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

HELL'S AVATAR -- PART TWENTY-FOUR

The Glide was screaming.

Uhzaysuhl's mouth was set in a grimace and his teeth clenched as the mountainous, semi-sentient shiftcraft resounded with a prolonged ear-piercing shriek. The craft trembled and quaked while it connected with the quantum passage that would take it from out of the interdimensional Non-Space of the Ventriculum to intersect directly with the dimensional plane of the Withered Land. Possessed of a rudimentary alien self-awareness, built containing its own separate intellect so as to prevent it from being used as a weapon, The Glide was resistant to instructions to leave its native anti-osmorphic void and penetrate the barrier veil between differing Planes of Reality. It was meant to wander sailing the corridors of the Purple Spectrum. It was not meant to intrude into the Here and Now of any one singular dimensional manifold within Einsteinian Space.

The shiftcraft was fighting Uhzaysuhl --- and it was losing.

He activated the inertial flux-filters and disconnected the mimetic shielding that inhibited the drive engines, allowing the vessel to achieve escape velocity from within the Ventriculum by decelerating its titanic mass, essentially slowing it down enough to allow The Glide to pop into a sub-light envelope and enter regular, physical, cosmic space.

He hadn't wanted to do this, but he had no choice. He was the Prime Template Pilgrim for all the various versions of The Pilgrim across the Multiverse and he had to get back to his own Point-of-Origin, crossing his own Timestream in the process.

This was because inside the technological sprawl that was the nerve center of the Autonomous Administrative Command Node under the Duskhelm Priory in Shi'draih-Hakaba, the mummified giant on the X-shaped cross, the comatose being called 'the Gatekeeper', was none other than himself. Uhzaysuhl was the Gatekeeper. And being imprisoned inside the central node of Teshiwahur's planetary megacomputer was his ultimate destiny... unless he could change his own past and defeat the Beast Who Awakened.

Uhzaysuhl threw the throttle-levers forward and set his legs against the base of the command chair, anticipating the ferocious sudden deceleration of the speeding shiftcraft, as he defied the Laws of Creation and challenged all of Reality.

The Pilgrim-Prime went to war.

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Xemyazzus felt hot tears flowing down his cheeks as, awestruck, his heart thundering in his throat, he watched the Avatar return to life. The Wenkrang warlord was covered in a layer of pale dust and grit from the eruption, but the night's rushing breezes fanned the particulate debris from off his skin in shifting clouds.

Roaring, Xemyazzus had dropped the telescoping, tube framework device Atu'ihma had given him after its activation. The device had burned and blistered the palms of his hands as it had uncontrollably vibrated, much like an immense and misshapen tuning fork gone amok, and the Speaker for the Wenkrang had been amazed at the weird construct's surging power.

Downhill and towering before him, half illuminated by flames and weapons fire from the combatants still locked in cruel and raging battle at its feet, the Avatar stood. It felt like standing at the foot of a living mountain.

The demonic thing was the color of dried blood under a noonday sun. It loomed above the desert floor some eighteen stories tall, a vaguely humanoid creature nearly half the width of a stadium playing field. It was a commanding, and impressive sight, parts of it almost lost in the deepening night's gloom. What more illumination there was reflected from off the far away face of the planet's disk-moon, Pex'Insava.