Invasion of the Adversary (GLoGtober 2024)

This is for the Alien Invasion challenge in GLoGtober 2024.

Across the stars, the mechanism of undeath is in constant motion. Dead nebulae churning out exotic matter, necromegastructures teeming with engineers and warriors in the dark, untold billions are at work under the direction of the Adversary. When your world was but a cloud of condensing matter, the Adversary stood tall on glassy night-soaked sands and watched their home chewed and swallowed by a black hole and on that day began their crusade to end ends, to cease cessation, to break the cycle and fling its ends to infinity. 

Vadim Sadovski

The Adversary's battle continues to this day, now spread across the filaments of the stars their intergalactic war against the Inevitable takes the shape of an intergalactic machine powered by matter, fueled by energy, and helmed by intellect. It is in search of these three resources that their Necrospores, moon sized heralds of undeath, have been scattered to our galaxy. 

General Order of Events:

100 years before Invasion:

Astronomers across your world will look up and see the bright corpselight burn of the Necrospore entering the star system and braking into a distant orbit. To wizards, this will be a terrible light that blooms across the night's sky and thrums with power. The Necrospore begins waking, organizing its legions and scouting the system- inevitably discovering your world.

85 years before Invasion:

The Necrospore begins thorough scouting of your world. Spies are deployed in steel coffins near major population centers and begin raiding cemeteries and funerary sites for corpses, interrogating them to learn more about the world and feed this back to the Necrospore. Meanwhile, the Necrospore is at work surveying planets and asteroids. Its light burns even brighter in the sky as its furnaces roar to life.

60 years before Invasion:

At one moment, the Necrospore contacts all of the most powerful wizards and world leaders and offers them a deal. Join the Adversary willingly and be blessed with eternal life, lead armies the size of planets across galactic timescales in exchange for selling their world. 

20 years before Invasion:

Agents of the Necrospore begin sabotaging the world's defenses and identifying key areas. Mass graves. Loci of magical power. Vaults of artifacts. Capital cities. Orbital batteries. Using Gates and other ritual magics, the Necrospore begins seeding elite forces throughout the world and causing chaos.

10 years before Invasion:

Each day the world is more dangerous. The dead walk freely, and the corpselight in the sky grows brighter. Over these ten years the Necrospore burns into a tight orbit around your world. Each day the great bell at its heart tolls a pulse across the gulf of space and you feel it approaching in your bones. Your skeleton knows where it is at all times. Once it is ready, the Invasion begins. 

Day of the Invasion:

The stage set, the Necrospore eclipses the world. Its corpselight blots out the sun and it unfurls its many millions of hangars and launches a million million ancient skeletons, alien death knights, and galactic liches to invade your world. Your world will serve, one way or another.

Variations

What's special about your world?

1. Your world was seeded with life long ago by an alien empire. Their engines of creation and destruction are still intact in the deepest parts of the world.

2. The world itself is alive but slow to rouse. It will try to combat this invasion- making it a powerful ally if you can contact it.

3. Nothing. Yet another world for the machine.

4. Powerful ley magics are infused in the asteroid belt near your world and the Necrospore will take twice as long to begin its invasion.

5. The veins of your world run infinitely deep and wide. The further you go, the stranger things get- and the further away the invasion forces are. If you're clever and fast enough you could outrun them forever.

6. A Third Party has interest in your world and will warn and provide support once the Necrospore appears in the sky. They have fought these battles before.

Your Necrospore

The Necrospore itself is a machine-being the size of a moon. At its core are the concentrated quantum-state phylacteries of a hundred liches in divine theospension mixed into one Ur-mind that makes up the Necrospore itself. It has a personality, whims, and can be spoken with. Though there are countless Necrospores, each is unique. This one:

1. Will take its time. Using waves of attacks from very far away until your world becomes strong. Then, it will crush you and turn that strength into its own weapon.

2. Prefers subtlety and manipulation. It masks its presence and sends dreams to recruit a cult of followers that will make the world ripe for its harvest.

3. Tries its best to bring your world into the fold peaceably. It will offer the gift of undeath to all who will take it willingly. It wants to be your friend so badly- why won't you just let it kill you?

4. Is a cauldron of bio-horrors. Feasting on samples from your world and others it brews them into soldiers and deploys them in a quest to improve their armies.

5. Has killed your gods. This isn't its first invasion by a long shot and knows the best first strike is to sever the divine links and smother the gods and godlings before they make the invasion more difficult.

6. Hates all of you individually and specifically. There will be no offers of peace or leniency. The Adversary sent it here to acquire materials. It wants to guarantee that the last sparks of your lives are so miserable that you will recognize undeath for the gift it is. All will serve- it does not matter how they get to serving.

Conclusion

Play as a dynasty fighting over a hundred years to defeat the Necrospore and its agents. Or as adventurers on that final day as the sky rains alien skeletons and angels of death. Or as world leaders and wizards orchestrating the final defenses. Maybe a neighboring interplanetary civilization will offer an escape for some? 

If you defeat the Necrospore then you have probably bought yourself at least a hundred years- maybe more. Perhaps you'll be lucky and the Adversary's forces are busy elsewhere in your galaxy and it gives you more time to prepare. To the Adversary, these are but small setbacks on subpixels of an intergalactic map. Your world will join eventually.  

And if you do join? Well now comes the longest war in the universe. Join the legions of the undead as they battle the Inevitable. Galaxy-class rituals spanning a thousand thousand worlds. Lead legions of dead conquering innumerable planets. Star system sized battles against the pawns of the Inevitable. Ancient Necrospires floating in the dark secret parts of intergalactic space and collecting all of the knowledge of all of the subsumed worlds. And perhaps, serve well enough to earn an iota of attention from the Adversary and bear their mark.