Vaxis - Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures (novella)

Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures is a novella written by Claudio Sanchez and Chondra Echert and illustrated by Chase Stone. It was published by Evil Ink with Deluxe Edition of Coheed and Cambria's album of the same name released in 2018. It is the first chapter in The Amory Wars sequel saga featuring a brand new cast of characters.

Plot Summary
We begin on the deck of a ship called The Gavel with two prisoners in front of an officer. Outside the ship's viewscreen, we can see The Dark Sentencer, a prison planet created by the Five Houses of Star Supremacy (also known as HOSS) after, "The Great Crash." The two prisoners, Nostrand Crane and Otto Cruger, are sentenced to be wards of the planet below. Before the pair are unceremoniously dumped into a space tunnel, Cruger tells Crane that he blames him completely for their situation and if he finds him, he will kill him. The pair belong to a criminal gang called the Unheavenly Creatures, and were joined by a third member, Nia Worn, who was killed in a bank heist gone wrong. Crane was in a relationship with Worn and wouldn't leave without her body, but Cruger forces him to do so under the threat of killing the innocents. Crane tries to explain that Worn was everything to him and the circumstances of her death didn't add up. He never saw her body and a guard shouldn't have been where he had to be to have killed her. Cruger admits he was the one who killed Worn, just as the pair are thrown into the compressed space between The Gavel and The Dark Sentencer. Wanting to kill each other, but passing out from the lack of proper air, Crane and Cruger fall to the planet.

The two do not end up together and what proceeds is Crane avoiding detection by HOSS, while also trying to find a way off the planet; he still wants to find out what happened to Worn after she was shot, and confirm that Cruger is the one who did it. He runs into an old friend who helps him avoid HOSS, and tells him about a mysterious group of residents called the Windows who may be able to help him. He searches endlessly for them until he's able to finally talk to them. They don't tell him what he initially wants to know, but instead reveal he has a son, Vaxis. When he asks who the mom is, they imply it's Worn. He doesn't get much more out of them before passing out. When he comes to, he finds he is in the Zero Level with other people that have avoided getting their Gutters, a device that allows HOSS to track and literally gut them. It is here that he finds Worn, only now she the known as The Glass Widow, and rules over the people of Zero Level. Trying to speak with her, she gives him the cold shoulder.

Shortly after he starts working to extract core in Zero Level, Worn approaches Crane secretly to share that the planet is going to die soon, and everyone on it with it. She wants his help getting off planet, which he readily agrees to. The pair carefully sneak around the underground tunnels and run into a Window who leads them to a safe zone. It's there that they finally hash out what happened and Crane tells her about Vaxis. Later that night, she also dreams of the boy. The next day, they are safely lead out of the tunnel by the same Window and successfully sneak into a HOSS ship hanger, only to be confronted by Cruger who has played by HOSS rules and given an arsenal to take the pair out. However, this includes a Gutter, and Worn had stolen an activation key that guts him, allowing the pair to escape.

Publication History
The novella was originally published as a hardcover book bundled with the Deluxe Edition of the album with the same name on October 5, 2018.

As of yet, it has not been reissued or re-released in any other format.

Creative Team
Chase Stone is an illustrator and concept artist with his most notable credits for Wizards of the Coast's table top RPG Dungeons and Dragons, and TCG Magic: the Gathering. His other work includes cover illustration for Sci-Fi and Fantasy books like The World of Ice and Fire and a spin-off series Gods of Thrones. He illustrated 27 images in Act I's novella, and an additional piece on the album, all of which were used for various videos on the band's YouTube channel, such as "The Dark Sentencer", "The Gutter", and the Acoustic version of "The Gutter."

Stuart Ng was the supporting concept artist. He designed three ships (including The Gavel, and the ship Crane and Worn stole, with the third likely being The Watchtower, but can't be confirmed based on pictures available alone ), the Quintillian Speakers (credited as "the soldier belonging to the Glass Widow" ), and Creature in a stolen HOSS uniform/a HOSS soldier. Of course, all final art was done by Chase Stone. Ng has most notably done concept art for big-named games like League of Legends, Sleeping Dogs, Disney Infinity 3.0, and Smash + Grab.

Album Comparison
"" The album begins with a sort of overview of the entire story and each subsequent track expands upon various key points. "Unheavenly Creatures" illustrates the events of the bank heist, "Queen of the Dark" is written from Worn's point of view when the pair are reunited, and "Old Flames" illustrates the final scene in the novella. "Lucky Stars" is perhaps the only song that doesn't have a counterpart in canon, but it seems to be what happens immediately after the conclusion of the book from Crane's perspective.

Trivia

 * Sanchez does consider the Vaxis Arc a sequel to the previous album and its ending and has said there are some elements where this story truly fits within the timeline and how these characters are related to Coheed and Cambria’s arc.
 * Though this is the first act in the Vaxis arc, Vaxis himself does not make much of an appearence, though Sanchez has stated that the characters in the act are guided by the hands of their unborn son.
 * Vaxis wasn't Ng's first work with the band—he also designed the variant cover of Issue #8 for The Amory Wars: Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, saying that Coheed was one of his favorite bands.