The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Twelve

She could smell the perfume of its unholy corruption, of its innate evil, and, as on many occasions before, the thought that it served her willingly made her wonder at the depth of her own debasement.

It waited for her. It knew she was coming.

She didn't want to go into the spacious, smoky crystal sarcophagus with that ... thing, that abomination. What was worse, if Kolag Y'phree ever were to know anything about so much as its existence, he would have her put to death ... immediately and painfully.

The creature was an Enemy of All Creation. There was no doubt. Everyone knew that.

It beheld her with rheumy, red-rimmed eyes, intelligent eyes that hinted at a vast and dark intellect, from under a heavy and prominent bow ridge, and its unwavering attentiveness was unnerving. It was tall and muscular, a man-shaped thing with ashen gray skin composed of thin interlocking, overlapping scales. It was hairless. There were luminescent violet inscriptions, like tattoos, cut or burned into its scaly skin and the glowing designs resembled the circular, mathematical navigation symbols from star charts. Its flesh was always warm and moist, like it had just come inside from a gentle spring rain. The creature was a thing defiled.

Once, long, long ago, it had been a man, born from the tainted Yur'seyn'Ahktar blood lineage, unlike the genetically and socially classic, mostly undiluted Cid'Ammar bloodline, or the lineage of the more common folk of the Ran'Jaddath, like she herself. But that man had been forcibly changed, evolutionarily and microbiologically and molecularly, neither evolving nor devolving, but instead transvolving. Its development had taken an unpredicted and unguessable path beyond the scientific descriptor of mere "mutation". It had become "Homo Obscuratum Irae". This being was mystical. This being was the product of the twisted imaginations and the ambitions of Darke Astromancers, a secretive sect of scientific prestidigitators who manipulated matter, light and geophysical space. And , so far as she knew, it was one of only five others of its kind existing on the planet.

It lived within a stasis field inside a gray crystal sarcophagus that appeared, on the outside, to be size of a clothing wardrobe. The rectangular, faceted stone crate sat atop a rivet-studded dais and under the expansive umbrella of a metallic, clamshell-shaped hood. But once the sarcophagus was opened, the space was revealed to be easily seven times that volume. The other creatures rumored to be like it were housed in similar crystal sarcophagi, but they were each of a different color: one was red, one was opaque white, one was brilliant blue, and the last was deep green. No one knew what the importance of the colors of the sarcophagi meant. No one remembered why the creatures had been created by the Darke Astromancers in the first place. And, truthfully, since the sarcophagi appeared to have originated shortly after the arrival of The Wound in Teshiwahur's solar system, most did not really want to know the answers to those questions.

It was unlikely that the presence of the quintet of Homo Obscuratum Irae meant anything good for the people of The Withered Land...

It called itself "Ka'esh-Woganhi'e", which was a contraction of a pair of Old Speak Nekkitto pagan tribal words combined to mean "he who enslaves the dead". The Darke Astromancers, nihilistic and boldly arrogant, owing no allegiance to either the general populace of Teshiwahur or to the royal armies of the Emperium, sought to create a sentient organic being who bridged the gap between Life and Death, between Chaos and Order, and who could command those unliving denizens passed beyond the Veil of Conscious Existence. To do that, though, the creature could not be anchored in any single state of existence: it was continually in a circumstance of quadrality, wherein it physically occupied a place in dimensional Space, a plane in dimensional Time, a geometric point-set in a topological set of converging axions, and where it acted as a point of intersection and unification in a mapped region of subspace equivalency. The Ka'esh-Woganhi'e was both a sentient physical being and an unliving multiplicative repository housing part of an extrahuman partitioned hive intellect. It was aware of everything around it in Time and Space, in the Past, Present and in the Future, and in different pockets of the Multiverse. Hence, the enclosing, protective crystalline sarcophagus, three times the size of any normal humanoid coffin-containment in breadth and width -- because, though the creature itself was not much taller nor more broad of build than an athletic human male, it could not function if it were left to nakedly interface with the physical atmospherics of any one particular part of Reality. It needed the protection the translucent, many faceted stone coffin provided. The thing was a clairvoyant precognitive, a being who could, via extrasensory mental ability, "see" future events happening somewhere, or some-when, else.