The Guardians - The Cataclysm

Posted on Mon Oct 5th, 2026 @ 10:04am by Captain Marie Batel & Patin

2,667 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Beholder
Location: Bajor
Timeline: Roughly 25000 Years ago, give or take

The crimson light descended. Patin and Marie followed.

Below them, the mountains of Bajor's Kendra Province rose from the darkness like ancient teeth, their peaks catching the faint light of the strange red presence as it descended toward the Fire Caves. The closer they came, the brighter the crimson aura became, until the mountains themselves seemed to glow from within.

The Wraith did not slow; instead it passed through the upper atmosphere without resistance, plunging toward the mountains with the certainty of something returning to a place it had known long before either woman had existed.

Patin watched in silence for a split fraction of a breath.  Then it struck. The impact was silent in the void. For one impossible instant, the crimson entity disappeared into the mountains. Then Bajor moved. The first tremor traveled outward beneath the surface, racing through ancient stone faster than any living creature could have run. The Fire Caves shook. Rock cracked deep within the mountains. Dust cascaded from the cavern walls as something enormous shifted beneath the earth. The Wraiths' crimson light vanished into the depths.

The second tremor was stronger as it moved like a ripple across the land. The mountains practically groaned. Far to the East, hundreds of kilometers away, a fault line ruptured. A ridge split. The ground rose several meters before collapsing beneath its own weight. Then the volcano woke.

At first, it was almost gentle. A plume of dark smoke curled from the summit and drifted lazily into the ancient sky. Then another plume rose beside it. The mountain shuddered. A deep rumble rolled across the land.

Birds erupted from the forests in great black clouds. Animals fled before they understood why. People stopped what they were doing and looked toward the horizon.

In B'hala, the first quake arrived as a tremor beneath the feet. A cup fell from a table. A clay vessel toppled from a shelf. A child laughed and then was silenced through fear. Someone shouted for the shaking to stop. Then the ground heaved. Buildings lurched sideways. Stone screamed against stone.

The great towers of B'hala swayed as though they had suddenly become trees caught in a storm. Dust poured from ancient ceilings. Market stalls collapsed into the streets. People stumbled, fell, grabbing for one another.

The Architect stepped from his tent. His parchments scattered behind him. He looked toward the horizon, towards the volcano. A column of ash rose into the sky, black against the afternoon light, growing larger by the heartbeat. He understood immediately.

Another quake tore through B'hala. This one was even more catastrophic. The streets buckled. Walls collapsed. The newly raised tower representing the red celestial presence cracked upwards from its foundation and folded over neatly into the city below. The quake moved through B'hala like an invisible wave, tearing foundations from beneath buildings and sending entire sections of the city sliding into one another. Stone statues toppled. Ancient structures built by generations of hands broke apart in seconds.

The People ran, panic-stricken, but there was nowhere to run. 

Then the lava came. It poured down the mountain in enormous glowing rivers, consuming forests, fields, roads, homes, temples, everything that stood before it. The people of B'hala had no name for such a thing. No story, no warning, and no prophecy. They could only watch the burning horizon approach.

The Architect stood amid the ruins of his city, staring toward the advancing fire. His parchments lay scattered around him. The stars he had so carefully copied onto them were already disappearing beneath ash. He looked upward. For one final moment, through the smoke and darkness, the blue light of the Celestial Temple remained visible. Beside it, the red light was gone.

The Architect whispered something Patin could not hear. Then the ash cloud swallowed the sky, and B'hala disappeared beneath the darkness. 

Patin and Marie could only watch. Patin floated motionless next to Marie. Below them, the volcano continued to burn. The Fire Caves glowed red within the mountains. And somewhere beneath all of that stone, the Wraiths had been sealed away.

Patin stared down at the devastation as it continued to unfold. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “They were banished.” She looked toward the distant ruins. “And everyone else paid for it with their lives.”

"The tremours, techtonic shifts, and chasms in the surface, they were caused by the Wraith being contained? Not by normal geologicsl shifts?" Marie doubted her own words even as they were spoken. There was nothing normal about any of it. She paused to mull over what they knew. "And everyone so often, one escapes, there is a reckoning, and they go back in the box." She spoke so she understood it herself.

"What stops them all from escaping?"

Patin looked almost lost for a moment. The devastation below them seemed to have stripped away whatever easy answer she might normally have reached for. “I... I'm not sure.” She glanced toward the mountains, then back toward Marie. “Maybe they're not completely contained. Maybe if they really want out, they can just leave.”

She frowned, rubbing at her temple as another piece of memory surfaced. “I seem to recall there was a book. Something used to summon them.” Her brow furrowed deeper. “And they need a host, or something.” Patin gave a small, frustrated shake of her head. “It's all convoluted bull-hockey to me.”

She fell quiet for a moment, staring toward the Fire Caves. “Then again...” Her expression changed as another memory surfaced, one she had not thought about in a very long time. “There were two of them who came to the cabin that night. The night they attacked Nozzie.”

Her eyes narrowed as she searched through the memory. “Brin.” The man's name came first. “And a woman, Faro, Remal told me her name was.” Patin's gaze remained fixed on the distant mountains. “Brin was inhabited by one of them, a Wraith.”

“It's all convoluted bull-hockey.” She looked down at Bajor, then toward the Fire Caves where the Wraiths had disappeared beneath the stone. “But in all my years...” Her mouth twisted into a humorless little smile. “I've witnessed some seriously weird shit.”

Marie frowned, she had heard bits and pieces of this battle on the shore on Bajor, but this was the first time she had heard the detail.

"Why did they attack Rhenora?" Marie asked, looking at the caves as though they could release the Wraith again should they so choose to do so.

Around them the mountains dissolved and were replaced by a snow capped cabin in the depths of winter. Waves crashed nearby on the shore, the ebbs and flow of life thundering unpaused for millennia.

They saw the sabotage, the visit of Brin and Faro, the battle in the garden. "That's a bit dodgy, fighting a heavily pregnant woman." Marie snarked as she watched the battle go down.

Patin's tone was more sombre now as she watched familiar events play out in front of her. “They saw her as a threat. Said she was the Ma of the future, the new Emissary of Bajor. They and their people were followers of the Pah'Wraiths, called themselves a Brotherhood.”

She watched the battle unfold, her expression tightening as the pieces came back to her. “From what I remember, they thought if the Wraiths inhabited the baby as it was born, it would be joined or something and become a leader. Leading people into a millennia of Wraith-controlled darkness.”

Patin's eyes followed the figures moving through the garden. She remembered this. Not just the battle, but the fear surrounding it, the sheer insanity of what had been happening around Rhenora and the baby. Then she spotted herself emerging from the woods, one hand clutching the stab wound in her abdomen. Her eyebrows rose. “Ooh, look, that's me.”

"Oh geez" Marie swore, honoured to be able to witness the entire event but still feeling intense emotion at the injustice of it all. "Let me guess, that's how you end up with the Prophets?" She quipped, not realising it was slightly more complicated than that.

The scene shifts to the cottage, the Captain is down, the baby born breathing, the mother dies. An odd sense of quiet and calm after the battle. She watches Patin enter, and leave again, before having an argument with someone or something.

"Who are you berating?" Marie asked, before the temple appeared before them, Patin and Rhenora within it, surrounded by the Prophets.

“Oh, that would be the Prophets.” Patin gave a small, irritated shrug. “I had just died and was a bit pissed off that they tried to take Nozzie from her family. At the time, it felt like a setup.”

She grumbled, watching the scene in the Temple unfold around them. “I have never been one to let other people control the narrative of my destiny.”

The scene shifted before them, carrying them from the Temple to a snow-covered beach. Patin appeared below, wounded and dying, stumbling slowly toward the dark water. She stripped away her clothes one piece at a time, leaving them behind in the snow, then paused at the edge of the waves.

She took one final drink from the flask she carried with her. For a moment, she simply stood there, looking out across the dark water. Then she stepped forward and disappeared into the waves.

It was a slow, almost dreamlike vision, every movement carrying its own meaning. The discarded clothes. The empty flask. The cold water. Patin leaving behind the last pieces of the life she had known before she finally disappeared beneath the surface.

"You really didn't need to see all of that, sentimentality crap if you ask me." Patin scoffed.

"It tells the complete story. You sacrificed yourself so she could live, and now you get to go back as her kid. Now if that ain't a head trip, I don't know what is." Marie retorted, turning her attention back to the cottage.

"Where did the Wraith go? Rhenora almost defeated it... or did she?" Marie turned her attention back to the figure fleeing back through the snow into the forest.

“I don't know for sure. I came in at the end there.” Patin watched the fleeing figure carefully. “I know the guy, Brin, I think his name was, was defeated. Died there on the battlefield. His woman, the one who was with him, fled shortly after.”

Patin lifted a hand, manipulating the scene around them until the vision shifted. The battle receded, leaving the aftermath in its place. There, among the snow and scattered debris, they spotted the woman, injured but very much alive, tears streaking down her face as she fled into the forest.

Patin narrowed her eyes as she zoomed in on Faro. “That's her.”

Marie drew closer to the fleeing woman, seeing the anguish on her face, the pain - but something else as well.

"They weren't destroyed. Defeated yes, destroyed no. One lives on in that woman. She is going to rebuild her following and try to free more" Marie's voice held an edge that spoke volumes.

Patin's expression hardened. Her anger came slowly at first, a familiar heat building beneath her skin as Marie's words sank in. Then it sharpened into something colder. Desire for revenge seemed to seep into every pore of her body, poisonous and deliberate, like snake oil working its way through her veins. She moved closer to Faro. This woman hurt her friends.

Then closer, until Patin was standing only an arm's length from the fleeing woman, close enough to see the tears on her face, the blood staining her clothes, the fear in her eyes. Patin stared directly into them, searching for the Wraith she knew was hiding somewhere behind them.

Her hand lifted and then Patin struck. The blow never reached Faro. Instead, an invisible force slammed into Patin's hand, stopping it cold. The impact rippled through the space between them, sending a pulse through the snow and the surrounding trees.

She tried again. The same invisible barrier pushed back. Patin's eyes narrowed as realization dawned. She could manipulate the scene, move through it, examine it, but she couldn't change it. What had happened here had already happened.

Then Faro stopped, frozen in the middle of the snow. Her breathing became shallow. Slowly, her eyes shifted, searching the darkness around her before settling on Patin, or Patin's location.

Patin went completely still, wondering if a memory could actually see her.

Faro's gaze moved across the darkness as though she could actually see something standing there. Her face tightened with confusion, then fear. “Who's there?” The words arrived quietly.

She looked around the forest, her breath visible in the freezing air. Behind her, the battlefield was still smoldering. Brin was dead. Their followers were scattered or fleeing. The night had swallowed what remained of the fighting, leaving only the wind moving through the trees and the distant crackle of dying fires.

Faro was alone, injured and terrified. And yet her eyes remained fixed on the place where Patin stood.

Patin slowly lowered her hand, the anger on her face giving way to surprise. The Wraith inside Faro had seen her.

"Easy there" Marie placed a hand on Patin's shoulder, feeling it quiver with pent up emotion. The Prophets had intervened, yet the Wraith had now seen them. How would that change things?

Patin shrugged off Marie's steadying hand. “I'm fine. Just a bit pissed off.” Her eyes remained fixed on Faro. “That THING tried to kill my friends. I can't stomach the idea that she's still out there somewhere.”

"Where do they go? The caves beneath the mountains?" She asked, feeling conflict between the Prophets and the Wraith begin to bubble again.

“The Fire Caves are along the westernmost peninsula of Kendra Province, on the other side of the Kendra Mountains. Where we say the red sun land.” Patin gestured toward the distant landscape. “They also had Brotherhood strongholds scattered all over the place, with people who were blindly loyal to the Wraiths.”

She frowned, watching Faro disappear into the darkness. “After a battle like that, she'd likely have gone somewhere local. Somewhere she knew she could disappear.”

Marie plonked herself down on a log in the forest, rubbing the bridge of her nose as a headache threatened to blossom at the front of her brain.

"This is so complicated," She lamented with a half smile. " I don't know how you Bajorans remember it all"

Patin shrugged. “We don't, not all of it, not really anyway. But we do tend to remember what hurts us.”

She looked back toward the scene unfolding around them. “I may be dead, but I remember her. I remember the feeling of seeing her, like I can remember how to load a T16 double-barrel pistol under the cover of dark. There was always that little spring-loaded catch that would cut your thumb if you didn't hold it just right.” Patin rubbed her thumb absently, as though she could still feel the old sting.

Then she turned to Marie. “Now, are we going to stand around watching history unfold, like 'THEY' expect us to do, or are we going to follow this...” She gestured toward the distant figure. “This Wraith thing, and do something to stop her, or not?”

"They stopped you before; we can't change the past..." Marie let the word linger for a few moments, the implication clear. "But if we find her in the present..." Obvious influence was out, but if they could nudge, tweak, adjust something so minor but would affect things just enough.

The forest had gone strangely quiet. The mist around them began to move. The trees faded. The battlefield disappeared. For one brief instant, Patin could see the Temple again, the endless stars suspended beyond them. Her expression hardened.

Somewhere beyond the veil, something answered. “The path has already been touched. It lies before you. Follow and be blessed.”

TBC

 

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