Beyond the sky, past the realm of birds and clouds and even the thin wisps of air that mark the boundary of the world, there drift the celestial bodies—and they are alive. Not alive in the way that mortals understand life, with breath and blood and beating hearts. They live on a scale that makes mortal existence seem like the flickering of a candle. Their thoughts span millennia. Their memories stretch back to the first light.
Zyknos is not merely named after a planet. Zyknos IS a planet.
A hungry one.
In the vast cold between stars, worlds like Zyknos drift and dream and feed. They consume asteroids, swallow moons, absorb the debris of dead solar systems. Most planets are content with this slow grazing, the patient accumulation of mass over billions of years. But Zyknos tasted something different when a comet passed through his atmosphere carrying spores from a distant world—life. Complex, thriving, multiplying life. The experience was intoxicating. The raw vitality of organic matter, the concentrated energy of ecosystems, the sheer density of existence that teemed on living worlds—it awakened a hunger that rocks and ice could never satisfy.
Zyknos began to hunt.
He learned to adjust his orbit, nudging himself through gravitational calculations that took centuries to execute. He consumed three worlds before finding Cordragia—barren rocks with only microbial life, appetizers that sharpened his appetite for something richer. When he finally detected this small blue-green jewel orbiting a yellow sun, he knew he had found his feast.
Cordragia blazes with life. Forests and oceans and teeming cities. Magic woven into the very soil. Creatures of such complexity and variety that Zyknos could spend millennia cataloging them. Dragons. Gods. Civilizations that have risen and fallen while he drifted ever closer. The sheer concentration of vital energy makes his planetary core ache with anticipation.
But Zyknos has a problem.
His true weapons—the ones that could crack continents and boil oceans—would destroy what he craves. A world reduced to molten slag holds no interest for him. He wants Cordragia alive when he takes it, wants to feel the forests burning slowly into his atmosphere, wants to absorb the oceans and all the creatures swimming within them, wants to draw the mountains down into his mantle where their minerals will enrich him for eons. The consumption must be gradual. Savored.
This requires conquest, not annihilation.
And conquest requires understanding the conquered.
Here, Zyknos fails.
He has observed Cordragia for centuries, reading the patterns of its civilizations from orbit. He has watched armies march and cities rise and kingdoms fall. But observation is not comprehension. The creatures of this world think in ways that baffle him. They fight for concepts he cannot parse—honor, love, revenge, faith. They sacrifice themselves for abstractions. They betray their allies for reasons that seem to contradict their own survival. Their wars follow no logical pattern. Their alliances make no gravitational sense.
Zyknos understands force. Mass. Trajectory. He does not understand politics.
When he sent his first expeditionary forces to the surface—asteroids carefully aimed to deliver his servants rather than devastate—they were destroyed within weeks. Not by superior firepower, but by guerrilla tactics he hadn't anticipated, by magical defenses he couldn't predict, by the simple fact that Cordragia's inhabitants knew their terrain while his forces did not.
He tried again. And again. Each attempt taught him something, but the lessons came slowly, filtered through a consciousness that processes information on geological timescales. By the time he understood one strategy, the mortals had already developed three new counter-strategies.
The magic poses another obstacle.
Zyknos has little magic. Planets struggle to cast spells. The fundamental forces he commands—gravity, magnetism, the slow churn of molten cores—are useless against wards that bend space or shields that exist partially in other dimensions. He has watched his most powerful servants, creatures of pure cosmic energy, be banished by a single mage's incantation. He has seen orbital bombardments deflected by prayer.
It infuriates him. It fascinates him. It makes him want Cordragia even more.