Eternal Escape (audio story)

Eternal Escape was a Faction Paradox audio story released by BBV Productions on their website in 2021. It was written by James Hornby and was read by Bill Baggs. It was not originally part of any subseries, but it set up the core element of Dionus's War, and was included, six months after its release, in a retrospective listing of Dionus's War stories on the BBV website.

The story was notable for featuring an appearance by the Friend, a War in Heaven faction which debuted in Cwej: The Series, appearing in this story under license from Gerard Power, as well as expounding on Gulliver's Rest, a planet which previously played a small part in Flight of the Cyberons.

Publisher's summary
The Battle of Golgalith affected many lives during the War, none more so than Dionus. But those days are long behind him... right?

Plot
Dionus, a soldier in the House Military, is traumatised by his experiences at the Battle of Golgalith, and particularly by the callousness of the Generals (including his own, Sandus) regarding the safety of the natives of the planet Golgalith itself, who suffer the brunt of the collateral damage of the three-way fight between the Houses, the Enemy and the Faction over the nexus world.

Deciding to turn renegade, Dionus steals a timeship and builds a new life living on Gulliver's Rest, where he tries to make amends for his acts as a soldier of the Houses by researching cures for temporal diseases. While running this clinic, he rears two children, Meren and Egar. He is visited by a Mother and Father of Faction Paradox who want to purchase Gulliver's Rest iself from him due to their interest in a temporal anomaly to which it is home, but he throws them out. He later meets the Friend, who help him tend to the patients of the clinic and refuses to get involved with the War in any active sense.

Some time later, however, War comes to Gulliver's Rest and Dionus's home is plunged in the same temporal chaos as Golgalith once was. As he makes his way from the clinic to the bunker where he has hidden his timeship, he tries to take his children with him, only for them to slip away from him one by one, with him gradually forgetting he has ever had more than two, then even a single, child. By the time he reaches his timeship (having also witnessed the death of the Faction Paradox Mother he met earlier), he believes himself to never have had a family before, and, essentially reduced to the state he was in when he ran from the Battle of Golgalith, he is looking forward to finding a peaceful planet to settle on and perhaps build a family.

Characters

 * Dionus
 * General Sandus
 * Susit
 * Meren
 * Egar
 * Tara
 * Mother
 * Father

Crew

 * Writer - James Hornby
 * Cover art - James Hornby and James Lee

Worldbuilding

 * Dionus refers to the Battle of Golgalith as "the straw that broke the mosrat's back" for him.
 * General Sandus was in charge of the Great Houses' Fifth Time Fleet.
 * Dionus swears by "Urizen's beard". According to him, soldiers of the House Military were "sworn to uphold my people's history in the name of the Architect".
 * Space-time vessels used by Faction Paradox include ritual barges.

Continuity

 * The War King was once a renegade. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
 * Golgalith and Gulliver's Rest are featured. The former is a nexus world. (PROSE: Crushing Reality, Flight of the Cyberons)
 * Dionus has an encounter with the Friend. (PROSE: Vignettes of an Uprising)
 * One Faction member's Faction Paradox mask is carved from the skull of one of the Ferutu. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
 * Dionus takes refuge on the planet Gulliver's Rest, which is home to a temporal anomaly. (PROSE: Flight of the Cyberons)