The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Eight

"Why didn't she kill us? Why in the name of the All the Slaughter Gods didn't she just kill us?"

Vashnur Xhant was doubled up, thin arms wrapped around his bloodied torso, and was bent over so far his forehead was nearly touching the ground in front of his knees. He was pale and dripping sweat and he repeatedly shook with sudden onsets of jerky convulsions.

"Somebody talk to me, dammit! WHY didn't she just go ahead and kill us?"

They were no longer where They expected they should be. Expectation had been subverted by displacement/disassociation and Conjecture. They were Outside, involuntarily ejected from one universe into another. They were Here, but not There. They were Someplace, but that place did not classify as a Where or even as a When, but rather as a physicalized Abstraction.

They were under the umbrella of a wide sky that did not betray any evidence there was a cosmos beyond it. Light streamed from that sky in bright, dynamic rays that penetrated an ash-hued cloudcover that hinted at a bitter and scarred, half-remembered antiquity. The horizon stretched on forever, an endless panoramic skyline above a limitless savanna that hinted at the shadowed shapes of distant cities, but nothing moved. It was devoid of life. The air was insubstantial, sluggish, and it smelled lightly of aged papyrus, and while light breezes moved that air, flowing it over the expansive near-feartureless plain, it did not refresh or nourish. The sky and landscape were not natural. They were artificial constructs existing outside conventional Time and Space. Reality was a hypothetical concept here, in this Non-Place.

There was a Sadness here, a Wrongness, that imbued eveything within this vista with a feeling of decay.

Ignoring Vashnur Xhant's pain-maddened outbursts, D'Spayr watched as a young woman, athletic and willowy, ran soundlessly across tall dunes of shifting gray gravel, her footing swift and sure, towards a pair of waiting figures silhouetted by the dying light of a cold star, who were standing at the foot of what could only be the open landing bay of a starship. The starship, nearly twelve stories tall and shaped like a pregnant metal ellipse, was on fire. And the shadowed profiles of the figures waiting for the young woman's arrival were not human.

To the immediate East, floating above the dunes and what passed for the ground, was an armored male figure that closely resembled Akkitus Orthwaine in his exo-chassis form. He was conscious, though uncommunicative, and a light from inside him appeared to shine out into the world. He was staring sightless into the depths of the sky above him, at roughly three stories above the baked, dessicated, pebble-strewn soil.

This was not a Dream. This was not a Memory. This was an Open Wound, still bleeding, in the withered remains of someone's soul.

...a journey through the Wormhole into and beyond the relativistic boundaries of the Event Horizon...

D'Spayr instinctually knew he was, through some dark necromancy, inside the damaged mind of the intelligent thing that he'd come to know as the Laukenmass Lazulux. It was not an act of psychic-oriented telepathy. It was Intradimensional, Metaversal. He was THERE, even though the sensation of his physical perceptions were hazy, occasionally indistinct, as if his body's ability to orient and isolate itself in relation to the ethereal landscape around him was being dialed down.

Somehow, someway, the Lazulux had pulled them into the fragmented and illusory perceptual puzzle box that was her own interpretation of external chronal and paraphysical data. She still possessed a singular sense of identity, an Ego and a Super-Ego, separate from that of being part of a faceless Intradimensional collective. It was no surprise to the Knight that she saw and experienced things differently than he, or any other human being, did. He was in her world...