Leverian

This is Atlas. Hard as stone. Is it any surprise that his story begins with an asteroid?

Temple Telamon had cast a spell on the indentured masses with a song that heralded the coming of a great stone destroyer. A god who would shatter the world and lead them to a great rebirth. The Orokin mocked the cult's off-key singing, their spasmodic dancing, but the spell only grew stronger. Telamon broadcasts would oft-times wedge into controlled channels to spread their doomsday message.

For the suffocated lower castes, the notion of something more powerful than their Orokin masters must have been intoxicating. A brutal Orokin crackdown seemed to be working, until... an asteroid was detected on a collision course with Earth. The Telamons celebrated it as prophecy writ true. Divine intervention. For the first time in living memory, the Orokin showed vulnerability.

It did not matter that the destruction would be total. For the Temple, this was a sign of a new age.

A probe was sent to the asteroid, perhaps seeking proof of divine intervention. It found intervention, though it was anything but divine.

The rock had been fitted with colossal steering thrusters and manning those thrusters, a bevy of well-armed Telamon. Having taken fate to their own hands, they set about a final convulsive dance aboard that rock. Battlecruisers, Orgon missiles, a gale-force of Dax... the Orokin could have resolved this in any number of ways. But their enemy was not the Telamons themselves. It was their ideas. Atlas, alone, was sent.

As he crashed onto that rock, his Shikoro helm greeted the cultists. Note the angled ballistic plating and reinforced neck protection.

He would soon need both.

For years, historians felt this 'Tale of Telamon' quite improbable, an artifact of Orokin propaganda-myth.

Then, on our system's outer edge, we found a debris field of small rocks and dust in a lazy elliptical orbit. Upon these rocks, we find the remains of peculiar stone statuary. The petrified figures, clearly Temple members, have been frozen into a tableau of struggle and death.

Or was it, perhaps, a dance? This remarkable find forces us to rethink the entire tale as fact.

The Stratum Syandana. Reserved and austere, until you turn it over and reveal the glowing hue of the amethyst crystal within.

A breathtaking geode. Imagine its spiralling ribbons as Atlas tore toward the killer asteroid's thrusters. His plan must have been to reorient them and push the rock away from Earth. But, as the story goes, as he neared, the cultists detonated the thruster's footings and sent them careening into space. They were no longer needed. Mass and inertia would carry the rock to its fate.

Atlas was out of options. Or so the Telamons thought.

The Tekko are, perhaps my favorite pieces in this gallery. Note the intricate, ornate moldings, the complex blades. Quite the contrast from Atlas's otherwise workmanlike appearance.

The beauty and craftsmanship conceal the true purpose of the Tekko, as indentations found in cultist's skulls attest.

I have to wonder what frenzied dance would have been interrupted, or, if the whiplash strikes and jabs of the Tekko might have blended into the crowd's fitful celebration?

Before you, a rare sight: two Rumblers, painstakingly recreated from fragments of the aforementioned Tableau.

How these inert and rigid formations are compelled to life by Atlas defies reason. Yet, it is true. Consider the confusion of those Telamons as the very stone they worshipped came to life and set upon them. How could they retaliate against such a thing?

Like sparring with a landslide.

Earth swelled on the horizon, as the cult mocked Atlas with their chorus: "The stone shall shatter all!"

Across the system, every Telamon echoed that final hymn. Children, as far as Neptune, turned their heads from greasy broth and gazed toward Earth. Would that careening stone change... everything? Atlas kneeled down, head and hands pressed to the ground in apparent defeat as the Telamon's hymn grew even louder.

But Atlas was listening, feeling, the way the stone trembled to the hymn's pitch. The faults within the asteroid became vivid to him... and so a new song rose up. Rumblers. Erupting in a god-like rhythm, beating along the faults until Atlas, alone, struck the final, resonant chord.

A tremor forked through the rock until, all at once, the great asteroid exploded, its dust falling as scintillating rain sparking across the atmosphere, and then... gone. The Telamon's song fell silent and children, as far as Neptune, turned away and swirled their spoons in greasy broth.

Ah, Gauss. Where to begin, where to begin... Well, the Ceres excavation of course. The site of the ancient tower of Altra.

Blastcrete emplacements, air sentries... its fields saturated with tremor mines. A great fortress for the Great Lords of Ceres... until they were pitched from the roof, immortal bodies erupting on the dread mines below.

An insurgency, from within. The Dax sent to reclaim Altra fared no better. Those that ran the gauntlet of bore-guns were soon cindered in the field beyond... That's when they called in our fleet-footed friend here.

Dual sidearms pulled from Altra's outer ring of blastcrete bunkers. Something crashed through those bunkers at great speed, the impact scattering stone and flesh all the same. An unearthly kinetic shockwave.

Those insurgents with the misfortune of surviving the initial blast must have seen the Akarius for themselves.

The Acceltra, a rapid-fire micro-missile launcher. The smooth polycarbonate barrels still carry a vague stench of ozone.

Some think Gauss was a blunt instrument, all speed, with as much versatility as a cannonball. But the Acceltra implies more. It implies surging in, inviting the enemy to consider the blade, then rebounding to let missiles answer their confusion.

Not the standard dress helm. This one has specialized control surfaces, angled plating. Supreme streamlining. It catches the light in a curious way, doesn't it?

When it shines just so, I see myself atop Altra, a hostage perhaps, peering out across the desolate field... and then, I'd see it. A pale glint of light.

Dax of the day had a saying, "That which cannot be hit, cannot be killed". I can only imagine what they thought when they saw Gauss that day. A gleaming bullet, this syandana pinned rigid like a flag in a maelstrom, streaking toward Altra.

A stripped-out Gauss Airfoil System. These fanciful contrivances contribute the Kubrodon's share of this Warframe's acceleration. Strength, mass, density - all held in a delicate balance.

Gauss. Front edge: smooth heat-resistant composites. Trailing edges: streamlined, foiled, this particular one vaguely warped by extreme heat stress.

The Saint of Altra. If the mind wanders, what do you see?

I see a vivid Lord-like Festival, the tremor mines bursting in a blinding wave, rising toward Altra. And Gauss - a smear of light, just ahead of the thermal avalanche - fast as fire. No... faster.

Grendel: Primal. Insatiable. And, as this exhibit will demonstrate, a creature of surprising compassion.

After the fall of the Orokin Empire, a surviving Orokin Executor - a violet-scented brute named Karishh - lorded over Europa's frozen, famine-struck city of Riddha.

Safe within his walled manse the moist and loathsome Karishh lived a lavish life while his frail citizens obeyed his every edict in the hope of receiving his pre-masticated table scraps. As the city starved beneath him, Karissh commanded yet another feast for himself and his gluttonous sycophants... twelve courses for each of his twelve grafted digestive sacs... and one... one uninvited guest.

There remains a shallow trench through the ruins. As if some colossal boulder had crashed from the manse and rolled down the hill... but what if it had rolled... up?

Imagine if you will, Karishh's Dax on the day... peering out, dumbstruck by what they saw. They readied no blade, sounded no alarm as the expanding orb of gristle hurtled toward them. And then in a spasm of giblets, Grendel was before them. His 'cutlery' in hand.. the Masseter.

Scraps of clothing matching Grendel's unexpectedly elegant Syandana were retrieved from the site, hooked on the remnants of gilded gates, stained with the evidence of his... degustation.

Indeed, most of the Orokin hanger-ons who attended the feast... became it. And Karishh himself fled shrieking into the hills of Riddha, as fast as his twelve exo-sac levitators would carry him.

It came as no surprise to me, to find this tiny fragment of Gauss just outside the city. Indeed, if one thing is for certain, wherever we find evidence of Grendel, we're sure to find some trace of Gauss as well.

Did they breach the city as a pair? Or did Gauss hang back intercepting returning patrols, generously letting his friend Grendel eat his fill at the feast within?

Note the open-face, almost maw-like design. A fitting visage for one of such singular, rapacious predilections.

Grendel may hunger, yes, but not with the excesses of gluttony. Not when others are in need. Oral history tells of Grendel, newly-engorged from his repast, rolling through the miserable slums of Riddha, reinvigorating the sick and the lame, the hungry and the dying, with the power he had stolen - consumed - from their oppressors.

Here we have shattered fragments of the manse wall and the gate mangled by Grendel's Masseter blade.

One can almost see, the city's masses, newly-rejuvenated by Grendel's healthful blessing, storming the manse. Shattered gates thrown wide, they take back what was theirs. Namely, control of their future.

See here the scattering of genuine Orokin dinnerware. Worn with time, these must have been used for countless meals as the people of Riddha bravely weathered the dark times ahead.

Many Warframes have speed and litheness but power, momentum, impact... those require mass.

And there... the creased midsection - the seam. Does it split? Yawning with a jagged, vacuous aperture to... to who knows? A certain Orokin may have found out.

That night when the people of Riddha ate their fill, feasting until the frozen mountains lit warmly with the dawn. It was toward those roseate peaks that the Executor fled, pursued by Grendel. What his fate was I cannot say, but as the people feasted, so the story goes, they were suddenly struck by a strange, deep sound. A rumble carried from mountain to mountain: a Single. Satisfied. Belch.