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Incursion Synopsis, 500 Words
Our world is one of atrocities; if you could stop them, wouldn’t you? DARREN, a man growing into near-godlike powers of provenance unknown, will try. Maybe it’ll mean he deserves to live.
While ending a crusade of extermination, he finds something even worse: an invisible malevolence, maddeningly familiar.
We meet KATHERINE and NATHAN, his friends.
Trying to remake our world, Darren is plagued by a parasite that sharpens his depression. It taunts him and makes him forget. Its opponent, a busker, once tells him he would help… but Darren must understand what he’s asking for.
Years ago, the US found a spacecraft and, fearing irrelevance and trying to turn us against him, misrepresents this, claiming Darren is an alien invader.
Shocking both, Darren discovers Katherine is like him.
The ancient (and wacky) spacecraft SHIP contacts Darren, telling him:
Our universe is built from the ruins of the first, after a war between its Makers and those who would unmake it—the Unmakers, whose only hope of restoring their kingdoms is to unmake time. Now trapped in the Underworld, Darren’s convinced the malevolence was them looking for an agent to help them escape.
But penitent Unmakers—the Exiles—came up with a plan to prevent this, creating a psychic army—the Chosen—that remains in the stars… before the Exiles too disappeared. Ship brings Darren and Katherine towards them.
En route they find another of their kind who says half of their number have sided with the Unmakers. They race back to Earth.
With a clue from Nathan, Darren figures out who the agent might be—a man named JOSEPH. Darren and Katherine wait to ambush him, but Joseph’s been following Nathan. He attacks him to make of him a “conduit”—but is fought off.
Darren realises that, to bring everyone together, someone must have manipulated his life, which terrifies him.
Forced to kill Joseph, Darren’s now certain he’s a monster. Katherine helps him recover, temporarily.
But Nathan was only one candidate. Later, an eyeless man murders joyfully. Darren and Katherine engage him.
The parasite acts, unleashing all Darren’s sharpened self-hatred at once. Katherine leaves him behind but cannot stop the man, who dies creating a path to the Underworld. Two traitor, Unmaker-strengthened Chosen, arrive. As the path closes, they attack.
A clue helps Darren see an incongruity in his memories, which he pulls on, understanding.
The parasite is a dead Unmaker, the busker a dead Maker, both casualties of the first war. Darren asks for help and the busker can now remove the parasite. He tells Darren he is a monster; a good one, “like me!”
Darren reaches a dying Katherine. The traitors prevent their escape… until he deciphers the busker’s words. He’s a Maker, written into the universe. After a brief display, the traitors flee.
He falls backwards through time, becoming the manipulator he feared. Attempting to save Katherine, he collapses.
He wakes in the Overworld. Katherine lives. He alters the past, to have made Ship.