On the Isles

(This is a continuation of the summaries/fanfiction/whatever found here and here. It is a spoiler for the (excellent) game Geneforge III. Oh, and some minor stuff for Geneforge IV, I guess.)

The resistance to the Shapers had never found a place to call its own. Whenever and wherever it was discovered, on Sucia Isle and the far valley colony, the Shapers inevitably arrived in force and destroyed everything in their path. In both events, a great deal of luck was all that kept the rebels, the keepers of the secrets of the Geneforge, from absolute extinction. But when the Shapers came to Drypeak Valley, the rebels were far more prepared than the pathetic remnants that fled Sucia. As the Barzhites and Awakened alike were slaughtered with fire and sword, the Takers, the most radical and powerful of the rebels, flew into hiding. Some number of them fled back to the great continent of Terrestria, the heartland of the Shapers, there to plant the seeds of dissent and insurrection. But the greatest of them, the Ur-Drakon Akhari Blaze and his drakon, servile and human followers, fled to a place they hoped to make a fortress: the Ashen Isles.


Lord Rahul ruled the Ashen Isles in those days, a loyal Guardian of the Shapers. The island on which he made his fortress, Dhonal's Island, was the largest and most prosperous of the five islands in the chain. To the south lay swampy Harmony Island, inhabited for the many valuable herbs that grew there, and farther south yet lay Greenwood Isle, home to rich mines and the Shaper Academy. North of Dhonal's Island was Gull Island, a center of Shaper research, and farthest north of all was the icy Isle of Spears, known to possess exactly no resources of value and completely uninhabited. It was here, thus, that the rebels set up their base.

Akhari Blaze moved slowly. The rebels had suffered enough defeats that he took precautions against another. Rebel serviles infiltrated every stronghold, slipping past careless defenses. Rebels laboured day and night, building a nigh-impregnable fortress to protect the Geneforge.
Propaganda was smuggled out to the southern isles, attempting to render the common folk of the Ashen Isles sympathetic to the rebel cause.

Then the signal came. The revolution had begun on the mainland. The Shaper Academy was the first to fall, as a traitor from within conspired with a powerful rebel Agent named Litalia to deliver it into ruin. The few Shaper students to escape found the island quarantined; revolution had erupted across the isles, and each island had been left to fend for itself. The young Shapers, not yet indoctrinated in the ways of their order, struggled across each island. Each was torn in strife between Rebel and Shaper and overrun by the rogue monsters unleashed in their battles. At each turn, Litalia appeared the the students, tempting them to the rebel cause. Each time she appeared, she was more powerful and less human, as she Shaped her own body to perfection.

Within months of the insurrection, the Ashen Isles fell entirely into rebel control, as the Shaper students, hardened by battle, succumbed to temptation and finished the revolution at Akhari Blaze's bidding. On Terrestria, the rebels met similar success - the entire eastern half of the continent shed its Shaper-imposed shackles as simultaneous insurrection across the entirety of the continent threw the realm into chaos. The Shapers, however, had not maintained generations of rule through incompetence. New creations, innovated in rebel labs, soon found themselves on both sides of the battlefield. Iron-fisted generals pushed the rebels back, inch by bloody inch. Within five years of the Great Rising, the East was lost, and the South crumbled. Only the North remained firmly in rebel hands - the North, ruled by the Drakons, home of one of the three Geneforges. (The rebels found the devices, expensive and precious as they were, too useful not to duplicate.)


Thus it stood in those days. The Shapers: tyrannical, secretive, and power-hungry as ever, yet the only force of stability available. The rebels of the North: dominated by the powerful drakons, the only creations ever to come close to matching the strength of the Shapers; yet, sadly, inhuman, possessed of an intense racial hatred toward all Shapers, and very likely working on a genocidal superweapon. The rebels of the South: the human face of the revolution, corrupted by the Geneforge (which granted power at the expense of humanity) in a failed attempt to match the power of the Shapers. And in the middle, the secret Trakovites, an order which wished to ban all shapings - all creations - in response to the horrific damage that had been wreaked by the war of Shapers across once-prosperous Terrestria.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men stand by, and do nothing.