In the depths of the Endless Chaotic Void, over a thousand warships glided silently through gaps in the elemental turbulence like a school of silver-gray deep-sea fish. Inside the command deck of the flagship, Deep Root, warm yellow biolight seeped from within the walls, staining the entire space in hues reminiscent of a forest at dusk.
A three-dimensional star map projection dozens of meters in diameter floated in the center of the chamber. More than a hundred tentacles of varying thickness worked nimbly over the dense control nodes along the edge of the projection.
The owners of those tentacles were the dominant race of this fleet.
Their forms resembled trees uprooted from the soil by some immense force. Their elongated trunks were covered in dark brown patterns like bark, and faint green pulsing light seeped through the cracks—the glow of nutrient fluid circulating through their bodies.
At the top of every "tree" grew a dense cluster of branch-and-leaf-like organs. Those branches were soft as vines, and at first glance looked more like tentacles capable of bending and curling freely.
Each tree possessed anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred tentacles, all busy with their own tasks.
At the junction between foliage and trunk lay a ring of sensory organs: eight soybean-sized lenses embedded evenly beneath the bark, giving off a faint golden glow.
This species had neither a sense of smell nor vocal organs, but they were exceptionally sensitive to all forms of vibration.
To them, the low-frequency vibrations created by tapping their trunks with the tips of their tentacles were "speech." Rhythmic knocking sounds rose and fell throughout the chamber.
The fleet's supreme commander stood directly beneath the star map.
He was a head taller than the others of his kind. More than two hundred tentacles grew from