Cwej: The Flatwoods Fractal by Aristide Twain

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THE FLATWOODS FRACTAL
WRITTEN BY
ARISTIDE TWAIN
& ILLUSTRATED BY
LEELA ROSS

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The woods were still, and dark, and silent. 

Why did people speak of things going bump in the night? It wasn’t even night, just late evening—and even now, watching the trees racing past the window of the Honda, Sang Mi found the silence far more uncanny than any mysterious growl. She was almost glad of the occasional, eerie glimpse of another pair of tail-lights ahead in the distance, matching their speed, dipping in and out of view as the road twisted.

Flatwoods. Somehow, the name fit. It wasn’t that the terrain was particularly flat—not in any way that would register to a girl used to perfectly-even, terraformed environments—but there was an eerie evenness to these forests, as if the rows upon rows of pine trees on each side of the road were simply painted backdrops, and the road an oppressive corridor whose walls might at any moment press together and crush them. 

Chris was driving slowly. He’d been driving slowly all throughout the trip; that was the point of this diversion, after all, as it had been the point of all the others. A bit more time. Taking things slow, one stop at a time. Somehow, irrationally, she found herself wishing he’d speed up; wishing this particular leg of their road trip could be over already. She repressed the urge to voice that need. She’d been the one to suggest they drive through Flatwoods, after all; the Phantom of Flatwoods had been one more name on the cryptid checklist, one more legend to investigate at a leisurely pace of their choosing. And they were nearly at the end of their journey, now—running out of viable ways to extend it. What sense would it make to call it off now, when they’d barely gotten started?

But the silence was getting to her, all the same, and by the looks of him, Chris Cwej himself seemed equally ill-at-ease. His chiseled jaw was clenched, and his hands gripped the primitive car’s steering wheel more tightly than anything about the situation could rationally justify. Eventually, she worked up the will to speak. 

“So,” she said, in the kind of falsely casual tone that wasn’t actually intended to fool anyone about her state of mind, “what do you think we’ll find, if we find something?”

Sang Mi felt a momentary warmth, seeing a bit of tension leave her friend as the silence was broken.

“I’m not sure,” he said finally. “A ship, maybe. According to those reports you found, some kind of spacecraft was seen landing here in 1952. But no one saw it leave.”

“Could have been cloaked,” she suggested.

“Well, maybe. But why would they let themselves be seen on the way down? No, this smells like a crash to me. Ship too wrecked to take off again, at a guess. The pilot clambered out, spooked those farm kids who called it in… and then, I don’t know. They’ve never been seen again around these parts, and not for lack of people looking. Maybe they contacted someone up there and got picked up, or they made it to a bigger city and joined up with the local alien underground. Even without groups like SIGNET, castaways and refugees tend to help each other.”

“Cool. Yeah, that all sounds… plausible.”

They drove on for just long enough that the looping spectacle of trees whooshing past in the twilight gloom began to make Sang Mi’s skin crawl anew. 

“…But you don’t sound very convinced,” Sang Mi added.

“It’s the species,” Chris confessed. “You’ve seen what it looked like.”

“What’s wrong with that? Judging by that novelty chair we saw when we passed through the town, I think it looks pretty cute. That little round head!”

“Oh, sure,” Chris agreed. “Love the chair, it’s a great chair—they’d hardly put it in front of the town hall if it wasn’t. Remind me to send you that picture I took, when this is all over.” He blinked, as if sorry he’d brought up the endpoint of their odyssey. “But—it doesn’t look like any species I know. And believe me, I ought to know. Back at the Academy, I was drilled on every spacefaring species in the quadrant. None of them fit the bill, not remotely.” 

He seemed about to say something more—then paused.

After a while, he took his eyes off the road to check on his friend in the passenger seat. Upon seeing the unmistakable I-saw-that look on Sang Mi’s face, he reddened and instantly gave in.

“…None of them except… creatures I really hope we never meet,” he admitted. “Creatures from the Time of Legends, unbound by the laws of the Superiors—hardly even a species, in the modern sense of the word. They’re almost… elemental. Creatures of absolute fear. The stories say they looked sort of vegetal; big, round, reddish heads… You know jack-o’-lanterns? The Halloween tradition?”

“…Yeah?” Sang Mi blinked. “We’ve got Halloween back in Cheonsa. Never really got the pumpkin thing, though, to be honest. I hardly ate anything else when I was in the hospital, so I speak from experience when I say—pumpkin porridge is not spooky.”

“No, it isn’t, is it?” Chris said with wry tension. “But Hervoken are terrifying, and early humans got the image from them. The whole scary-scarecrows thing, actually. Why is a man made of twigs with a gourd for a head supposed to be scary? Well, they’re why.” Then he blinked. “Or anyway, that’s where this Earth got it from. Not sure about your universe. But… let’s just say—if your world ever had Hervoken, you’d better pray they’re extinct now.”

“Hervoken,” Sang Mi repeated, tasting the word. Chris took his eyes off the road, driving on instinct, and met her eyes. “And they’re supposed to be extinct here too?”

“That’s what the Superiors say,” Chris told her with a hint of weariness as well as unease. “But… well, you’ve got to wonder why they’d bother briefing me about them, if they really believed that.”

“I think you might be right,” said Sang Mi, rushing the words with a sudden urgency which vaguely confused Chris until she added, in a much louder shriek: “Brake!”

He stopped the car dead a few feet from the figure which stood, still as a tree, in the middle of the road. 

“Bloody H—what is that?!”

It was lanky and strange, with a head like a big round tomato, its only features a pair of luminescent eyes. A collar shaped like the Ace of Spades framed that head from behind, but Chris and Sang Mi knew, somehow, that the creature wore no clothing. The flaps of the long skirt that shrouded its body looked more like vegetal fronds than any kind of cloth or armour. And then there were the arms, twig-like, thin, oddly stunted, with long, clawed fingers. The left was hanging limply at its side, but it was holding the other out in front of its chest, claw-hand out-stretched, palm forwards. The gesture was jarringly human. 

Chris’s head moved quickly back and forth between Sang Mi and the creature. They’d seen worse things by now, stranger, angrier things. But their hearts were thumping just the same as if they’d been a pair of lost children, and they felt a strange vertigo rising up within their chests.

“Chris, I feel—”

“I know,” he told her quickly, not raising his voice, hands gripping the wheel. “I’m getting it too.”

“It’s like… I’ve felt this before,” she told him. “Once or twice. When I was using —”

She cut herself off before she said Delirium, but he seemed to take her meaning just the same. 

“Like the ground’s vanishing beneath your feet? Just sinking and sinking, and you’re going to be sick—you’re going to bleed out, and you don’t know what to do?” He gulped and screwed up his face. “That’s not drugs. It’s because we’re—sensitive. You and I. To certain things. You more than me, I think, but with what I’ve been around, the people I’ve worked with… I can feel it, too. Damn—never felt it this strongly before. But I know what it means. It’s reality that’s askew.”

“And that thing is responsible?” asked Sang Mi, pointing at the alien.

The creature hadn’t moved a muscle—if it even had muscles. Its eyes remained fixed on them, unblinking. 

“But… but it just appeared,” she went on. “One moment it was there, one moment it wasn’t.”

“Teleportation’s fairly common tech by this century, in this dimension,” Chris replied. “Well, not for humans. You know what I mean. But…”

She followed his train of thought exactly; neither of them bothered to say it. If the stranded alien had a working teleport, why would it still be here, five decades later? She found her gaze drawn back to the unmoving figure. There was something profoundly strange about it, something ghostly. It wasn’t translucent or anything so theatrical, and it took a moment for Sang Mi to spot it. When she did, she froze a moment before getting Chris’s attention and attempting a wordless gesture. After a moment his own eyes widened, and she knew he’d got it. 

The Honda’s headlights were shining directly upon the phantom. And still it cast no shadow on the road behind it. 

Suddenly, as if sensing that its nature had been probed, the phantom stirred to life. It moved slowly, even so, gliding like mist; but all the same, it was moving, and moving towards them. 

Chris and Sang Mi stared at each other out the corners of their eyes, neither of them now daring to stop watching the creature completely. They remained silent, breath bated, until the apparition reached the hood of the Honda—and went through it as if through a hologram. 

“Get out of the car!” Chris shouted. “Out! Out! Out!”

Even as he spoke, he pushed the door open and unstrapped his seatbelt, jumping out of the vehicle like a trooper into action. Sang Mi hesitated for a moment, her hand halfway to the handle of her own door, before she decided that she had better not split up from him; unbuckling her own seatbelt, she crawled as fast as she could over his empty driver’s seat and followed him out of the door on his side of the car. Out in front, the creature was still slowly, slowly gliding through the engine; its outstretched hand was almost touching the windshield. 

Chris took her hand as she got out of the car, and helped her find her footing; and then they were running, off the road, into the woods—hand in hand, without looking back.

---

Sang Mi couldn’t have said how long they kept running. It didn’t seem like a prolonged effort, more like a single moment of fear and exertion, stretched out until it was almost unbearable. Neither she nor Chris were strangers to running, to say the least, but eventually they had to stop, lungs burning, pulse beating a samba. Sang Mi collapsed into an almost foetal crouch, then, confirming with a glance that the ground was soft and mossy, let herself sit down in earnest. Chris stopped a second later, looking back to see her there, and he turned round to join her. 

“…I don’t think it’s chasing us,” she told him when their eyes met. 

He swallowed, and nodded. “Agreed. I think… Goddess, it sounds stupid. I think it wanted the car.”

Sang Mi felt herself chortling, despite the hoarseness of her throat and the adrenaline in her veins. “…What?”

“Think about it,” he explained, tilting his head and spreading those thick, long arms of his. “It’s a crashed pilot, yeah? Powers know what species, but stranded, anyway. Stranded here for decades, and it clearly didn’t make contact with humanity, for whatever reason. I think it wants off this planet. I think it must have recognised you and me—time-sensitives—as higher lifeforms, not native to this time and place… so it figures our vehicle must be advanced technology it could use to escape.”

Sang Mi thought for a moment, and straightened, looking Chris dead in the eye. 

“…Well, it’s not entirely wrong, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—you’re saying it’s basically a hitchhiker, aren’t you?” Sang Mi replied. “Sure, the Honda won’t get it where it wants to go, but maybe we can help. Can’t you, I dunno, contact those Superiors of yours? You told me they see themselves as peacekeepers, sorting out Time and Space and all that. Sending a stranded creature home ought to be within their wheelhouse, even if it’s dangerous.”

“Especially if it’s dangerous,” Chris granted. “But—uhm—my T.M. comms unit was in the trunk.”

She blinked at him. “I thought you had some sort of telepathic link to your bosses. Is it only one-way?”

“No…” groaned Chris as he began to stand up again, brushing twigs and dead leaves off his trousers. “But it’s delicate stuff. See, it’s not exactly telepathy. I’m connected to the Vicinity, and that means I’m connected to the Threads of the Infinite Spiral of Space-Time Itself—and the Base of Operations is built, basically, on top of the Astral Nexus, where all those threads converge. The eye of the storm.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Chris shrugged. “It’s… a place of power. They keep it in their basement.”

“Uhuh,” Sang Mi nodded, not without sarcasm. “I hope you realise how that all sounded.”

He gave her a wan smile as he offered her a hand and helped her to her feet in turn. “You have no idea,” he told her. “But my point is, it only works when the structure of reality itself is nice and orderly. And let me tell you… What we’ve been feeling, you and I… There’s something very wrong with Space and Time in these woods.”

“Y-you can say that again,” said Sang Mi, letting go of his hand as she took a step back—then pointed, eyes wide, over his shoulder. “Look!”

Chris Cwej whirled round, bracing himself for the sight of the green phantom, the thing without a shadow, stalking them once more. What he found, what Sang Mi had spotted, was altogether more disquieting. 

There, in the distance, barely visible in the gloom behind the black bars of the tree-trunks, were two human silhouettes, standing quite close together. Looking directly at them. One was a tall, broad man with long arms and square shoulders. The other was a girl with a skirt, her hair styled in a bob.

She was pointing.

Chris swallowed.

“Ah.”

He inched closer to Sang Mi and took her hand again. The other Cwej did the same with the other Sang Mi. 

“Ah,” Chris said again, and Sang Mi felt a chill down her spine as she faintly heard the same remark coming from the duplicate Cwej, with not the slightest time-delay. 

“Chris?” she asked him in barely more than a whisper, just so she wouldn’t hear those words coming out of her other self’s mouth. “What’s happening? It’s not a shapeshifter, is it?”

“No such luck. Don’t —” he paused “— be afraid. Not of… them,” he added with a vague gesture in the direction of their duplicates. “I don’t think they’re copies at all. I think they’re us. Literally us.”

“You don’t mean —”

“Oh, I do,” he exhaled, frowning with concentration. His grip felt tight around her fingers; not so tight that it was painful, but anxious. “Space-time is screwed up much worse than I thought. Gah, I should have seen it! That ride was taking way too long.”

“And those tail lights… Those car tail lights in the distance…” Sang Mi added in frightful realisation, still keeping her voice low. 

“You’re right,” Chris confirmed grimly. “There was never anyone else on the road. It’s this forest. It’s folded up on itself, like—like a maze.”

“A fractal maze,” she added, staring, entranced, at her own face a hundred yards away. “No wonder that creature never found its way out, even after half a century. And—look,” she added.

So saying, she slipped her hand out of his grip and began to turn in place, scanning the dark horizon beyond the nearest trees. It didn’t take long for her to spot yet another duo a quarter-turn away; a tall man standing still, and a girl spinning in place. 

“Look over there,” she said, grimly but without fear, pointing at that more distant pair. 
Chris followed her gaze, and she saw in the way his eyes widened that he’d understood what she meant.

“…And there,” he added in turn, pointing even further away. 

“Chris,” she asked him, turning back to him, in a level, serious voice. “How… How are we going to get out of here?”

“I… I don’t know,” he confessed. 

She heard in his tone that he’d considered a comforting lie, for just a second, then chosen honesty. Just for that, she flashed him a brief, sad, but thankful smile. Then she took a moment to collect herself before smiling again, with as much genuine hope as she felt.

“There’s got to be a way,” she assured him. “We’ve been through worse. We’ve got our memories., this time. Our wits. And no one’s trying to keep us here, are they?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he granted, drumming his fingers on his chin like a child playing at Sherlock Holmes. “I don’t think it’s a trap. Just an anomaly. A higher-dimensional ship crashed here, and it… cracked space itself. Like a crater tunneling into the fifth dimension. Accidental. Doesn’t explain what the pilot is, how it could phase through the Honda like that, but… It’s not malicious. Neither the place nor the creature.”

“Exactly,” said Sang Mi. “And if there was a way in, there must be a way out. We just have to find it. We just need…”

She trailed off, eyes widening again; Chris watched, confused, as she rocked back on a single heel and spun once more, then twice, then thrice. Suddenly she stopped and snapped her fingers. 

“Of course. Chris! What was it you said? The eye of the storm!”

She fell to her knees and began to pat at the mossy forest-floor until she found a long, thin, sturdy twig.

“…what are you doing?”

“Space in this forest has been turned into a fractal,” she explained with a kind of giddy franticness as she cleared away some of the moss and began to etch markings into the earth. “Don’t you see? A spiraling fractal might be infinite, but it must have a centre. Like the Spiral of All Space and Time that your Superiors created. We just need… to find… the pattern.”

She stepped back and beckoned Chris to look at her handiwork. With a remarkable eye for proportions, she had noted down the positions of all their duplicates in sight, then joined the dots to form a perfect spiral—and bisected it with a long, straight line. The path of their run. 

“…Oh,” said Chris, eyes shining with admiration. “Wow. I… wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“They do teach us a thing or two at Academy 27,” she replied with an impish look that could not disguise her blush at the praise.

“I went to an Academy,” he replied with a playful pout.

“Yeah, you said. And they taught you how to recognise every species in the galaxy except the one we needed today.”

They shared a stifled laugh, then joined hands again as they began to run anew. But this time—they knew where they were going. 

---

The heart of the woods—the eye of the storm—didn’t look like much. It was barely worthy of being called a clearing; the trees were sparser here, younger, but it was the sort of thing which someone would only notice if they were already looking. Whatever area had been scorched clean by the original spaceship crash, the plant kingdom had begun to conquer anew half a century prior. There was no doubt that they had the right place, however. Stepping into the centre of the fractal, Chris and Sang Mi finally saw their spatial reflections vanish into an impossible angle and out of sight. 

They looked at each other. It was Sang Mi who spoke.

“Well… we’ve made it. What now? We dig?”

“No,” Chris said with an odd graveness to his tone. “We’re going to have to do something much harder.”

Sang Mi repressed the urge to puncture that seriousness with some meaningless quip. Chris wouldn’t have said it that way unless he meant it, and what her friend needed right now, she felt, was for her to respect that fact. Hence, she slowly nodded, instead, repressing the urge to let her eyes wander over the trees and keeping her gaze fixed on the tall man’s face, in silent encouragement to continue his explanation.

“Most higher-dimensional ships have… minds of their own,” he told her. “Souls of their own. They’ve got to. A structure that complex, it can’t maintain itself without knowing itself. I think the ship that crashed in 1952 didn’t just bury itself down there from the force of the impact—I think it’s hiding, like a wounded animal. And that fear, that nausea we’ve been feeling… I got it wrong. Half-wrong. It isn’t the spatial distortion, not directly. We’re feeling what it feels.”

“And we need to draw it out? Gain its trust?” guessed a distressed Sang Mi. “But how do we do that!?”

Chris tried to avert his gaze for just a moment, scratching the back of his head. 

“Simple,” he replied. “We’ve got to show it that we understand it, that we understand its pain. That we want to help. Which means—that feeling of wrongness we’ve been talking about? That pain we’ve been distracting ourselves from?”

Sang Mi had guessed his next words many long seconds before he uttered them. 

“We need to sit down and focus on it as hard as we can.”

---

No words could describe the work it took to summon the Ship. It wasn’t anything as trite as telepathy, as poetic as a wish upon a star. No sigils were etched, in skin or in the dirt; no incantations uttered. No palms were joined in prayer; not a word was uttered.

They simply stood in silence, side by side, at the eye of the storm—the man and the girl—and let themselves feel. The silent darkness of the woods was a blessing now; with only one another’s breathing to ignore, it was oddly easy to close their minds to the ills of the world and their situation; oddly natural to let themselves feel. And all the things they’d been running from came flooding out. The fear, and the pain, and the wrongness. 

She felt it clearly, keenly, intimately. A journey that should have been the briefest of visits, a little taste of that strange, beautiful place called Earth—extended, now, loop after loop, into an alluring fractal of places and people. And there was safety in that, though it should last forever. Who knew what lay beyond? They’d been away from home for such a long time, now. Had it changed? Had they changed? Home was such a tumultuous place, for all its allure. 

How could they trade this silent peace for the chance of a war-song? Here, things were simple. Just them and their faithful companion. Their guide. 

And things could stay that way forever, if they willed it hard enough. Making time was easy. Every loop could be looped back on itself, unto infinity. Fractal. How large was the forest? How far was it from Chicago to the Blue Ridge Mountain? As long as you liked. If you broke the rules, summer could last forever. And if not—if they let this end--

—they’d be alone. They might never see that special someone again. Friend. Companion. Mentor. Pilot. 

And that hurt more than anything. 

Sang Mi was crying. The tears were hot on her cheeks, and after all a while, she couldn’t keep her eyes shut anymore. She opened them and wiped at them with the backs of her hands --

—and gasped in surprise. 

There had been no great rumbling and moving of earth; no trees had been felled. But the Ship now hovered, suspended in front of Sang Mi and Chris, its geometrical form impossibly overlapping the tree-trunks like a poorly-rendered computer image. A perfect sphere, so flawless it looked unreal, its golden hull glowing with an inner light. Flawless in design, yes--

—but cracked.

“Well done,” said Chris, his wide eyes still brimming with tears of his own. “Well done… Well done,” he repeated, and Sang Mi didn’t know if he was speaking to her or to the Ship. Perhaps, in this moment, there was no difference.

But it was definitely the Ship that he addressed when he stretched out a hand and touched the metal surface with boundless care.

“Now,” he asked it, “can you let us in?”

---

Dawn was breaking when they drove out of Flatwoods in the Honda. In silence. Only when the sign disappeared in the rear view mirror did Sang Mi dare to speak.

“Well… We found the Flatwoods Monster,” she said, wry, forlorn perhaps, but not unhappy. They’d done good—as good as anyone could have done. “And now it’s gone forever.”

“I told the Ship to take its pilot home,” said Chris. “To its home planet. It’s still there, I could promise it that much.”

Sang Mi nodded. She’d assumed as much, but the controls of the Ship had been nothing she could understand. Even Chris had seemed to struggle with them, after they’d moved the body—gently, ever so gently—out of the pilot’s seat. 

She didn’t ask if Chris thought the creature would make it. They didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Nobody did; that was the point. The Ship itself hadn’t known; it hadn’t known if its pilot would heal from their injuries, it hadn’t even known if it could survive the trip home without repairs that the pilot was in no condition to provide. 

In both cases, it was… possible. They’d sensed that much from its aching, swirling thoughts. But the Ship hadn’t wanted to gamble on those odds, whatever they were. For sixty years, it had delayed—hiding itself in a cocoon of repeated space-time, trapping an echo, a ghost of its pilot in the maze. Keeping them safe. Keeping them close. Keeping them lost and far from home. 

But it had known, deep down, this couldn’t last forever. All it had needed was a friend there to give it the strength to let go.

Sang Mi understood that. She understood it all too well. 

So she didn’t ask if the alien and Ship would survive; if they’d ever be reunited on other journeys, other adventures. Even if she could somehow get the answers, she didn’t want to know. Not yet. The truth might hurt too much. 

But the time for silence was past, so she asked a different question, using one hand to shield her eyes from the rays of the morning sun dead ahead.

“Do you know what it was, then? The pilot’s home planet?”

Chris nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. “Yep. Ship was unmistakable—I know what species made it. And they’re as old as the Hervoken, too, if you can believe it, only much… nicer. They’re from another Galaxy altogether; I never expected to see one on Earth, and I’d never seen them in person. I only know about’em because they’ve been allies to my Superiors since, oh, before the Big Bang. If my bosses see to Time, they’re the people who look after Space.”

“Cool,” said Sang Mi, her tone meditative. “I guess that makes sense.” Then her mouth curled into a lopsided grin, and she elbowed the driver—lightly. “Well, go on then. Tell me the name.”

He gave a subdued half-snort as he turned off the main road. “You’ll laugh.”

“Aw, I won’t.”

“You will! People always do, when they aren’t used to intergalactic, uh, stuff. The universe is… big,” he said, and she saw his hands twitch on the steering wheel, repressing the urge to spread out his arms for emphasis. “Big and populous. Which means there’s bound to be coincidences. Sandy planets called Desertis Minor. Warrior races from the Militarius System. Doesn’t mean anything, really, there’s just as many punny planets in the sky no matter what language you speak—the ones I mentioned are just off the English list.” He gave her an embarrassed smile. “I, er, don’t know the Korean ones off the top of my head, sorry. Uhm… Okay. Here goes. The pilot… was what we call a Space Lord—from the planet Fractallax.”

“Hah!” Sang Mi laughed, but the mirth of the joke was all in the telling; she doubted she’d have even noticed the oddly fitting syllables in that name, if Chris hadn’t worked his way to it. “Frankly, I expected worse. So the Lords of Space in your dimension are a bunch of plant people from a planet called Fractallax… Good for them. Good for them.”

“S’pose it is.” He was quiet for a moment—not meditative, just thinking. “Funny thing is, they usually keep to themselves. Sat out the Cosmic War and… everything. Wonder what one of them was doing on Earth, all on their own.”

“I think that’s their business,” she replied. “Don’t you? Oh, but about those planet names—one thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Chris Cwej.

The road ahead was clear and well-lit. He risked a head-turn, and found Jhe Sang Mi smiling at him with eyes full of hope.

“It’s okay you don’t know them off the top of your head—but next time, promise you’ll bring me a list of the funniest ones.”

He didn’t know whether to laugh, or to cry all over again. He settled for a smile to match hers. “Next time?”

She nodded decisively, and turned back to the road as Cwej did the same.

“Yeah. Next time.”

---

NEXT STOP:
COMING SOON…

---

Copyright © 2025 Arcbeatle Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Edited by James Wylder and James Hornby
Formatting and design by James Wylder & Aristide Twain
Cover by Leela Ross
Illustration by Plum Pudding
Logo design by Lucas Kovacs
 
Concepts Used with Permission:
Academy 27 © Arcbeatle Press
Shapeships © Nate Bumber
WARSONG, WARS TCG, Gongen, Takumi, and associated concepts © Decipher, Inc.
Chris Cwej and associated concepts © Andy Lane
Hervoken © Mark Morris
The Astral Nexus, Fractallax, the Space Lords © Aristide Twain