A parody - The Sporolyd

Based on [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and mostly parodying Warhammer 40k and its Tyranid (or the 'nature gone wild' trope in general). Bunch of nonsense and mostly a writing excersize, so take it with a grain of salt.


The Sporolyd

History does not remember the ruined world of Draenor, nor how it finally fell apart in the wake of the Great War. None shall ever recall the heroics of the fledgling army of Light as it made its first few uncertain steps on the long road towards the destruction of the Legion, or remember that it was here that the Lord Saviour Turalydan the Unfathomable returned to lead the charge.
No, all that history would remember is that it might have been ‘that world where the green (or were they brown?) runts came from’, and that it was academic suicide to even consider writing a thesis on them or their supposed ‘broken’ planet.

Equally obscure is the fact that on this world there once was a species called the ‘Sporeggar.’ Tiny, friendly creatures composed of fungus which once thrived in a great swamp of towering mushrooms.
For as long as they existed, these Sporelings occupied a low rung on the natural order of their mushroom kingdom. Constantly threatened by great one-eyed moss beasts, bird creatures sporting two heads and long-legged lizards oft various stories high, day to day existence was fraught with peril. Indeed, it is a testament to their resilience that the Sporregar existed for as long as they did, and a curse to those of us facing their descendants today.

Likely simply forgotten when the Mushroom Kingdom dried up and Draenor became uninhabitable, the Sporelings would fade from memory as surely as the exploits of the lovers Valee’thas Lothar and Khadgurian Wrynn.
It is assumed that the Sporegar as a species ceased to exist then and there, burned up in the collapse of Draenor’s atmosphere and fragmentation of its landmass. Fungi however, as mentioned earlier, are resilient, and many sporeling seedlings would survive the destruction of their world; hidden away in the crags and crevices of various asteroids. These asteroids travelled the currents of the Twisting Nether for hundreds of years, constantly subjected to its strange and shifting laws of reality.
Tragically, one of these asteroids would one day collide with the GCS Gallytorque, an early design of the Exploration & Exploitation class Interstellar vessels belonging to the Great Conglomerate; experts claim to this day that the accident was due to faulty piloting, and not its impeccable engineering. The hull pierced and ejected from the Nether-realm into the Great Dark, the Gallytorque was stranded thousands of Lightyears from the closest inhabited planet. While rescue vessels were sent out as soon as their distress call reached the nearest active com buoy, the crew of the Gallytorque would still spent weeks drifting aimlessly through space. Its last transmission spoke of how the surviving crew, with typical gnoblin enthusiasm, would attempt repairs as soon as they had managed to decontaminate the lower decks.

When first response vessel GCS Ishignoma finally reached the Gallytorque’s location five weeks later, all they found was a debris field.

After a thorough scan for any valuables the Ishignoma’s captain swiftly deduced that the debris field was far too small to be all that was left of the stranded vessel and, reasoning that they might have gone elsewhere, ordered a map of nearby planets and asteroids brought up. He also composed a message, questioning GCS Command if they hadn’t been sent out to the ‘arse end of nowhere’ as a practical joke.
The Ishignoma would spend the next month jumping to and from nearby planets in an attempt to locate the missing Gallytorque, but found nothing. With morale plummeting, the search was finally called off and the vessel declared MIA. NGC officials later released a statement that the vessel was lost to Moonglade Protectorate raiders in an attempt to destabilize the Conglomerate’s borders. Sadly the news coincided with famous moviestar Metzy Chrisfit’s marriage and subsequent divorce the same week, and thus only drew minor attention.

The mystery of the Gallytorque’s disappearance was finally solved roughly twenty years ago when an Imperial patrol cruiser found a crashed Conglomerate vessel on a barren planet in the Whitemane Nebula, half a galaxy away from the site of its original position and on the edge of known space.
Fearing invasion, a fleet was dispatched to investigate the site and flush out the hypothetical Conglomerate Vanguard. By the time it was discovered that the supposed crashed troop transport was over ten thousand years old, the Imperial fleet had already destroyed seventeen moons, glassed eight planets and extinguished two suns.
As per usual Imperial conduct, the fiasco was covered up as a training exercise - the summary execution of over a hundred officers for unsavory conduct the next few days ‘completely unrelated’.

Grudgingly sparing a science frigate to investigate, the Imperials discovered the remains of strange plant life clinging to the superstructure of the wreck; odd, considering the planet itself was completely barren. After a quick series of carbon dating and sampling of the planetary soil, it was concluded that the organisms had arrived with the wreck and then, surprisingly, ventured out of it. The scientists were left baffled as to why, since there could have been nothing out there to support whatever it had been.
Coining that the planet might not always have been barren, the team conducted a variety of further tests to uncover what had transpired here so long ago, only to be presented with a terrifying conclusion.

Circa 34000 aDP the planet had been a lush, vibrant garden world. With over 70% covered in water, it had sported three continents along the equator, largely covered in rainforests and other dense vegetation. The wreck, since linked to the Gallytorque, had appeared in orbit one day and promptly crash landed on the largest of the three landmasses.
Whatever once used the vessel had then aggressively begun to consume the surrounding fauna, leaving the Gallytorque behind like a discarded shell. Within the span of a month the continent had become barren, another for it to spread to the remaining continents, and roughly a year total for it to drain the oceans and whatever minerals the earth had held. At that point the organism had simply upped and vanished, leaving behind the barren rock that it was today.
Imperial overseers started fretting over the possibility of an unknown Moongladian bioweapon and wished to inform the Ordo Onslaughtum, Hammer of the Emperor, and wipe their hands clean of a mess that was rapidly snowballing out of control. The science team advised patience, and suggested they send out probes to neighboring systems in an effort to find if other planets had suffered the same fate. In the interim, they would conduct several more tests on seemingly dead ‘seeds’ found near the planet’s core.

For yet undisclosed reasons the wreck of the Gallytorque, and the science team, were bombarded from orbit not an hour later.

The Ordo, once informed, rushed to the scene like dogs to a bone. The crew of the frigate was permanently silenced, probe date compiled and additional surveys performed with immaculate efficiency. The report that returned to the Imperial capital painted a grim, yet optimistic picture. The organism had carved a path of destruction through the Whitemane nebula, only to finally disappear at the galaxy’s edge. With the wildly spread notion that nothing could survive there besides the most technologically advanced of races, the matter was dropped and buried, seeming to have resolved itself.
That the Lorelius galaxy, directly in the projected path of the organism, had steadily been going out over the past thousand years was conveniently left out of the report.


Two years ago, outposts along the Imperial-Conglomerate northern most borders started going dark. Reports remained scarce for the longest time, both sides continuously blaming the other for breaking a variety of treaties and threatening with military escalation. It wasn’t until a Conglomerate hive world with a population of over ten-million went dark that both sides realized that something else entirely was transpiring.
First response vessels sent out frantic transmissions describing how the entire planet was covered in a ‘giganantic organic mass’ before going abruptly silent. An imperial relief fleet, dispatched hours later in a rare peaceful gesture, was able to send back telemetry and images of giant living things with abhorrent amounts of teeth before being presumably obliterated.

The last transmission from the imperial flagship Greymane showed the crew falling victim to a bacterial infection that ravaged their bodies in a matter of minutes. Purple, spindly creatures rose from their remains and savagely butchered those unfortunate few still alive. A final frame of a slimy maw and five beady orange eyes would burn itself into the collective memory of billions.

They were the Sporolyd, and they hungered.




Don’t you have some glowcaps to turn in?