It started with a rough sketch. A drawing that even scared the person who made it: me.
The name hit me quickly: The Archonum. Something in it felt like dread, a cosmic horror that haunted the edge of my mind.
and both latched onto it quickly. Andrew even mentioned it in the story he was writing.
But the name-drop was just that. No details. Just an unsettling reminder that fictional worlds could have their share of mysterious creatures… and this was one you never wanted to meet.
What the [bleep] are the Archonum?
To quote our wiki entry:
To settlers on the fringes of the Stellar Empire galaxy, the Archonum are considered a ghost story or cryptid folklore. They have spent millennia subsiting on other senteient races. Numerous abductions have occurred, and settlements have been harvested with nearly no survivors.
Scattered tales from deep space pirates of Longshot, survivors driven mad by what they saw, are all the galactic community has to reference. Most major empires won’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the Achonum species. Most “proof” is the remains of abandoned hive clusters with minimal biological remains to decipher their origins.
Given the lack of survivsors, pirates are blamed for many lost ships. Without significant evidence and ships seeming to disappear completely, the Archonum infestation goes uncatalogued.
The Archonum possess psionic abilities, manifested by their oversized cranium. In most cases, they can hypnotize their prey, lulling them into a docile state.1 From there, the Archonum either devour or store their tasty morsels. If their prey proves to have exceptional willpower, they have a stinging barb attached to a whip-like appendage on the back area of their large heads. The sting paralyzes, leaving the prey to be consumed at the Archonum’s leisure.
They operate within small hive clusters that each share a collective consciousness. They are scattered along the outer rim of the ‘northern’ edge of the Stellar Empire galaxy. Because of the way they hunt and infest in these sparsely populated regions, what little survivors there have been have psychotic breaks, and their witness accounts are more akin to ghost stories…
Final Artwork
After some back and forth, ideation, and the art of scaring the crap out of ourselves, we landed on this look for the boogey men (err…things?) of the galaxy’s edge. Just imagine yourself, barely conscious, dragged into the depths of a tunnel system, and you look back at the last glimmers of light before you succumb to darkness… And you see this thing:
That’s what we thought, too.
Would hate to ruin the meat with spiking adrenaline.
I can't wait to share more of the unhinged side of Stellar Empire. Not to say that Ash and Iron has been all sunshine and rainbows. Fisker and his crew are into some unpleasant stuff. But I feel like we're sort of just teasing that side of things right now.
The Archonum are _scary_. Rob made sure of that. And there's plenty more where that came from.
Um - this sounds like a 'Burn the Xenos', send in the Ultramarines, kind of alien.