Some alien races say that the Lazloi were made from ice, and that to ice we will return when the end comes. Perhaps this myth comes from our fondness for the cold places of the universe. Our home world is not our own, merely an adopted place that the Creators chose to give us. Our ancestors were taken from the cradle of humanity tens of thousands of years ago, and modified at the deepest and most profound level of life's building blocks. Those first Lazloi served the Creators for thousands of years, and were perfected and controlled in everyway. We were made to serve and were attuned to our environment to do so. The world we now call home has been cold as long as our collective memory can remember, with only the equatorial regions supporting our needs for food and animals. It is only natural we are comfortable amongst the ice. It was here that we survived the fall of the Creators, a great storm of destruction we have yet to fully understand. It was not the first time that a great power has fallen from grace, for the race the humans call Shepherds destroyed themselves many hundreds of thousands of years before. When such empires collapse, their client races and slaves seldom survive. Their dependency becomes their downfall and they are soon forgotten. The Lazloi were different. We were advisors and assistants to the Creators, made to be as long lived as our masters and to act on their behalf. We emerged from our shelters with the knowledge of the Creators intact. While early humans were painting the walls of caves, we were travelling the stars again and wresting the secrets of science from the hands of the universe itself. How arrogant we became in the perfection the Creators had bestowed on us, how conceited in the powers we inherited that allowed us to bend matter and energy into forms not known in the natural world. That period of grace lasted many thousands of years, but it was a perfection that could not last. Like an intricate and precise machine, it could only function with the constant attention of its owner. We do not know if it was a mistake or whether it was by design, but slowly and surely our race began to fail. It is a cruel thing that the universe has done to us, for it has allowed the Lazloi to be at once perfect and utterly flawed. While our menfolk fade quickly and die, the females continue to live the lifetimes the Creators first intended. Now there are no male children, not these last forty years, and our male adults are fewer every day. A terrible madness threatens to engulf us, for soon there can be no children born to us. The Creators made us to be their servants, incorruptible, perfect, and without the possibility of modification. We thought there was no hope, except for the chance accident of Alisandra Zilaerion. She was the first Lazloi to have conceived a hybrid human child without herself dying. It is another cruel joke that the universe has chosen to play on us, for it is a solution none of us can truly accept. In our insanity, it seems we would choose oblivion than to dilute our perfection and our past. If Alisandra is our salvation, then we must hope she survives her intention to destroy the Enemy here. So we wait on the icy pole of Illaria in anticipation of the cataclysm that will mark her plans conclusion. -- Rianaea hept Zilaerion, acting commander of the 'Spirit of the Dark River'. A big thank you to Colin whose enthusiasm for this ships design prompted me to update and fix the model for this picture. Original model created in Cinema 4D, with V4 figures in the Xurge Nano suit. Rendered in Cinema 4D R13 Visualise.