1.15-Shadows of Leviathans

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]The star at the center of the Obdrisceant rings is dyin’. The commune of Obdrin been hiring our flyers from all over to bring their followers to the rings. They want to all be together when their god passes away.The Wrot has tried to keep the natural death cycle to a minimum. No super nova, no collapsing into a black hole. Its strange hearing a Wrot be so selfless. The cosmic parasites will do just about anything to hang on to power. Rumor has it this one never propagated. No progeny to save or covet resources for.It’s host star, however, likely doesn’t care. Elder Obdrin been working for generations on a way to avert their own destruction and maybe preserve their object of worship. And they found something.Circlin’ the Wrot and half as big as its star is a Reef Leviathan. Hulking ship from tritium-infused polyps grown by Escathai vertebrae, small, silk-thin animals made entirely of nerve cells. The bigger the colony, the more food, sodium, and magnesium there is to go around. Plenty like to live on their own before the Commune of Hristoth came and took their seas. Their twin home worlds of Escar and Esceer, moons around the ocean giant Tel’im are adrift in the void somewhere. Now the Reef Leviathans are their only sanctuaries.Waves of psychic miasma cloud the onlookers as the Commune across all 418 rings watch their god breath its last. A flow of plasma streams off the surface of the star, magnetized into the vast coral ship in orbit. The Wrot dies with a sigh in the shadow of the Escathai colony.In the days that follow, the entire commune hitches a ride on the Leviathan. One of the folks we brought to see the event was a celestorian. She kept wondering why the Escathai would help here seein’ as a Wrot was what did in Tel’im, their home world. The Escathai aren’t known for being generous and compassionate. They ain’t mean or nothing, just don’t like to interfere.I remember tryin’ to see the rings out the viewport as we left, the system nothing but a black husk with the Wrot gone. And I think about Escar and Esceer floatin’ somewhere off in the dark. I wonder if those abandoned worlds will ever meet.