It starts like so many things start: With a dream. But before there was a dream, there was a nightmare.

Earth became a very different place on December 21, 2012, the day that the tapestry of Creation became threadbare, allowing Hell itself to leak into the world. Starting somewhere in downtown Los Angeles, and continuing in a million places all around the globe, the ixitl hordes poured through the nil portals from the maw of the Void, eviscerating every living thing in their wake. The military forces of the world's nations, great and small, were overwhelmed in a matter of hours. Over three billion people, about half of Earth's human population, were killed that first day. By the end of the second day, only a small fraction of humanity remained, huddled together in scattered communes wherever they could find the means to fend off their insectoid slayers.

Alec had known beforehand that the time of Uncreation was nigh, but he also knew that the outcome of that cataclysm was not set in stone. When the time came, he was ready, having prepared a veritable fortress to shelter himself, his extended family and closest friends from the slaughter that was consuming the rest of the world. After the first few weeks, this was expanded into an entire settlement of survivors that was nestled behind an earthen breastworks affectionately called "the Berm." They would call themselves citizens of Freedomtown, and Alec was their de facto mayor, not only because his tau-jin powers were the ultimate guaranteer of that freedom (or rather, their continued existence), but because he had come to earn their respect as a leader. It was thusly that Alec and the people of Freedomtown fought for their lives behind the shelter of the Berm.

It wasn't long before it became apparent that a portion of America's military strength had survived; for while virtually all of her front-line and reserve units had been wiped out during the first week of the Scathing, many of her locally based National Guard units had managed to survive and stay in the fight. One such unit had established a "safe zone" up the road from Freedomtown, in the southern part of the city of Terre Haute, Ind. After an initial friction, an outright battle, and even an attempted airstrike on Alec's fortress home (after which Alec forced a "regime change" in the unit), the two groups began to cooperate. Together they came into contact with other Guard units who had survived, and with them they stitched together a formidable force; all together they were the rough equivalent of a standard Army mechanized infantry brigade, replete with a nearly full compliment of attack helicopters and even the support of an Air Guard fighter squadron of aging, but still potent F-16s. They styled themselves the "14th Indiana Infantry Regiment," after the much decorated Union regiment that served with distinction during the Civil War.

In September of 2013 the commanding officer of the 14th decides that the time has come to launch an attack on the nearest of three ixitl hives, as a test of their ability to remove the insectoid infestation...at least locally. The swarms and their hives were growing in number, making it more and more difficult for the survivors to farm what little land they could safely access, and overrunning the already scarce pasture and hunting grounds. A determination was made that there would be great difficulty for most people in surviving the coming winter, and only by going on the offensive for once and "thinning the herd" could that difficulty be ameliorated

Alec disagreed. He knew that the ixitl swarms were only one part of the Void's agents on Earth. The dorokusai, though not nearly as numerous, were nonetheless far more deadly; they were the antithesis of the tau-jin - former humans corrupted by the influence of the Void, and transformed into beings of exceptional power. A concerted attack on the hives, he feared, would draw the dorokusai into the battle and exact a heavy death toll on any military force they encountered. The solution to the world's infestation, Alec knew, would be presented to him at some point through the tau - the energy that forms the foundation for Creation. The problem was...the military commander was right. Unless the swarms were driven back, famine would surely consume a large portion of the remaining population and make it even more difficult to maintain their settlements. Despairing for lack of a better solution, the one he knew would be shown to him in time, Alec gives his tacit endorsement for the attack. Several dozen men in the Freedomtown settlement volunteer to join it along with him, including both of his brothers, two uncles, as well as a handful of the friends he had brought along with him into the fortress at the outset of the Scathing. A battle plan is drawn up and Alec takes his place among the infantry volunteers, riding into battle inside one of the 14th's mechanized infantry carriers.

The battle goes exceptionally well for the 14th in the beginning. The army's artillery rained shells down on the hive structures, and then on the swarms that came out to meet them in battle, cutting through them like a scythe. Aircraft from the fighter wing successfully bombed the hive with multiple cluster munitions, although several of the fighters were lost to antiair fire coming from spore towers within the hive colony. With shells still falling ahead of them, the mechanized infantry carriers advanced on the hive, disgorging their armed human cargoes and opening fire with their own .50-caliber machine guns. The swarm was falling to the human onslaught, and it appeared as if the hive would be razed in short order - and then the nil portals opened, the dorokusai rising out of them just as Alec had feared they would.

The fighters of the 14th would discover that their assault rifles had little effect on the Void-eaten. It seemed as if bullets went right through them, as they cut their way through the infantry lines with their double-bladed sen-pa swords, augmented by their Void magics. Man and machine were being rent to shreds, and only Alec had the ability to stand against them. Engaging them in battle, he was able to hold them off while the remaining soldiers beat a hasty retreat, a reinvigorated swarm regrouping and threatening to overwhelm them in the chaos. What Alec would discover during this stage of the battle, however, was that even with their vastly superior numbers...the dorokusai were no match for him. Several of them were vanquished before they, too, retreated back through their nil portals. Alec makes his way back to Freedomtown, to bury his brother and eldest uncle who were among those who perished in the ill-fated assault.

As the residents of Freedomtown mourn their losses, Alec is left with many unanswered questions. Why had the dorokusai been so ineffective against him' What did that mean' Did it have anything to do with the balanced integer, a unique and unknown quality that was locked up deep down in his mind? And most importantly, what was the next step in his path' Frustrated, he resolves that he will no longer simply wait for the answers to come to him, like a tau-jin was supposed to. Instead he will put his faith in an ancient ritual that comes with risks all its own.

The native people of North America are a diverse group, but there are many customs and traditions that most of them share in common. One of them is the custom of the sweat lodge, which is a variation of a practice learned from the ancient Mound Builder civilization that Alec's distant ancestor, Ramius, helped to establish in the neolithic period. That ritual itself was taught to the Mound Builders by Ramius, adapted from a tau-jin ritual used to induce an altered mental state which makes it easier to commune with the tau. It was this ritual that Alec would now seek to duplicate. Locking himself away into his private quarters, he initiates the ritual with fire, steam, and a select panel of medicinal agents to help induce the altered state.

A vision comes to him. Taking flight from a dark, bleak place to the north, a flock of sparrows leap into the air, each carrying a twig and a leaf in their beaks. The flock flies west over a vast ocean, until a great serpent rises up from the depths to devour them whole, which then spits fire high into the air. When the fire lands, it envelopes a great hive of ixitl, and the cries he hears are not just the clatterings of chittenous mandibles, but the dark screams of twisted voices. At each stage of the vision, he sees through the vaporous images into the tau, and he is able to guage their connections into his own paradigm. When he rouses himself from the vision, his head still swimming from exhilaration and slight dehydration, Alec appears before members of his family with fateful words.

"I know what I have to do."

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. -Shirley Abbott

Part Two: Severing The Chain

Ramius had come to Earth an exile, cast away from a world called Rhy'Din through a device called the Hyperbola Gate. The primitive aboriginal people who found him thought he was their divine Moon-spirit fallen to the physical realm (because of his alabaster white hair), one prophesied to lead them to a great destiny. And so he had. Teaching them skills in agriculture and giving them the secrets of forging steel tools and weapons, he became a great warrior and commander of their war parties. Under his leadership, they dominated the neighboring tribes and incorporated them, creating an empire that spanned from the Appalachian Mountains in the east to the banks of the mighty Mississippi river in the west, from the Great Lakes in the north to the Cumberland river in the south. This vast stretch of the continent would become pockmarked with great earthen mounds which served as centers of religious rituals and burial rites. Cities of earth, stone, and mortar sprang up around the mounds, and the tribe whose name was lost to the mists of antiquity (they would be known to archeologists and historians only as "the Mound Builders") were known and awed from the Creek, Choctow, and Cherokee in the south, to the great steppe tribes of the western plains.

It was a great civilization; the first civilization of the western hemisphere, but it would not long outlive its beloved founder, the man who could wield the great energies of the spirit world. A mere two centuries after Ramius/Sesetuaha died, the empire of the Mound Builders collapsed, the only evidence of their existence being the wondrous earthen mounds and the steel they left behind. What manuscripts they had left for modern researchers to find could not be translated, the written language of the Mound Builders being based upon the Ippon glyphs taught to them by Ramius...and there was no Rosetta Stone-like key anywhere to be found that could teach anyone to read them.

There were two books, however, preserved through the three-thousand years since the fall of the Mound Builders that held answers that modern archeology sought with zeal: Where had they come from, this mysterious civilization' The most important of the books, the First Book, was known as the Tau-tet to the Ippons of Rhy'Din. It was to them, and more specifically, to the tau-jin, as the Bible was to Christendom. Ramius had copied it soon after his arrival on Earth and taught his children, and his children's children and so on, to read and, most importantly, to protect it. The second book, which Ramius had brought with him through the Hyperbola Gate, was known to his adoptive tribe as the Second Book, but was simply Ramius' journal that he had kept since the the he had first left his native land on his sojourn west to the land of Rhy'Din.

Ramius took a human wife from the Mound Builder tribe, and had three children with her. His oldest son was named Sesmahua (Child-of-the-Stars), his daughter Senutahea (Girl-Weaves-Cloth), and Meheetuhea (Boy-Chases-Fox). Ramius knew that while his children all appeared to be perfectly human, they would all pass along his Ippon traits to their descendants for all human history. More importantly, while his sons would pass those traits along in a peripheral kind of way, such as improved reflexes and deeper intelligence, to name just two, his daughter would pass along to her descendants the keys to reconstituting a truly Ippon child, with a true Ippon genome incorporating the whole of the human genome, sometime far into a history that none of them would ever witness. He knew this not only because he knew the mechanics of the Ippon genome as it encounters those of other races (he had fathered one child that he knew of back in Rhy'Din, as well as one that he did not know of), but because he had in fact encountered the presence of that far off descendant during his fall through the Hyperbola Gate. But to protect the descendants of Senutahea and to monitor the Ippon genome during its long chase through time until the day it could reconstitute itself, Ramius charged Sesmahua, his eldest son, with the protection of his sister. Likewise, his children would monitor and protect hers, and so and and so forth for all time to come. Meanwhile, his youngest would protect the First and Second Books, passing them down to his descendants who, with the descendants of Sesmahua would form a tribe of their own; a secret tribe, whose identity would never be brought into the light of day until the Scathing Times that would not occur for thousands of years.

The descendants of Sesmahua would become known as "the Watchers." The descendants of Meheetuhea, "the Oracles." The Watchers developed a martial identity, training and passing along to their children the secret tau-jin arts that Ramius taught to their common ancestor. The Oracles likewise developed into a more shamanic order, and would one day judge the one the Watchers would bring to them as the Legacy Child, the reconstituted Ippon boy child who would be born to two human descendants of Ramius' daughter, Senutahea. The Oracles and Watchers alike believed that it would be the destiny of the Legacy Child to lead their tribe out of the Scathing Times, to father a new race of pureblood Ippons upon the Earth and to rebuild the old empire of the Mound Builders. Little did they suspect that soon after he was identified, the Legacy Child would grow into a man with an entirely different sense of his destiny.

Alec was convinced that Ramius' presence on Earth altered the way human history had evolved, upsetting a delicate balance of forces and was the reason that the Scathing (or as he understood it, the beginning of the Uncreation) had happened in the first place. In order to restore the balance, all of the unbalancing forces would have to be removed from the world. This not only meant that the ixitl and the dorokusai would have to be purged, but the First and Second Books, and Alec himself would have to be purged with them. No agents of the Uncreation, no tau-jin, and no ability to train anymore tau-jin like himself could be left behind. He could not purge all traces of the Ippon genome from the human gene pool, even though the Scathing itself had done much of that job for him, so he could only hope that without the texts necessary to train a tau-jin, the existence of the Ippon genes themselves would be of little consequence to the balance of forces on Earth...at least until another Legacy Child was born sometime in the future. And when that happens" F*ck him, Alec thought. Let him deal with this bullsh*t in his own way.

Alec takes the two Great Books out of his keepsafe, fires up the qala crystal forge that he uses to forge Ippon crysteel, and allows the forge to consume the Tau-tet, or the First Book. The Second Book, however, the personal journal of his ancestor, he simply cannot bring himself to burn it. It had been far too important to him in life. Let it burn with him, when the time comes. He stuffs the ancient journal into his trusty leather satchel, packed as it already was with various other supplies, slings it over his shoulder, and walks into the basement conference room.

There were already a few people in the room waiting for him. The commander of the 14th Indiana, a former Lt. Colonel of the Indiana National Guard named Henry Chickadaunce, spoke up immediately. "Finally. Maybe we can get some answers now."

Alec looked at everyone in the room in turn. Three of them were highly respected leaders of the Freedomtown community. Three others were part of Col. Chickadaunce's command staff, themselves the CO's of the regimental air, artillery, and mechanized infantry assets. Then there was Aryane, his Watcher and longtime friend. These were the people he had chosen to share his plan with, and would leave it to them to share it with whoever they saw fit to inform. She would stare at him with quiet intensity, and only now did he begin to feel the unease of anxiety. This would not be easy, and Aryane would likely contest his plan the fiercest.

The table in the center of the conference room had a map of the old United States laid out flat upon it. Alec took his place at the head of the table and placed a finger on the state of Nevada. "I've been in touch with Comstock Guard today," he said. The Comstock Guard was a large military force comprised of the survivors of the Nevada and Arizona National Guard, various Air National Guard assets pieced together from the southwestern states, and some former Mexican paramilitaries. All together, the Comstock Guard was the rough equivalent of an old U.S. Army Infantry division like the Big Red One, with a large attached air wing of F-15s and -16s, making it one of the largest cohesive military forces on the continent today. They took their name from the old Comstock Lode, the vast deposit of silver ore that had single handedly led to the creation of Nevada state during the Civil War.

In an example of what was old becoming new again, a network of shortwave radio broadcasters had stitched together a flow of information not unlike the Internet that had replaced it in the Nineties. Now that the modern communications networks had been rendered useless by the rampaging ixitl swarms, Humanity had turned once again to radio to reestablish contact with their far-flung brethren, and walled outposts like Freedomtown once again could have a more or less clear picture of the goings-on of similar outposts all around the globe. It was thus that someone like Alec could get in touch with the commanding officer of the Comstock Guard, a self-styled major general who, prior to the Scathing, had been a struggling computer salesman, but a perfectly competent officer in the Nevada Guard. A lowly lieutenant, to be sure, but possessed of enough dogged confidence and charisma to assemble the remnants of many surviving Guard units around him and make them believe that he could lead them in this terrifying new reality.

"I will take a team of four recon soldiers from the 14th with me on a flight here," Alec continued, sliding his finger to a spot somewhere in southeastern California. "Cadiz Airstrip, about twenty miles east of the old Marine Corps Air Combat Center at Twentypalms. A reconnaissance platoon from the Comstock will meet us there, and we'll all proceed together from there into the mountains overlooking Los Angeles." Alec took a deep, quiet breath at this point, deliberately not looking at Aryane. "We'll establish a base camp, and they'll keep overwatch as I proceed into Los Angeles alone."

Aryane's outburst was expected. "Like hell, you will! Where you go, I go. You know that." Yes, Alec knew it. It had been that way ever since her grandfather began teaching him the ways of the tau-jin. He was his teacher, but not his Watcher. That task had always belonged to Aryane, and she devoted herself to her duty with a rabid singlemindedness. Alec shook his head.

"Not this time, Ary. This time your Legacy Child marches in alone."

Before she could reply, one of Col. Chickadaunce's underlings, a Guard captain who commands the 14th Indiana's artillery battalion, spoke up. "There is something I don't think any of us understands, man. Okay, you say that the big bad bug hive in L.A. needs to be destroyed. I get that. But you haven't told us how you plan on doing it, especially if you plan on walking in there alone, to say nothing of all those dark no-face whatsits that kicked our posteriors the last time we tried to take out one of their hives."

"That part is actually the easiest to achieve," Alec stated. "I can take on the bugs and hive's defensive structures all day long. When I start carving the place up, the dorokusai will have no choice but to try and stop me...because if I am able to find and kill the hive queen there, it's game over for the bugs all around the globe. And when I start carving up the dorokusai, well, I can only hope that that draws all of them into the fight. I already set the trap. That's what my last flight north was about. I went to the Navy's old transmitter station in the Upper Peninsula and sent a message to every nuclear ballistic missile submarine in the northern Pacific that might have survived the Scathing: Nuke Los Angeles at such-and-such date, at such-and-such time."

Jaws proceeded to drop all around the table. One of the military types finally breathed, "F*ckin' A..."

After a brief moment, Aryane asked the inevitable question. "And just how do you plan on getting out before the mushroom cloud hits?"

"If the mushroom cloud hits, you mean," Alec corrected his longtime best friend. "I didn't stick around for an acknowledgement that might never come. To answer your question, though...I don't.?