particular country or nation, and send forth no diplomat to negotiate terms. Efforts have been made to communicate in the past, but it has always ended badly for our delegates.
We call the ships they arrive in Behemoths, and for good reason. Bigger than anything seen on Sarn, these flying contraptions are great, bulbous things, resembling, if anything, the humble woodlouse (for reference: Rolda de Grazon made a number of extraordinary sketches during the Eighth Rain, which are kept in the Grazon family archive, and these I have compared to other contemporary reports. Dear distant Cousin Rolda had a good eye). Within these Behemoths travel the seeds of their entire force. Behemoths that have been brought down and crashed into the surface of Sarn have proved difficult to explore, with most accounts of the interiors making little sense – the general assumption is that something within the broken ships causes humans to lose their sanity. It’s not a comforting thought. In recent times, pieces of broken-up Behemoth, shards of their strange green or black ‘moon-metal’,1 are known to generate or attract the beings known as ‘parasite spirits’ – no one knows why this is, whether they are from Sarn itself, or a direct fallout of this alien technology. The parasite spirits only started appearing after the Eighth Rain, for reasons we may never know. One theory I believe has merit is that they are some sort of ‘sleeping weapon’, left behind by the Jure’lia as a way of further poisoning our land while they themselves recuperate. It’s a fascinating idea.
Within each Behemoth will be several hundred ‘mothers’. As ever, with the Jure’lia, we are uncertain whether or not these creatures are entirely organic, or manufactured in some way. With six mobile legs coming together in a central ‘cup’, they mostly look like especially tall spiders, although without eyes or mandibles or even an abdomen. Instead, the cup holds a sac, pearlescent in colour, which generates, or gives birth to, thousands of ‘burrowers’, also referred to as ‘bugs’. These creatures look a little like beetles with soft body casings. They are narrow, with multiple legs, and, unfortunately, that’s about all I know as no organic material has ever survived from them. Infamously, burrowers are the true horror of the Jure’lia, and the method via which they threaten to conquer Sarn – burrowers will hide inside a human victim and ‘eat’ away their insides, leaving a hollow interior coated in a strange, black, viscous substance. Whatever this substance is, it is more than simple waste material, as it leaves the victim conscious and able to communicate to some extent – although, of course, all trace of their previous personality has been replaced with the Jure’lia hive. Such unfortunate souls are effectively dead – at least, to their families and friends.
When the burrowers have done their work, what we’re left with are drones. They make up the vast majority of the Jure’lia force, and represent a terrible psychological toll on the survivors. Fight against the Jure’lia and you will be killing enemies with the faces of your neighbours, your friends, your family, your lover. We know from accounts of previous invasions that armies have suffered significant losses of morale, which in turn has been devastating.
Also contained within the Behemoths are ‘maggots’ (also referred to, rather colourfully, as the ‘shitters’, but I will stick to maggots for my purposes). Maggots are enormous living creatures, around sixty feet long and twenty feet wide. They move slowly, and seem to largely consist of a mouth at one end and an anus at the other, with a fat segmented middle section (for reference, again dear Cousin Rolda has done a series of drawings, from several angles. I must assume that because these things take a while to travel any distance, he was able to spend some time studying them). These creatures appear to have been entirely organic, with no interior skeleton and, consequently, no physical sign of them remains. These creatures made their slow way across Sarn, guarded by mothers and by drones, and consumed all the organic material in their paths. Trees, grass, plants, crops, animals, anything slower than them – and then excreted a vast amount of a thick, viscous slime, dark green in colour. This substance would then set, becoming harder than steel and smothering anything that came into contact with it.
It is possible to see evidence of this ‘suffocation’ at several locations around Sarn, most notably at the so-called ‘abyssal fields’ on the Wintertree plains – here you can experience a landscape so bleak and horrifying that I wouldn’t recommend more than an hour’s visit. It is possible, through the thick layer of vaguely translucent green varnish, to see the lost earth beneath, with strands of lost grass frozen in time. And a fair few bodies too – some are almost certainly drones who did not get out of the maggots’ way in time, and others were humans fleeing the invasion. It is a sad sight indeed, and deeply eerie – these men and women died hundreds of years ago, yet the maggot fluid has preserved them so well it looks like they have simply ducked their heads below the waters of a pond for a few brief moments.
There are similar sights at the Fon-sein Temple of the Lost, to the east of Brindlebrook in Reilans, the Iron Market Memorial in Mushenska, and in the Thousand Tooth Valley, although that particular stretch of ‘varnish’, as it has become known, has been built on top of and has become something of an attraction for travellers. The varnish has proved near impossible to move, which rather raises the question: will the Jure’lia eventually win by simply covering us over, piece by piece, however long it takes? An alarming thought.
Extract from the journals of Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon