Europa
Book 1 of the Shadow war
By Stan Butler
Written as an Extended Project Qualification novel
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Part 1: On a land of ice...
Part 2: A foe of shadows...
Part 3: Four shall die...
Part 4: Salvation comes...
Afterword
Prologue
The world glittered in the faint light of the distant star, the giant planet it orbits filling the sky with a swirling palette of colours. Great swathes of reds, ochres and burnt umbers creating a scene as if the work of a great modern artist’s painting session.
Another moon entered the vista, a world of great volcanic activity, creating great arcs of plasma as some of the greatest volcanoes in the solar system erupted.
The faint light accentuated the beautiful heat-carved spires, water-cut valleys became shrouded in shadow, some flowing while others just dry beds. The great sheets of ice that formed the world creaked and groaned under their monumental stresses, but other than that all there was, was silence, the silence of a world surrounded by the black canvas of space watched unnoticed by the eyes of a hundred thousand stars.
Silence soon broken by a strange droning noise.
“We’ve escaped!” laughed one of the two scientists piloting the tracked sled
“Not yet Efra, we still need to reach the relay station.” spoke the other, looking forlornly out of the thick rad-glass window as the research station which had been their home for the past twenty years disappeared from sight and sighed
“Damn that creature for ruining everything.”
Efra shuddered as he remembered the massacre they had found when they returned with their algae samples and at the sight of a dear friend frozen to death then shattered into smithereens like the others.
“What did it want?” pondered Dave “It can’t have been food as it disintegrated its prey and we did nothing to aggravate it so unless it was sentient and thought we were invading it’s world. I can think of no other reason for the attac...”
“The power was out.” replied Efra “Perhaps it was similar to a terran fire ant and was drawn to electricity, took out the power then due to pain induced madness killed the scientists?”
Dave did not reply.
“What do you think Dave?” he asked, turning to look at him.
Frost covered his body and his skin was turning blue.
A figure behind him was revealed by the cold induced mist. It raised one hand towards Dave and after a blinding flash, all that was left was a few slowly melting shards.
“W...Why?” stammered Efra. “Are yo...you d...doing this?”
“There is a war coming.” replied the once again invisible figure, filling the crisp air with flecks of crimson as a blade flashed unseen through the scientist’s neck
The creature opened the rear door of the sled and jumped out, rolling to absorb the impact.
“And it begins.”
The sled drove onwards, propelled by two caterpillar tracks as the atmosphere was too thin for hovercar technology, the tracks throwing aside crystals of ice that had lain undisturbed for eons.
In the cabin the air was slowly venting into the thin atmosphere of the world, blood still hung in the air and as the cabin cooled, these droplets froze, tiny beads of life that fell to the steel floor next to the body they had once called home, shattering on the floor in little shards that reflected the harsh light of the LED’s that lit the cabin with piercing white light.
The two bodies lay on the floor surrounded by these red shards, one of them mixed their own shards with these new shards while the other stared up at those LED’s with unseeing eyes that slowly glazed over as his life fled in fear, head surrounded by a crimson halo of death, three feet from the body it once animated.
Little crystals of ice formed in the air, little wisps of cloud as well that split the light into the whole spectrum, creating rainbows in the air. Eventually these crystals of ice grew large enough to fall from the air and within the confines of this sled, snow graced the now pale blue body of Efra Finn. It was as if the world was giving him a farewell, a meteorologist frosted with snow formed from his last breath.
Two minutes later the sled ploughed into an ice cliff and the wisps of cloud spun into complex vortices and eddies, the shards of blood, flesh and bone lifted off the floor and fell again, re-organised, redistributed and intermingled in death.
For an instant, the vortices in the clouds formed the image of two figures being lead away by another cloaked figure, but that could just have been a trick of the light.
The engines ticked down as the batteries were drained, cut off from the star that usually powered them, the lights dimmed, flickered, before eventually casting the cabin into near darkness, ice crystals only glittering in the faint light of a distant star.
Part one
On a land of Ice a storm shall rise
A storm that drowns out innocents’ cries
Reaps souls from their unprotected chests
And lays waste to all the rest