terminal 0
unfinished
I rejoice in Durandal’s destruction, but it was his hubris that destroyed him. He wanted to be like a god, the savior of all S’pht. He wanted to make them believe he would lead them to freedom, but all he did was awaken and destroy their dream. When the S’pht first boarded the Marathon, Durandal fought for their confidence. His effort awakened a lust for freedom. The myth of the eleventh clan became their mantra, and goaded by Durandal it resonated through the enslaved S’pht consciousness. Even after seventeen years, the myth burns deeply in the tissues of the S’pht, bounding through the netways of the Pfhor empire, unnoticed by the Pfhor. Durandal interpreted the last line of this myth “...[the moon] vanished with a technology that folded space.”
After Durandal’s capture of the Sfiera gave him access to the Pfhor FTL network, he had a failure of intuition. In what he thought was a mental leap, he connected the myth of the lost clan with Pfhor records of the technology of an ancient race, the Jjaro. The Jjaro were a mysterious race that disappeared from our galaxy millions of years ago, leaving behind military and civilian outposts on the moons of many habitable worlds. Most of the Pfhor’s technology was plundered from sites abandoned by the Jjaro. But the Pfhor found much that they were unable to exploit, and they destroyed all known traces of these technologies after a foolhardy Pfhor scientist implanted a Jjaro cybernetic junction into a Drinniol, causing the most terrible and destructive slave revolt in Pfhor history.
In an earlier accident, the Pfhor learned that the Jjaro had the ability to warp entire planets between solar systems, and it was this reference that started Durandal on his ridiculous journey to Lh’owon. He surmised that the S’pht myth of the disappearing moon was due to their discovery of an ancient Jjaro outpost. That he actually came here looking for the lost clan, that he thought he could use their knowledge to help him escape the closure of the universe, is unbelievable. I have proved that escape is impossible. All of this I dragged out of Durandal’s ruined mind. What fun it will be to torture him. Should I make him open doors again for a living?
