A Special CNG Lamentation Day Bulletin: The Guardians of Destiny Remember! Lamentation Day: “The First Battle For Earth.”
Lamentation Day is officially marked as having occurred on January 16th, 1781, largely in orbit over the continent of Africa. Ceremonial services are still held to this day across G.O.D. colonies, as well as upon Earth itself after The Fall of The Facade. As far as space-based naval conflicts go, it was possibly the biggest starship battle that our Central Universe had ever yet seen, at least until The Battle of The First Expeditionary Fleet almost three-hundred years later. It came at the cost of thousands of Guardian and Armada lives, as well as innumerable starships and pieces of equipment.
The battle was sparked as one of the direct consequences of Xex’s betrayal of The Guardians of Destiny that very same day. Unbeknownst to loyalist Guardian forces – Xex, The God of Control, a member of The Prime Triumvirate, and a seat on the Guardian Council, had been building traitorous allegiances within the Guardian Navy and Army!
(Teleprompter: CUE – Stock Footage of defected Black Armada gods overdub.)
This had been occuring in secret over the course of months, as Xex slowly began recruiting Admirals, Generals, and Ship Captains towards his secret coup d’etat, citing discontent with the G.O.D. High Council. As a member of The Prime Triumvirate, it was easy to sway many dissatisfied members of the Guardian Military to this betrayal, promising a firmer authoritarian rule under the command and leadership of Xex himself. Several high-ranking High Council members would even later help and command Xex’s forces during the battle – including the man who would become the God-Emperor’s right hand man in The Black Armada that was forming – Absolution, The (former) God of Air.
Even as the bright flashes of light far above the African savannah lit up the skies, even during the battle itself, the G.O.D. was still working feverishly via their intelligence agency The Eye in order to hide the truth of the matter from the world, as prior to The Fall of The Facade, colloquially known back then as “The Veil,” the majority of humanity was still not aware of the presence of immortals or The Guardians of Destiny organization. A massive media censoring of independent news printing, several press releases by world governments, and other specially targeted assassinations were being carried out far below on Earth itself, even as the battle raged with the victor yet undecided. Meteor showers were a good enough explanation at the time – seeing as humans outside The Guardians of Destiny were a hundred years from even learning the basic principles of flight.
The majority of the low orbit battle took place both within as well as outside the former G.O.D. headquarters of The Hub. The space station was spared no injury. Entire sections were damaged from targeted attacks from the archaic railgun technologies and missile batteries of the time period. Some damage required decoupling and even the ejection of sections of the station at several points in the conflict, to avoid the collapse or deorbiting of the entire facility, even with hundreds of people still trapped within. The compartments burned up in the atmosphere upon re-entry.
The initial shots of the Lamentation Day conflict were fired from Xex controlled ships as they fled from The Hub and moved away from the station where it was located near Lagrange Point One. The collection of traitorous ships that would become the very first Black Armada fleet soon began rallying at Lagrange Point Two and then moved to attack The Hub directly. The carrier A Husk of Entropy led efforts to evacuate remaining Black Armada forces, including Xex himself, from their successful offensive aboard The Hub.
Only minutes before the initial order was given to attack and ambush the G.O.D. fleet in drydock and other defensive positions around the station, Xex himself led an elite force of loyal soldiers and unique specialist units such as early prototype Dread Knights into The Glass Casket Chamber. This was where The Creator had remained in status for approximately the previous seventy-six thousand years according to Prime Triumvirate accounts, although other records suggest The Creator being moved from Earth up onto the station much more recently in human history. Despite the best efforts of Guardian security and military personnel, including a valiant last stand before The Glass Casket itself by The God of Justice… The Lady of Justice herself – Serania, and The God of Chaos, Jikos… Xex was ultimately successful in his goals. The God of Control slaughtered his fellow Prime Triumvirate brother Jikos and destroyed the casket. To the horror of the assembled security forces, somehow the rogue god consumed and absorbed the energy being within the casket, granting Xex his monstrous power and boosting his own ascended abilities immensely. Xex used this new power to almost single-handedly fight back to the station’s hangars. There, he boarded a transport and absconded to the battlecruiser Royal Wedding Day which fled towards the rear of the Black Armada’s battlegroup, assisted by A Husk of Entropy. Many religious organizations around the world have purported The Creator to be a messenger of God, if not God himself. The theological community has been torn as such since The Fall of The Facade with little true consensus on the matter.
The initial destruction was catastrophic, with the station venting atmosphere from multiple breaches in the armored superstructure of The Hub. The majority of the damage came from the initial salvo, as once Xex and his forces had retreated from The Hub proper, The Black Armada commenced firing upon the station without mercy, attempting to scuttle it entirely. Unfortunately for the Guardians of Destiny, the initial G.O.D. naval response was slow and difficult, as never before had the G.O.D. Navy ever been attacked outright outside of brief skirmishes with Dark God insurrectionists, rebel colonies, or pirates. Careful screening of human innovation and scientific progress had purposely been enacted on Earth, with human technological progress carefully hindered upon the homeworld for millennia to avoid exactly such a scenario, even as The G.O.D. had been mapping and colonizing the stars with the advent of Rift technology.
Such an attack could not possibly have been foreseen. Xex was well-loved by many.
Within the span of a few crucial minutes, several G.O.D. battlecruisers were scuttled or destroyed outright, many still in drydock – being forcefully detached from the structure by the damage, and beginning the slow drop towards the planet below. Even in the midst of combat, such hazards required emergency measures to avoid catastrophic planetwide disaster. Several more ships were destroyed immediately, via damaged nuclear engines, rift generators, or other vital sections.
To those inhabitants of Africa, the night sky was filled with bright flashes of light, the most feverish “meteor shower” ever to be experienced by human eyes. Not a soul in that age of technological suppression in Africa had any idea that the bright flashes of light were hundreds of human lives perishing in the blink of an eye. The G.O.D. forced as it was, needed to ensure all deorbiting debris would be small enough to burn up on re-entry to save Earth from disaster.
The G.O.D. eventually roused from slumber, led by Tarnos, who was at the time the current God of Death, and now listed as retired. Under Tarnos’ centuries of combat expertise, the far side of the installation quickly became a staging point for six carriers, and ten battlecruisers, comprising those few ships that successfully escaped destruction while helplessly connected to the station, or which were luckily orbiting the moon or far side of the planet. Tarnos chose to drop lower into orbit, traversing the span of The Hub from underneath and surprising Xex’s ships from below while using the station as a shield for their advance. They ambushed the sizable traitor fleet along the Z axis, and quickly eliminated three cruisers in their first salvo: Missing Fates, Temptation, and In Noble Sacrifice, as well as crippling a key Armada carrier, Imperialist. The naval engagement was far more brutal in scope and scale than modern naval engagements, as Lamentation Day was prior to the development of plasma shielding and weaponry, the second volley easily ruptured two more ships – Amalgamation and Yangtze.
Black Armada ships returned fire, concentrating their focus on the six carriers in the middle of the formation as it rose from below. Two Guardian starships were destroyed outright, Under Careful Consideration and Romulo, which forced the counterattack to break formation as the two ships lost power to engines and thrusters and began to drift from the force of the enemy attack, slowly breaking up with both Guardian and Armada assistance above the Atlantic ocean.
After clearing the two broken ships, Tarnos decided that the superior numbers and firepower of the Armada fleet would require close quarters engagement, to avoid being completely decimated from The Armada’s overwhelming numbers after months of conspiracy. Additionally working against G.O.D. forces, the ships Xex commanded during his traitorous attack were some of the most well armed and armoured ships in the fleet, and had months prior to prepare in secret for the assault.
It was this decision to eliminate the tactical disadvantage of superior numbers that would prove to ultimately win the battle for the G.O.D. as the remaining carriers under Tarnos’ command released all available fighter and boarding craft. Strafing runs from Tarnos’ fleet on the larger Black Armada ships incapacitated their close combat abilities, while covering fire from The Hub alongside looming reinforcements turned the tide. As Xex was not expecting such a brash forward attack, The Black Armada realized that living to fight another day was the tactically sound decision, and would order the half of the Black Armada fleet being actively boarded to act as a rearguard while the remainder of his forces beat a hasty retreat before the Guardian Navy could rally reinforcements from the Core Worlds or other colonies.
The immediate escape of Xex’s forces from the Earth’s solar system would not spell the end of the battle outright, however. With more G.O.D. ships detaching from the station or arriving via rift to join the battle, the remaining Armada ships left behind as a fighting retreat consigned themselves to Martyrdom. The disabling of all the weapons systems aboard The Elephant, an Armada carrier, would drive the captain into a kamikaze attack on the G.O.D. cruiser Quetzalcoatl. Throwing the larger ship into the side of the battlecruiser split the smaller ship in half, and The Elephant then proceeded to collide with The Hub, killing an enormous number of G.O.D. personnel.
Aid finally arrived in force in the form of the nearby defence fleet near Venus, and quickly roaring into combat, Admiral Gilead acted to decimate two more Black Armada ships, Genesis and Legacies in Brimstone with a fierce storm of rail gun fire, falling under the command of The God of Death. Genesis erupted, falling to the African Savannah below, and despite failed scuttling attempts before breaching the atmosphere, resulted in an enormous impact crater that would quake the earth for miles. Legacies in Brimstone remained in higher orbit, would drift as a memento of the battle for years, before finally being salvaged by the G.O.D. for war materials later on in the ensuing war, after the inner colonies were secure. Many amateur astronomers over the years would find themselves on The Eye’s tracking list in the decades that followed.
The Black Armada forces quickly crumbled under the combined efforts of Admiral Gilead and The God of Death. Precision strikes on engine rooms and docking bays by boarding and attack craft under Tarnos’ command completely disabled several Armada ships, with the treasonous commanding officers of such starships committing mass suicides rather than risk capture and interrogation. At this stage of the fight, several Xex-allied ascended defectors were killed in action amidst the corridors of some larger carriers and command ships.
The final casualty of the naval battle would be the destruction of Gregorian, a G.O.D. cruiser, when a previously fired missile that had punched a hole into its side finally detonated, having failed to do so previously. The explosion triggered a chain reaction, literally tearing the ship into four pieces as the rift generator exploded. The bow of the ship would land in Mali, in a larger population center near The Sahara. The city was purged by the G.O.D. as a result of the information blackout that occurred during and immediately after the battle. Not even infants or children were spared, so great was the fear of an information leak. Sudden earthquakes and sandstorms were the officially cited reason for the genocide.
The purging in Mali began one of the largest witch-hunts in the history of mankind. As the Guardian Navy fought a continued running battle with Xex and his Black Armada as it retreated out towards the Neutral Territories and old colony worlds near the Eastern Galactic Rim, G.O.D. black ops and intelligence teams were dispatched across the globe. They worked even more feverishly than during the battle, silencing those who may have heard or seen anything about the low orbit battle that couldn’t align with the official narratives. Coastal damage throughout the world was attributed to tsunamis, and those in Africa who did witness the flashing lights, explosions, and shapes far above the continent, and who attempted to publicly address such visions were immediately eliminated or discredited. The ongoing British conflicts in North America and South Africa were an easy scapegoat alongside stories of Meteor Showers and natural disasters. Numerous civilians who would witness the battle, and attempt to describe it publicly, would either be killed outright, or forced into submissive silence for fear of fates far worse than death.
After The Solar System was secured, and a front with the Black Armada to the eastern rim was established after weeks of running guerrilla battles, the G.O.D. chokehold on Earth actually tightened even further as a result of Xex’s betrayal. The human populace was infiltrated even further by shadow groups, puppet dictators, and G.O.D. subservient governments. While complete domination of humanity on earth was impossible, the Guardians of Destiny made sure nothing from their sphere of existence could ever easily enter the public eye again. Costs for such a “cleanup” after the battle in orbit were immense, and salvage missions to recover all the surviving ship wreckage and weapons materials ranged for decades, either dredged up from beneath the waves of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, or scattered across the western landscape of Africa. Black market and other specialties collectors were especially fond of such materials as Titanium, Tungsten, and other unique compounds yet “undiscovered” by man. This would undoubtedly fuel scientific progress, despite G.O.D. attempts at stifling it to keep Earth behind them technologically.
Several decades after the battle, despite the ongoing war with Xex, the final piece of evidence to note that the battle had ever taken place would be disassembled and its components reused for the war effort. Legacies in Brimstone would be incorporated into The Hub as it was repaired, with the bow placed at the entrance to the main hangars of the station. It would remain as an icon & symbol, a reminder of that very first battle against The Black Armada, high above Earth.
Memorial services are still held every year on January 16th to mark the start of the conflict between The G.O.D. and The Black Armada, and throughout our Guardian colonies, white Guardian helix insignias splashed with red paint signifying blood spatter are distributed and displayed as a sign of unyielding remembrance and devotion. For many in the G.O.D. Military, the day has become holy – as a day of rest and relaxation to remember fallen comrades from across the centuries long war.
Thank you for joining us here at CNG for this special Lamentation Day broadcast. Talk to your local Guardian recruiter to see how you can support our incredible G.O.D. troops, or even become one yourself – to ensure that the tragedy and betrayal of Lamentation Day is never forgiven, or forgotten! On behalf of the CNG news team, thanks for watching!
