This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Proximal_Flame on 2025-12-10 16:37:56+00:00.
This month’s first update is here, with a fresh chapter of The Serpent’s Garden! Red One and the Calnian fleet have arrived in Meer Colhara, the site of the Calnian’s greatest atrocity. The Meer-Ulson were not exterminated, but they’ve been driven back to their homeworld and kept in perpetual isolation until the Calnians can be assured that they won’t pose a danger to anyone else.
The Calnians will be waiting a long time.
A snippet from the chapter is below, and the rest can be found at the link above. Enjoy!
~
Nanil spoke briefly to the border sentinels’ hierarchs. They made little effort to hide their fascination with the flotilla’s alien companions and were quick to discuss their duties within this system as they directed the new arrivals from their emergence at the rip point to the security checkpoint at Coldheart, though Nanil didn’t learn much that she hadn’t from the briefings. Still, it was good to keep up amicable relations with other officers. FAD’s bonds were tighter than those of IOP or other services.
This was Nanil’s first visit to Meer Colhara; what she knew of it came from stories, Pride archives and history lessons. Meer Colhara had been a hellish world even before the Hegemony had turned its air black with ash and blotted out its sun. No one quite knew what it had been like before the Meer-Ulson arrived, but based on what data they’d been able to collect, it had been a world of blues, reds and yellows with an ecosystem all its own. Then it had become an industrial fortress and the center of the never-ending production and development of interstellar units and war materiel that had once spanned this system. Shipnests by the hundreds, moons with artificial rings. The fires of the forge had enveloped Meer Colhara on a scale that the Hegemony had never before dreamt of...
...and then we brought fires of our own.
The world of Coldheart met the flotilla as a brooding grey sentinel; a great frozen gas world on the farthest reaches of Meer Colhara with more than eighty moons, it had been a launching point for Meer-Ulson fleets, and the first of several bastions within the system itself. Though the Hegemony’s interstellar units could have bypassed it to emerge deeper within the system, it and its vast courts of combat units could not be allowed to remain at the Pride’s back. Supreme Pride Overseer Ensar-Preka had made the first assault upon Meer Colhara here at this world. A third of his forces, themselves more than a third of the Pride’s remaining strength, struck directly at Coldheart, its industry and its fleets.
The battle had been horrifying, devolving into brutal close-quarters fighting; only the siege on Meer Colhara itself was more costly. It was also the first time that the Pride had lost a host vessel in battle, the cousin to Operational Necessity and one of the intendants of the assaulting force. The wreckage of those units, Pride and Meer-Ulson alike, had been left in orbit of Coldheart’s sundered moons as a memorial to the lives lost upon them. The entire system was like that now, all but silent save for the electromagnetic song of lifeless worlds. The Meer-Ulson had fought to the last on every planet and the fleet had had to scour the void of every ship and keep before closing in on Meer Colhara itself. The Meer-Ulson had accepted no quarter and offered none, forcing the Hegemony to shed and wade through an ocean of blood.
~
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