The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Eight

The walls of Reality cracked and the First Construct bled away into the Foreverness...

One moment her wellness and self-possessed state of being had been calm and stable. But in the next she had been assaulted by wave after distressing wave of seething, incandescent havoc as she felt something essential to her very existence break.

She was in the grips of an agony and a horror beyond anything she'd ever before experienced. Everything was saw-blades and razors ripping at her flesh. Something poisonously cold was burning its way through her guts and something that stung like acid was flooding her skull, washing across the membrane of her vibrating mind. Fianaxis screamed as the head of an erupting thunderbolt catapulted her through the dark deepness beyond the borders of four dimensional Space.

She futilely tried to focus, to concentrate her awareness on a point of origin from which the maelstrom of pandemonium came, but the attempt was doomed to fail. The power of her enhanced and mutated mind was among her greatest weapons, the source of her powers as an Arbiter. However, she wasn't able to activate the extrasensory key to unlock that power. Something was blocking her. Her connection with the Source from which she drew her strength had been suddenly and violently severed.

She could no longer feel Quhr.

It was all too much for her, the assaultive nature of the turmoil too great to overcome.

She could feel herself levitating, being physically stretched to the breaking point and then beyond even that. She had only the most peripheral sense of being caught in the tremendous, irresistible pull of an electro-nuclear force beyond description as both she and the world around her were glacially chilled, partitioned and fragmented, then jarringly disassembled and flushed outwards, forced through a spiraling warp-tunnel set ablaze. She was coming Undone, unraveling through Space and Time.

Her herculean strength, enhanced by alien technology, meant nothing. Her dazzling array of powers, birthed by the biological mutational necromancy of an ancient, inhuman demi-god, meant nothing. Her indomitable willpower, the most native gift of her few remaining original, natural attributes, amounted to nothing.

There was just the pain. The suffering was everything.

She had the nightmarish sense that planets and galaxies were breaking.

Her scream echoed endlessly down the corridors of broken Creation. She was being summoned back to The Withered Land. Arbiter or no, Fianaxis was being called home...

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Drawing in a deep breath, Rae'vynn Wyyng ignored the painful stiffening begining to make its urgency felt along the lower right side of her back, above the haunch. She hadn't suffered any deep cuts, but knew she had probably cracked a pair of ribs. It had been the result of a brutal encounter only moments ago against a pair of Honor Guard Shieldswomen. Sleek and lithe as panthers, the fierce Shieldswomen, dressed in their standard garb of kevlar-weave pantaloons tucked into the death's-head decorated cuff of knee-high, articulated steel boots and a torso-enveloping combat blouse of anatomic-fit, flexible and reinforced light-armor, had leapt out from inside an interior archway of the main corridor. The women, one a lanky brunette with a long, braided pony tail and the other a thickly-muscled red-head with an assymetrically-cut short hairdo, had wielded their two-headed war pikes with practiced, expert-level efficiency as they'd cut-off Rae'vynn's avenues for escape and stalked her from either side. The pair had moved as one, a cruel swagger to the circular spiral pattern in which they moved as they sought to contain Rae'vynn. But the pirate Captain was no stranger to the combat tactics of defending against multiple assailants and she adopted movements that carried her in a rapid, diagonal path that doubled back on itself, throwing the Shieldswomen off. When they had finally lunged at her, Rae'vynn had positioned them into an attack path that took them straight into the path of her own aggressive, low-sweeping, kiri age-defense variation. The ensuing fight had been short and murderous, a bloodthirsty dance of keenly-edged metal in trained hands, but the effort of defeating the women had cost her.