#sessile

It is possible that surviving for long enough on the Front turns you into a Strategist. Others claim that the Strategists are the immutable gods of the Front, and though their bodies are mortal, so long as the Front exists they will always return. Yet other stories suggest that the alien light that gives them their power is something cultivated by secret rituals that they keep to themselves, and that the ultimate goal of their eternal war is waged to consolidate their secrets under a single master in order to perfect the technique. It scarcely matters. The Strategists are the architects of the Front. They dictate what matters, and they do not reward curiosity. Certainly, they are capable of human pettiness, human rage, and human greed, but whether they were human once, chose to mimic them, or picked up bits of humanity from pure proximity, there is nothing else human about them. Every Strategist has a singular concrete, long-term aim; everything it does or thinks is calibrated to produce the most optimal, most thorough version of that aim. Lath Dhaun, the Strategist presiding over the Ascendant League, is morally opposed to flat surfaces; every member of the League is trained in stonemasonry and earthworks, so that as they claim territory they leave a tessellating field of 45-degree slopes behind them. Where they get these fixations, no one can say.