The Withered Land, THE EMPIRE FALLS: HELL'S AVATAR

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART TWO

There is a Place outside the Megacosm that is No Place and it occupies a Time that Is Without Time. It "Is" and yet it "Is Not". It is an enclosed void between dimensional membranes, a living river running through a transpatial arterial aqueduct, not quite its own cosmos, but a near-infinite, non-linear, sixth dimensional extent between planar tiers of Space. In it, mathematical conceptualizations, physical objects and both micro and macro events have no singular definition. It is the physical definition of Non-Euclidian geometry, without topological boundaries. Within its meandering, labyrinthian parameter, there is endless Spacetime possibility.

Inside that Place, things that should not exist can hide. Inside that Place, Existence itself meta-triangulates to a location both excluded from and beyond Relativistic definition. The Megacosm cannot touch anything within it, but that which lies within the non-place's oceanic depths can exert influence over the Megacosm.

Nothing alive is supposed to be there. And with relentless mercilessness every five hundred and forty Earth-minutes, every 32, 400 seconds, this bizarre ocean of semi-sentient chronal liquidity dissolves into hollow Nothingness, only to reboot itself and re-assert its position between alternate universes inside of a nanosecond.

It dies and then it lives again --- almost before Reality realizes it has died.

This place is the Ventriculum.

It is into this devolved, anti-osmorphic void that a non-native entity from an exterior dimension traveled to meet with the last few surviving Celestial Messengers of the Empyrean Host.

His name across six different Relativistic dimensions was "Strayn'juhr". Across two dozen more dimensional Realities, he was known simply as "The Journeyer". On a pair of other dimensional planes he was called "Incomer". Other places, he was Nameless and in at least two dimensions he did not exist at all. But across the extraspatial boundaries of thirty-four other Realities he was mostly known as "Pilgrim".

On the planet Teshiwahur, he was Forynnuhr.

In the Ventriculum, the Celestial Empyrean Host knew a different version of him, a version unlike the one called to The Wastes. His name in the non-space between Realities was "Uhzaysuhl".

And when he called, they came.

"As you requested, I met and spoke with The Anomaly," Atu'ihma said to the cosmic entity standing at the edges of the Scrying Gate. His distaste in the aftermath of the meeting on the planet of Teshiwahur was palpable. "It was unpleasant. He is one of your least cooperative, least enlightened megacosmic reflections..."

"I understand that," Uhzaysuhl said calmly. "But it cannot be denied that, as unpleasant an individual as he may be, The Anomaly is also my most powerful reflection."

The Scrying Gate was a mechanical iris opening upon a crystalline lens as wide as three men were tall. The lens focused on active frequencies following a set of coordinates chosen by the viewer across the expanse of Spacetime. The Scrying Gate allowed an observer to see simultaneous live images particular to any living individual across multiple dimensions. The Gate was inside a vast steel and chrome vault built into the interior of a massive spherical craft that cruised the mammoth, sweeping transpatial artery between dimensions. The huge craft, the forward face of which was covered by a diamond-shaped field of one hundred thousand closely-packed antenna-quills, each quill being twenty yards long, traveled through the Ventriculum, sailing through a medium that was neither the vacuum of space nor that of air, nor any variety of liquid. That volume of non-space was a manifestation of a Four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, a physical translation of a paraphysical alternate geometry on Space/Time. The craft continuously sailed through the planar corridors between the Higher Dimensions. It was propelled by the magnetically stimulated, targeted warping of gravitational fields. The huge craft was eons-old, accidentally discovered by the Host long before the Sacred Mutagenesis Campaigns, and was known simply as "The Glide". An alien shiftcraft, the term 'shiftcraft' meaning that the vessel was of a type designed to traverse the stream of non-linear, Four Dimensional Einsteinian space through power provided by an out-of-temporal-phase dark sun, a pocket black hole, it was physically anchored within the ultra-spatial corridors of the Purple Spectrum, of which the Ventriculum was made. The vessel was controlled by an autonomous artificial intelligence of extraplanetary, extrahuman origin. No one, not even the Empyrean Host, knew what manner of beings had built it or why.

"So you say. We believe that it is his bloodlusting, bestial nature that makes him undesirable as a likely tool for this project."

"It is just this very bestial and violent nature that will guarantee he survives what is to come."

Atu'ihma's usually impassive face betrayed his skepticism. "So you say."

Atu'ihma, whose social interactions with beings not of the Celestial Host were learned behaviors not natural to his kind, often aped the behaviors of normal human beings, and yet was inately a prideful creature, much like the very humans he looked down upon, but he enjoyed his non-human status as a messenger from outside the known civilized federation of worlds. He was an alien among other aliens and he liked that. It made him feel separate and special. But his behavior around a true child of the Megacosm like Uhzaysuhl was primarily characterized by caution. Those who willingly traversed the byways of the Ventriculum were the true aliens among living beings and, for the most part, their allegiances, like their motivations, were unguessable.

"Why do you involve yourself in the affairs of this one solitary world? How is this in any way important to you?" Atu'ihma bluntly asked. "There are so many other wonders to choose from..."

Uzayshul sighed. "There is a theory prevalent amongst humanoid beings that the worlds their civilizations inhabit are cruxes of creation, that the nature and future of the universe revolves around the events that transpire where they live. As we both know, that is utter nonsense. They are no more important in the greater scheme of things than any other species of sentient creatures. And, as such, my interest in what transpires either on Sol III, the planet commonly called 'Earth' at the edges of the Milky Way galaxy, or the planet many light-years away called 'Teshiwahur', over in the Pan-Galactic Nexus, simply should not matter. But the awful truth is that there are certain living individuals, regardless of the limitations of their spatial cosmography, whose decisions and actions shape the course of events in the Megacosm. It is these beings for whom I have a certain, shall we say, fascination..."

"Even beings like this 'Pilgrim', who is, paradoxically, a lesser, unevolved reflection of yourself?"

Uhzaysuhl turned away from peering deep in to the interior of the Scrying Gate and walked a trio of steps closer to the Celestial Empyrean before saying, "He is important. He himself does not understand yet HOW important he is, but he is needed to balance the catastrophic conditions of imbalance created by our faceless enemies."

"All we want to know is this: when this is over, when the Objectives of the Project have been met, will we be allowed to kill him?"

Uhzaysuhl smiled, albeit the expression was touched with more than just a tiny bit of sadness.

"Yes. You can kill him. As a matter of fact, for the plan to work, it is imperative that you do."

Atu'ihma beamed. The very human expression of satisfaction did not sit well on his alien face.

"Then we will do everything we can to help him succeed," the Empyrean said.