Whilst the opening stages of the the Thul’s invasion of Inixia was swift: their fleets overrunning and outnumbering Inixia’s far smaller navy, and their ground forces quickly laying siege to the region’s inhabited worlds and fortified strongholds; the final stage, that of the conquest of Inixia itself, was a slow and grinding affair. The advantage of surprise and speed, the size of their forces, and the very nature of faster than light travel had served them well, but all these advantages were rendered moot as they advanced on the capital.
The Inixian Needle, supra-dimensional Tower and gateway to true intra-galactic travel, served as lynchpin to the system (as did examples of such a structure in other capitals and noteworthy or blessed systems across the galaxy). The Needle, by its nature, laid an unshakeable claim to sub-space within a range of several lightyears around it and down to prodigious depths. It supplied power and safety, and the distant hope that should they hold on long enough reinforcements could arrive directly over, or rather under in strictly dimensional terms, the heads of the foes.
The Thul, whilst they had powerful patrons, lacked the power to directly subvert the Needle and so conquest fell to decades of unrelenting, unceasing and unending siege. For years, fleets filled with Thul armies were forced to sail from nearby systems at sublight speeds before arriving in the Inxian system. Entire regiments were trained en route, molded from those that had been too young to have ever experienced the early stages of the war.
With the time lag, meticulous planning on the part of the Thul Viziers became pointless, whatever forces they marshalled to depart unable to arrive on the battlefield for many years. So the calculus became simple: vast waves of ships, many built specifically to transport and sustain the invasion forces, sailed out into the void towards Inixia. They arrived first into the waiting guns of Inixian forces, but as the decades ground on, small footholds were won and they began to arrive to sprawling battlefields far different from what they had set out for. The outer planets became rubble strewn plains of chaos, where the tide of Thul forces would sweep in only to recede and be beaten back by the Inxian defenders, who hurriedly tried to shore up what they could before the wave came crashing in.
In this chaos the front lines became atomised and porous, both sides deploying formations of elite troops in the hope of striking some meaningful and serious blow against the other. Inixan Bravehearts, elite soldiers in combat harnesses designed to give them the capabilities of the much vaunted Scions, clashed with Thul headtakers: fanatical sadists who had embarked on the journey as little more than children, morphing over time into hate filled killers committed life and soul to the destruction of Inixia.
