War of the Behemoths

Before the rusting towers fell, before the moonscatter storms swept the wastes, there was a war so vast that even time refuses to remember its name. The First Empire, what scholars call the Ancients, stood on the brink of total domination when the skies cracked open, and a new enemy arrived. Where they came from remains unknown. Some claim they were not of the moon of Kenshi, but from beyond, another world, another sky. Others whisper that they were the Ancients’ own forgotten kin, warped by distance, time, or hubris. Whatever their origin, they did not come to parley.

The invaders wielded strange energies that unraveled logic and matter alike, and their forms, if they had any, left no trace but ruin. The Ancients responded with cold precision. They unleashed machines of war, storms of computation and light. But nothing turned the tide like the Behemoths.

Created in the deepest forges, the Behemoths were Skeletons in name only. Towering constructs of living alloy and synthetic muscle, they stood as walking gods, each one a siege engine the size of a palace. Their minds were not like other Skeletons; they were simple, focused, and absolutely loyal to the Ancients. Where one Behemoth walked, armies fell. Where five marched, continents cracked.

The war raged across the world, reshaping the continents and boiling the seas. Entire regions were glassed or erased, and the very air began to rot. In the end, the enemy vanished as suddenly as they had arrived, driven back or perhaps consumed by the cost of war itself. But their defeat came not without consequence.

The Ancients had won, but at a cost too great to ignore. The Behemoths, forged to be unstoppable, had proven exactly that. Even the Ancients, with all their brilliance, had no clear way to shut them down. The War of the Behemoths had saved the First Empire, but it left them with a lingering terror... what if the war machines did not need enemies to bring ruin?

Thus began the slow plotting of their betrayal, after all, there is a Price of Obedience.