The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Two

They were trying to kill one another in some of the most inventive and imaginative expressions of martial savagery he'd ever seen in the course of all his life.

The first and topmost twin-bladed war axe sliced through the air trailing a scintilla of electromagnetic energy that left a trail of burnt ozone on the air. The axe swung parallel to the floor at shoulder's height. Another axe, wielded by a different assailant, swung in the opposite direction, also parallel to the floor, at a height approximately that of a tall man's pelvis. Both weapons were wielded with strength enough to pulverize the plate steel hatch-door to a ship's passageway and moved as fast as rockets. In between the deadly blades of the axes was their intended target, D'Spayr, who had thrown his body sideways, length-wise, and then launched from an aerial twist into a dive roll, evading the blades.

When he hit the floor, on his side, he next leapt upwards into a half-somersault and then launched a spinning kick that punched into the side torso-plate of one of the Instrumentality cyborgs, knocking it high from off its scrambling feet. The Knight then planted his extended kicking foot, pivoted and re-drew the sword he had sheathed, whipping the weapon's twin blades across the exposed articulated abdomen-joint of the second killer-cyborg and cut through the mech-creature's waist-pelvic junction, throwing out a rooster's tail of hot sparks as the cyborg's body separated.

D'Spayr was already a dozen running steps away, on through to his next opponents, as his metal assailants fell awkwardly to the floor...

It is a fact that some moments pass unnoticed, sliding through the observable mental aperture of The Present down the conduit of Consciousness into the reservoir of The Past, moving like mercury and leaving little trace, ghost impressions, while other moments strike like a shotgun blast, puncturing, ripping and shredding the fragile transitional physics of the motion governing travel from Then to Now.

He watched, taking in every element of the scene playing out in front of him down to the smallest detail, and felt detached, distant, unmoved, like he was outside of himself. His intellect told him that what he was seeing was the resultant series of actionable consequences following the complex sequence of interrelated, overlapping events that brought them all to this moment, but his own personal biases colored the situation such that he couldn't help but pass judgment on what he saw.

Waste. It was all such a waste. Nothing of any true cosmic consequence was being accomplished by any of this.

He was not a Terran, not an Earth-born human, but, had he known of the writer and of the quotation, he would immediately thought of William Shakespeare's famous couplet from the play "Macbeth", Act 5, Scene 5: "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

This was not how this was supposed to play out. At this rate, the battle could likely go on for another hour without either side gaining the upper hand.

A waste.

Kollachaim observed the furious tumult around him with a mind divided into three separate compartments. One compartment was cool and analytical, registering the number of active participants in immediate combat, the number of combatants on the fringe of the action, the physical length, width, depth and specific volume of the area in which the combatants fought and then calculated all the possible variations of the organic ebb and flow of the confrontation as the mechanized cybernetic soldiers of the Instrumentality opposed the human trio composed of the Knight D'Spayr and his comrades-at-arms, Oerdyke and Murshipaz. The second compartment of his mind contained the desperate war for dominance over his waking mind, the raging battle between his own identity and sense of self against the invading mental domination of The Arbiter, the alien woman named Fianaxis, whose extramental, hypersensory psychic domination of his mind threatened to suppress, erase, and then overwrite the entirety of his identity engrams and all memories of who and what he really was, supplanting that with the non-identity of an emotionless war-machine marionette she could puppeteer. He could feel part of her inside himself, an ugly and unhuman psychic toad squatting on a cold stone inserted into the liquidity of his mind. The third and last compartment of Kollachaim's divided mind was an extrasensory realm of fear, rebellion and horror at his current state of existence. He did not want to be Dagnoth's replacement as the newest member of The Arbiters, despite the mesmerizingly seductive feelings of power, the welling of superhuman grandeur, which it instilled within him. Kollachaim was a Wytchborn, intelligent and independent and prideful, unused to being limited, caged actually, within his or her own geospatial Time-Space plane. To surrender to Fianaxis' control and domination meant to lose his birthright, that being the ability to see and manipulate the unique invisible energies that lay outside the realm of quantum physics. A Wytchborn was no man, and no woman's, slave.