The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Nine

The silence that descended over The City was palpable, an oppressive and overwhelmingly stifling, dark thing like some great stalking beast that had cornered its fragile human prey. The dying light from the dual suns failed to illuminate inside the cocoon of ash, smoke and smog cloaking the city's skyline and, to the bleary eyes of the battered and bruised population, all that they saw was imagery resembling that from whispered tales told about graveyards and ghosts.

The sluggish air was thick with the scent of fire and spilled blood. In the aftermath of the explosion, all of Niyaddour was united in its collective misery.

Amid the rising chorus of voices that had begun to moan and to wail, among the tortured ensemble of proclaimants carolling their pain and distress, there were cracklingly sharp intrusions depicting the continued collapse of metal and masonry. The sound of buckling buildings. The City was still falling.

And beneath those noises was a rhythmic percussive thunder, an insistent reverberation of footfalls, growing ever louder and more sinister.

The lifeless, homicidal golem automatons birthed by the horrid the Nieth'brekyll, the Machineries of Witchery, were growing in number and, seeking prey, they were filling Niyaddour's streets.

The killing had not yet stopped...

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Throughout the universe, defining the concept of "balance" in relativistic terms is a slippery affair. The definitions of Stability, Counterbalance and Equilibrium are, at very best, ephemeral when used to isolate, identify, collate and catalogue the disharmony of intergalactic Creation. Physicists and Astronomers create mathematical models wherein basic planetary and spatial forces are defined as constants and where cosmic elemental components are defined as descendants of those larger constants, so that the equations scientists craft can produce replicable and predictive results. Components like Distance and Mass, like temperature and pressure, like electro-molecular polarities, like the energy states of conduction, radiation and convection are all brought to heel by defining and designing carefully structured and orderly systematic frameworks. It is a purposeful and dogged attempt by the human mind, whether Terran Earth-based or Teshiwahurian in origin, to make the incomprehensible comprehendable.

It is an effort that rarely works. The cosmos is anything but static. Things change from moment to moment. Those concepts and elements identified only moments ago frequently wind up having to be redefined as they interact with one another in unexpected and unimagined ways. All the targets rarely stand still long enough for the observer to get a definitive grip on what they actually are. What one sees as Real is only Real on one level..., and there are a plethora of differing, barely congruent levels. Most the things that make up what the human mind "sees" as The World are rarely what humans first thought they were. Stability, Counterbalance and Equilibrium are constantly being redefined. Up is Down, Down is Up, Up is Out, Down is In, In is exactly equal to Out, and then, too, the concept of Up-Down-Out-In have no meaning... The math has to be re-examined and reworked --- it is often inadequate to embrace the immensity of the concepts against which it is brought to bear.

The Balance is never truly obtained.

When The Balance is absent or is broken, the effects of its disjointed discontinuity trickle down from the astrophysical to the protophysical to the bio-organic to the cognitive and even to the extrasensory.