The Quintesson Wars: Bad Moons Rising
The quintesson’s ship, that foreboding tower of black metal and piercing red eyes, which had just hours before hung malevolently over the skyline of Iacon, now rested in smoldering pieces across the metal hills around the Well of All Sparks. It’s central column had been snapped apart like an ebony twig, and the mushroom-like hood atop it had caved in, with a great hole punched into its dome. Crimson lights across the wreckage’s surface flickered dimly, trying to hold on to life, while orange fires burned within the wreckage. It was a sound victory for the Primes and newborn race of Transformers; the quintesson’s daring invasion had been soundly repulsed.
But how that victory had been achieved, no-one among the people of Iacon could say for sure. Prima’s plan to activate the city’s defensive weapons had been rendered null as a bright light had suddenly flared at the megalopolis’s center, engulfing the enemy vessel as a loud sound, like the tolling of a great bell, had split the evening air and drowned out the sounds of clashing blades and weaponsfire. When the light and noise cleared a second later, the ship was gone, and a thunderous boom sounded from the plains around Iacon. The Primes and their warriors hadn’t time to ponder the miracle, and instead cut down the rest of the quintesson monsters infesting the city streets, now that they would not be replaced with reinforcements from their ship.
The battle was over. Night had fallen over Iacon and the surrounding plains, and while the populace immediately went to work repairing the damage the quintessons had wrought- assisted by the restorative abilities of Solus, Alchemist, and Nexus Prime- the rest of the Thirteen traveled to the crash site in search of answers. Before the looming visage of the ship’s hood, a ribbon of green light sliced through the air. It grew larger, widening into a gateway cut into the empty space. From its center, Prima, Megatronus, Liege Maximo, Amalgamous Prime, Alpha Trion (accompanied, as always, by Beta Maxx), Onyx Prime, Micronus Prime, and Quintus Prime emerged together, their armor painted by firelight and the dim glow cast down by Cybertron’s twin moons, Hecate and Artemis. Vector Prime walked out of the portal behind them all, and dispelled the gate his sword had created by stowing Rhisling on his hip. The glyphs on its blade stopped shining, and the air around the Primes righted itself again. The robotic demigods looked up at the destroyed ship, none of them taking as much pride in their victory as they wanted to. With only one ship, the quintessons had slipped past fleets of warships and planetary defenses, and proceeded to launch an invasion of the capitol city of their fledgling civilization.
It made Vector Prime wonder: if this enemy was so bold as to immediately attempt such a strike- to leave the rest of the Imperium of Cybertron leaderless and disoriented, no doubt- how would they retaliate now that they had been defeated? If the quintessons truly had visited other dimensions before this one, had they already anticipated the results of this battle?
He shook his head. He wouldn’t allow himself to become paralyzed by fearful ruminations. As the Guardian of Space and Time, a threat to the multiverse such as this new enemy was his responsibility, whether the others shared that sentiment or not. Meanwhile Megatronus kicked at pieces of wreckage by his feet, looking for anything that could have once been a weapon, or a part in the ship’s systems. The segmented plates that made up his face were shaped into a scowl. If Vector thought he had been caught unaware by this new enemy, he could only imagine what ran through Megatronus’s mind.
Vector’s gold hand rested on Megatronus’s pitch-dark shoulder. “This will not happen again,” Vector said reassuringly. “We will be ready for them.”
But Megatronus only turned his grimace to the face of his comrade, and shrugged the outreached hand off of his arm. “Indeed, I shall,” he hissed wrathfully, his eyes burning a hellish red. Vector gave a melancholy sigh, and joined the other Primes in examining the wreck. Only one bot could console Megatronus in his worst of moods, and she wasn’t here right now.
Beneath the quintesson ship’s dome, they found a way into the vessel’s interior. The winding passages were large enough to accommodate their giant forms, though to Onyx Prime they seemed more like the veins and arteries of a massive creature than hallways. With curved surfaces and walls made from thick black cables, they branched off into smaller passages often, and frequently merged with others halls to lead into wider chambers housing unfamiliar machines. Some shipwrights likened their craft to loyal companions, but this monolithic vessel truly felt like a living organism- like the bestial titans that roamed across Cybertron’s equator. The Lord of Beasts squared his shoulders and tensed his claws, feeling like some insignificant microbe within the body of this bizarre creature.
“Fascinating,” remarked Quintus Prime, plucking a cable from the wall and pinching it with his long, thin fingers. Maroon liquid trickled from its torn end. His six eyes were wide with wonder, and his small mouth agape. “Oh, if only Optimus had left it in a more pristine condition…”
“That is one way to appraise this… thing, I suppose,” Onyx murmured, not exactly sharing in Quintus’s enthusiasm. The difference between the two of them, he supposed, was that Quintus couldn’t recognize a true monster among the many forms life took across the cosmos. The quintessons didn’t even come from this cosmos; they were foreign to the natural order, and it terrified the Lord of Beasts.
The Primes pressed inward in to the wreck, keeping on the same path as it went uphill through burst-open hatches and intricate valves. Broken bodies were strewn across the floor: some the Primes recognized as more of the tentacled warriors they had fought, while others were clearly of the same design, but frailer, and without tails to support themselves on. Their bodies simply ended in a web of tendrils bellow their waist, and some even had more additional appendages coming from their flanks, or behind their shoulders. Pinkish flesh wove with complex circuitry beneath sheets of osteoderm and metal. The Primes said nothing as they passed the corpses, eventually coming to a door which hadn’t broken open wide enough to allow them through.
With the strength of the five robots that made up his form, Nexus Prime stepped forward and ripped the hatches from the walls, tearing out trails of wires and tubes beneath them. The Primes stepped through the aperture and into a massive round chamber, the interior of the quintesson ship’s domed cap reaching up all around them, with twin beams of moonlight shining through the massive tear in its side. The silvery radiance shone upon destroyed machines adorned with strange markings, with damaged hologram projectors that occasionally spat out more otherworldly symbols that none of the Primes could decipher.
In the center of the cavernous space, a harness made from gnarled mechanical arms, twisted like the roots of a black tree, reached down and wrapped around a creature encircled by broken monitors. It had no limbs that the Primes could see, just a large, bloated face of necrotic tissue and grey cybernetic implants that held it all together. It’s bony jaws were slack, its mechanical eyes lightless. All over the creature’s body, cables and tubes of varying size stretched between it and the myriad of machines around its harness, which in turn were linked to the other mechanisms throughout the chamber by visceral webs of veiny circuits.
The Primes gaped up at this thing in a dreadful silence, not knowing what to make of it. Now more than ever, these new foes presented themselves as a threat utterly alien to them. For all his terrifying powers, Unicron and his minions were something they could understand.
The creature in the harness suddenly shuddered, and its right eye filled with a dim red light, which illuminated a jagged rupture in the armor above its face, where blood and mech fluid bled out through ridges of brain matter. Creature and harness turned as one, swiveling on some axis in the ceiling to face the Primes as a choked gurgling sound escaped its mouth. Horrified, Prima stepped back and threw a hand on the hilt of the Star Saber.
“What… what in Primus’s name are you?” he gasped. The creature’s jaws drew together as its one working eye widened. Then, it spoke:
"Prima of Cybertron. You and the rest of the Thirteen, acting on behalf of the cybertronian race, have refused to comply with our mandates and submit yourselves to Judgement." It spoke in the detached, eery voice that the crew of the Chronon had heard at the Benzuli Expanse. It shuddered, as more fluid poured from its wound and a few cables on its side tore away from its body.
“Submit?” Prima scoffed. “You expected us to stand by and let you decide if we live or die?”
“Your compliance was mandated, cybertronian,” the creature- a quintesson, to be sure- said. "Your universe has been selected by the quintessons for trial and examination. The compliance of the native civilizations ensures an orderly procession and is convenient on your part."
Prima’s eyes narrowed. “Your people appear more as invading tyrants than judges, from where I’m standing. The Imperium of Cybertron does not recognize the authority you claim over our right to exist.”
“Irrelevant,” boomed the quintesson. More machines began to come loose from its body as the edges of its face sagged. "We are the only authority; only we can observe the permutations of existence, removed from its influence.
“There is a realm of being beyond the ability of even your technological mind to grasp. It affords a perspective that you could not begin to process within tenfold of your spark’s lifespan. What you perceive to be your universe is part of a vast matrix that must be curated, and only we have the means by which to do so.”
The quintesson began to sink into its harness as it drew closer to death, and Prima stepped forward. This shriveling creature’s grand words and pious ramblings did little to sway his mind. He drew his sword from his back and pointed the Star Saber’s blade up at the quintesson.
“You have lost,” the Warrior of Light says defiantly. “You underestimate your enemies if you truly expect them to yield to you- not without a fight, they won’t. The people of this universe will never be cowed, and we will resist your judgement with everything at our command.”
The quintesson’s eye flickered as blood stopped pouring from its head wound. Its flesh sagged, sloughing off its mechanical supports in places as it offered a final rebuke to the Primes:
"Your actions are consistent with previously-observed permutations. You are but a piece in a system far beyond your ability to comprehend. You are a product of probability on a scale unfathomable to you, but which we have observed since before its inception. You cannot break from the confines of your existence. You cannot defy the quintessons.
“You believe you will have war, Prima of Cybertron. We will have Judgement.”
So here it is: the finale of the cut-short Quintesson Wars. More of a look into how they started than a chronicle of centuries of battle and the generations of people who fought in them, but it’s the best I could do. I bit off way more than I could chew on this one and found myself in way over my head.
So this is the end of the Quintesson Wars, but from now on I’ll be returning to just writing standalone vignettes or short stories from around the TOTGA-verse timeline. I’ll revisit the quintessons and the Quintesson Wars again, but in a format more within my capabilities, and sprinkled among other things that I want to share.
As always, comments and constructive criticism is requested and appreciated. Thank you so much for your time.