The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Nineteen

Beyond the borders of Einsteinian Relativistic Space, at the overlap-intersection between differing Planes of Reality, outside Time, external to the physical influences of phasic Matter...

Outside the Megacosm, occupying a Time that is Without Time.

Her name had once, so very long ago as living sentient entities measured Time, been called "Fianaxis", and she had been the eldest of the hive-born among her now-extinct species. She was an extrahuman entity commonly known as "The Woman". She was waiting, nervously, inside a sixth dimensional singularity, a non-randomized spatial cavity that resided at the edge of a Fractal Conjecture Manifold. It was a haven for her just outside the electrospectral membrane into the vast mysteriousness of the Ventriculum, a living transpatial arterial aqueduct, and she was not happy.

Her name had once, so very long ago as living sentient entities measured Time, been called "Fianaxis", and she had been the eldest of the hive-born among her now-extinct species. She had willingly sacrificed herself to an invading destructive alien intelligence that had laid waste to three-quarters of her planet so that she could save her people --- whom she would later herself slaughter. She had told herself back then that her sacrifice was necessary, but, once she had interfaced with the alien intelligence, she quickly learned afterwards that the complete genocide of her civilization was a solution to a thorny problem that would eventually arise some seventeen centuries later. So she killed them all, everyone, and, with the power given her by the alien intelligence as a kind of reward for allowing it to kill, deconstruct and resurrect her, changing her, she had rendered her planet forever uninhabitable to carbon-based life forms. At that moment, then, it had been a small enough price to pay for achieving something very much like godhood. But the act still haunted her over a century later.

She blamed that alien intelligence for what she considered to be her Damnation. It had seduced her, tricked her, played to her ignorance and her selfishness, to her Ego, and now she was as alien as the intelligence itself.

And alone. Always and Forever alone. Bound to her murderer, a non-human Overmind that called itself QUHR, the Invoker of Judgment, First among the Void-Gods.

The Void Gods, an ancient exobiological species of astral life forms, resided and ruled within the boundaries of a isolated, free-floating, macro-level subdimension. That subdimension was enfolded in the chronal liquidity of the Megacosm, in a massive quantum flux-cavern that contained a phantom star-system. The flux-cavern was a incompletely-defined, sixth dimensional cosmic conceptualization where a pentagon-shaped galactic star-network existed, separate from normal Relativistic space. Void-Gods were inter-celestial intelligences, alien and immortal sentient beings, that could exert their influence upon the Megacosmic timestream through assorted physical manifestations. They had identities, they had names, possessed a shared culture, and, though they shared a set of basic species characteristics, they each had a special unique set of abilities through which they exerted their will over events and places outside their dimensional home.

Quhr had telepathically contacted her and instructed her to wait to meet with it in a Place that was No Place, a place where it had trained her to expand her mind beyond the limitations presented by being a self-aware creature evolved from flesh, a sanctum of contraconsciousness.

It made her wait in the place where it had enthralled her, subjugated her, where it had made of her its slave.

This was where it had made her wait. If Life had meant anything to Fianaxis anymore, she would have hated Quhr. Vehemently.

Sadly, now she simply found the situation ... uncomfortably inconvenient.

She felt an abrupt and galvanizing burst of brutal agony and knew from experience that this was what heralded its arrival.