User blog:Iro: Spirit of Iron/Sins of the Fathers Preview

Working on this one for whatever reason now...

Prologue
The being rose to his feet unsteadily. He looked around, dazed and confused, his head pulsating with a nagging sensation of familiarity – and with general pain. He placed his hand to his forehead and let out a harsh and sharp sigh. There was nothing, nothing that came to him in a surge of remembrance. He felt as if his mind had been ravaged, a portion of his reminiscences stripped away. One thing, among a few others, stood out in his half-empty memory – his name. Harjotu, he realized, was what he had been called once. Another word floated through his head: Tsiac. It was a broader term, but he recalled being referred to by it. A race or a species, perhaps, it was.

From a third person’s perspective, he was not a remarkable sight for this world around him. Standing at about seven and a half feet in height, he had a muscular build with a lean and strong torso. His skin was a pale grey, and his eyes a dull orange. He had no hair atop his head, though a thick black beard was present on his chin. He wore a black set of clothing over his torso and a red one over his limbs. His legs were incredibly long, having two knees each, and were clad in steel armor, like his arms. On his feet, he wore a pair of metal sandals, small spikes on the bottom. A large silver helmet was at his left side. It had two thin slits for the eyes that were angled in a menacing way, and the portion that would cover one’s mouth was carved into a cruel and mad smile.

To his right was another being. It was very skinny, almost insect-like in appearance. It wore black clothing was well, though it was armored in a translucent orange substance that looked to be glass from a distance. It had two wings that were similar to a housefly’s and a set of pincers around its head, a mechanical implant rather than a natural appendage. The stranger sat up wearily at spat away from Harjotu. Its face was as hideous as could be, scratched and scarred with unfamiliar markings burned into its features. Its eyes were crystalline, seeming like orange gems rather than the traditional orbs a normal being would have.

“I know you,” it said in a nasal voice. Hearing this being’s voice confirmed Harjotu’s theory that this one was a male; no female was as ugly as this insect-looking freak. “You were a general, right? In the army?”

“I don’t know,” Harjotu muttered. “I don’t know a lot of things, like where I am... and who in the world you are.”

“Taçedre, they called me. Yeah, I remember you. You were the one they said could stretch your body around others until they talked. You were pretty powerful for a Tsiac.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“Hit your head pretty hard upon impact, eh? I woke up when I was falling. I tried to slow down, but all I managed to do was save myself from getting a concussion or something.”

“Where were we falling from?” Harjotu asked. He could not say that he particularly liked this Taçedre, but it seemed that he knew a lot more about what had happened in the past than Harjotu did.

Taçedre looked up in the night sky and squinted. He turned his head about until his eyes locked on a small pale red object off in the far distance among the thousands of stars. “There,” he said at last. “At least, I think that’s where we were. Even if not, Benevus is the only place we could’ve come from.”

“Benevus?”

“Your memory really is shot. You lived there. I lived there. I think... I think we’re on the main world.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, Benevus is just a moon. It has to orbit something. I think we’re on the actual planet. What’d our leader call it...? Murtua, something like that...”