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[WP] War is the bread and butter of your people, so you were taken aback when the enemy saved your life. Cheated of a Good Death, you awake in a human field hospital and treated better here than back amongst your peers. Here, they even remember your name. Your loyalty drastically shifts...

*****

Among my people, the words for war and life are the same. I will not hammer out the tired wisdom of that polysemy for you. You know better than most. You have seen it with your own eyes. You have felt it buck in your shoulder with each trigger pull, or heave in your shoulders with each tear shed for the fallen. But despite your enigmatic empathy, we are the same, your kind and mine. Or so I thought, for so long. It is only now I see you are better.

After one cycle of life, my kindred was thrown into its first crucible. Still young, still soft, we cleaned our weapons in our ship bays and listened to the drumbeat of war. Against the Vitrolian Annex, we were told there could be no quarter. None given, none received. We put their nests to flame and crushed the writhing maggots of their young in our armored claws. They captured our wounded and let their larvae feed on my maimed brethren from inside-out.

After the second cycle of my life, the blooded among us were dispatched to bring peace to the Cold Stars. Knowing what you know of our definitions of war and life, I should imagine you can guess what word shares its shape with peace. We did as instructed. And once the wasteland arcologies of the Cold Star Kin had been consecrated into haunted mausoleums, we departed on howling void ships that burnt the atmosphere to its constituent molecules. The flames we lit immolated even the ghosts of those worlds, until only aether and ash remained.

Ten cycles passed before I ascended to the Exemplarship, and our tribal empire was given its first and noblest challenge. The sapiens of Grug, called human in their tongue, your tongue. Understand, we had never faced true warriors before we faced you. We had never faced any worthy of our blades. And whatever you may think yourselves—lovers, thinkers, artists—you are warriors.

In the Oort Cloud skirmishes, your hit-and-run tactics devastated our fleets. Intrigued we were by this impudence, but we adapted. We surrendered the time-honored tradition of invitation-battle to fight you where tactical need dictated. When you first unleashed your soulless soldiers of quantum intelligence on the red sands of your seed world, Mars, we saw this as a mark of honor rather than desperation. It was not that you feared to fight us, for we knew of your war-kin's excellence by reputation. But we had not yet proven our worth to you; you would not deign to fight us with your own flesh and blood, nor sully your weapons with our ichor.

Oh, how our blood blazed at this challenge. How it burned! When first we sailed to your crown world of gray skies and acid seas—when first we reddened your own sands with your own oxygenous blood—the purity of our pleasure made our skin sing. Your warrior caste, perfected through gene-science and engrammatic indoctrination, hardened by powered carapace that rivalled the strength of our most venerable blooded, trained in the waging of war as if it were a science rather than a passion, cut us down just as quickly as they fell.

You were... perfect. And you offered me all I had ever wanted since the moment of my birth and my mothers told me my purpose.

You offered me peace.

So when fragmentation from a stray shell in the tree-infested swamps of your Amazon wounded me, and your meticulous surgeons deprived me of the final rest I had so long sought, you can understand my displeasure, and why it has taken me so long to answer your inquiries. I thought you were taunting me. I thought you were torturing me, just as the Vitrolian Talon Kin had tortured my brethren when they'd injected their young maggots into our bellies and let them feast upon us from within. I thought you enjoyed it. And never once did I stop to think why I had craved peace for so long.

But by the fifth rotation of your planet, I began to understand. Your nurses—your nurses, soldiers in their own, loving way—came and spoke to me in my tongue. You asked how I was. How was I? How could I have been but wrathful? My entire kindred had been slain over the years, to return to the heavenly halls of our tribal mothers. I had faced down a human champion and pounded my claws upon my breastplate in challenge. Then the caprice of gravity and steel rain had stolen me the honor of duelling him, of rest.

Why did I seek rest? It didn't matter. I was angry. I was spiteful. I was so, so sick.

She put her hand on mine, the nurse, and her two eyes looked into my eight.

"Everything," she spoke, her tongue enthralling the sounds of my people's tongue, the tongue of my fathers and mothers, the tongue of my war and my life, "will be all right."

Life, my kind are told, is war. That is its finest iteration. From you, in the span of these days, I have learned the opposite may be true. Life can be peace.

You ask why we came, or why we fight you. I answer you now. It is because we have not known kindness. It is because we have not known you.

*****

THE END