The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Two

"The stars! What have you done? Where are they? Where are the stars?"

Her voice, with its stuttering cadence, mechanical calm, and its flattened electronic intonation, had abruptly taken on an all-too-human shrillness as she was confronted by the bleak alienness of the panorama surrounding her. She was a true spawn of the cosmos, habituated to experiencing her physical reality through the senses of vision, sound, mind, Time, and Metasentience, her biophysical perceptions greatly enhanced and her mental perceptions beyond those of normal humans. She was a being unaccustomed to the tightly restricted limitations posed by the prison of linear reality.

She was feeling as though she'd suddenly lost sight in one eye, her sharply focused, three-dimensional, stereoscopic sight suddenly reduced to a cloudy and fragmentary, monocular point of view.

"WHAT have you DONE, flesh-sack? WHERE ARE THE STARS?"

Behind her feverish and unhinged pleading was a sonorous rushing sound intermittently peppered with sharp pops and cracks, a sound very much like that of an intensely aggressive, gargantuan inferno. Nature and the firmament raged in all directions around them, above and below and around, while the rough sphere in which they stood slowly rotated in a counter-clockwise direction even as it simultaneously rolled from north to south on its Y-axis.

D'Spayr fought back a turbulent wave of oncoming nausea as his mind struggled to quickly catalog and decipher his strange, eccentric surroundings...

They were inside a paraphysical TimeSpace encapsulation, in an entropic M-vent that was, itself, awash in the stream of violent energies emitted by The Lazulux's invocation of a gravitational event horizon. Their surroundings were awash in the ribbon-like light from captured bands of ever-changing light energy. They actually stood upon solid light, a plano-concave floor composed of the hoods of shell-like protuberances of varying sizes. They were in an inflation zone, an interruption in the embryonic event horizon's field of TimeSpace flux. The M-Vent was a rift in spatial relativity, a supersymmetrical bubble, and the expanding, disk-like gravitational horizon surrounding the nucleus anchored by and composed of the Lazulux's physical form flowed around the bubble, unable to disintegrate it or to crush it. But the M-Vent was only a temporary environment. Its existence had a preset expiration. When that time period terminated, the bubble would dissolve and surrender to the powerful tidal forces of the event horizon, sucking the contents of the bubble in towards the nucleus, stretching and thermalizing physical matter as it compressed and streamed into black infinity.

The danger posed by the Lazulux's impulsive and intemperate onslaught was, for the moment, contained within the M-Vent. The awful destructive effects of the event horizon were temporarily encompassed and suppressed in a string particle-brane high-point, what could be called a miniature dimensional worldvolume. But an event horizon, even a small one, was an incalculably powerful manifestation of electromagnetic power that could not be contained for any extended amount of time.

The M-Vent had no hope of holding that power for more than a few moments...

They both were going to die. Although both the M-Vent and the event horizon shared a similar quantum gravity, the thermodynamics governing the black hole, the object that the Laukenmass Lazulux's physical body had become, would result in any sentient living creature being destroyed by the electromagnetic black body-radiation raging at its core. The Knight had precious little time in which to act.

But he had absolutely no idea what to do.

As that realization settled in, D'Spayr felt a jolting sensation that could only be described as having the back of his skull hammered opened and peeled back. There was something vaguely familiar, and paradoxically reassuring, about the intrusive, throbbing oscillation that invaded his mind and seized his consciousness.