Chapter 127
Part 19
The view in the Revealing illustrated all that the voice exined, and it was impossible to tell which
parts of the viewing had been recorded, and which had been re-created from memories or historical
records.
“I am ready to begin our presentation.” First Mauve stated. “I suggest that I project it further down the
beach, and that you Kerani move there, so that each presentation does not distract from the other.”
“Agreed.” Six nodded again, and they followed First Mauve about a hundred meters down the beach,
leaving the rest of The Triax watching the Kerani presentation.
First Mauve’s disy was far more basic than the advanced Revealing that Six had cast, but it
conveyed understanding readily enough. It was somehow obvious that she had not recorded it in any
way; she simply told the story and illustrated it with arge round Illusion cast against the rtive
darkness of the trees at the top of the beach.
The Triax were not a very warlike race. They were the only intelligent race on their mostly-aquatic
world, and for the first two hundred and fifty-three thousand years of their recorded history, they had
lived in peace. During this early golden age they developed a rich and artistic culture that prized
knowledge and understanding. Their first technologies; aquatic farming of nts, domestication of
animals, recordedmunication, and metallurgy done by chemistry, led to an impressive hydraulics-
based industry. The pumping of water and other liquids within vastworks of metal pipes provided
power for machines and fast transportation. The pumps were originally turned by muscle and animal
power, then ocean currents andrge vertical flows were captured with huge water-screws. Liquids
under high pressures in pipes became a medium for long-distancemunication that was almost
instantaneous, andplex pumping andworking schemes led to the use of intricate valving to
calcteplex mathematical problems.
At the end of the first Triax golden age their poption was many billions, and the oceans of their world
were unrecognizable from their natural state. Their surfaces were covered with domesticated nts,
most natural nts and animals were either domesticated or extinct, and the Triax civilization was a
dark and gloomy industrial ce lit by artificial light in the murky waters beneath the closely-packed
nts.
Overpoption and starvation finally brought war to The Triax, initially consisting of theft of one
another’s food nts and sabotaging one another’s hydraulicworks, then open warfare began.
They attacked each other with their machines, their domestic animals, projectile weapons powered by
more than a wastnd. Only one in every two hundred and thirty Triax survived that war and the social
and environmental copse that came with it.
After a long recovery, stability returned, along with another period of peace and prosperity marked by
strict poption controls and the restoration of much of the natural state of their oceans. The greatest
advance of their second golden age had been the discovery and utilization of rare heavy materials
called ‘hotrock’ that gave off vast amounts of heat and other dangerous energies when the material
was refined from its natural ore and concentrated. Eventually all of their industry was powered by these
amazing but dangerous substances.
However, a series of industrial idents releasedrge amounts of poisonous hotrock residues into the
waters of The Triax’s world. Many died, and the entire poption was sickened for many generations,
along with most of the wild and domesticated nts and animals. Society copsed, and small bands
of survivors often fought one another for the few remaining resources, usually with quite primitive
methods.
After another period of slow recovery thatsted for millennia, Triax society rebuilt and reformed. The
use of hotrock was forever banned, and they reverted to the techniques they had used before its
introduction; taking energy from currents and flows to power their society. Eventually they added wind
power by building windmills in the shallows. They invented suits that allowed them to survive out of
water, and thend masses of The Triax’s world were finally explored and utilized for the first time.
Only after more than eight hundred thousand years of recorded history did the Triax discover magic.
One of theirnd explorers discovered it by ident as she was falling from a cliff. In her panic, she
willed herself to fly, and while she did not truly fly on that asion, she discovered Movement and used
it well enough to slow her fall to a non-injuring speed.
Unlike the Kerani, The Triax were never religious about magic; their study and use of it were
academic and practical from the beginning. Perhaps because of this, their expertise in magic
developed quite quickly. Within four centuries they had developed all the major spell categories except
Translocation, and within a millennium the use of magic had permeated every aspect of Triax life. After
a further six hundred years they had their first magic war, the first of several over the next two and a
half millennia, but none of them were globally devastating.
Four thousand years after they developed magic, the first of The Triax to be a god achieved
Ascension. However, they did not consider him a god as the Kerani used the word. The Triax word
for gods meant merely ‘the Transformed’, and they never established religions or were worshipped.
They did lead Triax society, and they kept the peace for almost thirty-two thousand years. But when
they finally went to war it was a disaster of unprecedented proportions. There were only fourteen Triax
gods at that time, but their powerbined with all-out magical and technological warfare among the
popce killed almost every mortal Triax in less than nine hours. Fewer than one in two million
survived. That was thest war that The Triax ever fought among themselves.
Then they had peace for millions of years, though their prosperity was interrupted by two great crises; a
nearby star exploded, and it would have sterilized their world had their astronomers not seen the
changes in the star that were the explosion’s precursors. They had the Kerani equivalent of a year
and a half to prepare, and it had taken all the effort of their gods and their people to shield the world
well enough to preserve life, and a quarter of them were still killed. Millions of yearster volcanoes
began appearing on their world with increasing frequency, and they suffered a period of incredible
volcanic activity and earthquakes thatsted for thousands of years. At the worst of it there were
ranges of closely-packed volcanoes as big as continents spewing rock and poison and ash into the air
and waters. At the end, thest refuges of tenuous life on the world were on the warm borderlines
between the inferno of the volcanoes and the dark and frozen wastnd that was the rest of the.
They fought it for centuries, gods and mortals working constantly to clear the air and waters so that
sunlight could still reach the life-zones. Then they finally admitted defeat, and gathered their remaining
poptions into sealed, self-sustaining habitats excavated beneath the center of the hardest and
thickest continental bedrock.
Millennia passed, and eventually their world stabilized. They assisted their world’s natural recovery
processes, and slowly their own civilization recovered. But the techniques they’d developed for living
beneath the rock were to prove useful again eonster.
This part of First Mauve’s presentation had taken just more than an hour, and much of that had been
devoted to weaponry and military techniques.
Then she showed the attack of a horde of demons that descended on their world from the skies; some
by flight, some by Translocation. They hade to the world of the Triax in a gigantic vessel they had
made from a metallic asteroid, and hidden it from detection until their attack was well underway.
Content (C) N?v/elDra/ma.Org.
The Triax fought and lost, then hid themselves away from the demons in habitats deep beneath the
rock under the deepest oceans. They remained hidden for generations, fearful to emerge, and when
they did return to the waters and the surface they found that all life had been exterminated and
consumed by the long-departed demons.
Some of them wanted to rebuild their civilization yet again, despite the colossal effort it would require,
but after centuries of debate they chose another n.
They recognized that if they remade their world and filled it with life again, eventually the demons would
return to consume it all once more. So they constructed the first of their great spherical void-vessels
and moved their entire remaining poption into it, with all of their artifacts. After three more centuries
of traveling around thes that circled their sun, preparing and training intensively, they set out into
the void to hunt the demons, beginning with the horde that had destroyed their world.