The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Seven

Tuwerbleek Atun was clearly visible atop the Uffraza Trail's third eastern rise, a hardscrabble tract of land along the southern entrance into the Pil'ayyat-Reishenschall Valley. There were hot and dry gusts of night-time winds blowing streams of grit and particulate debris directly into the windscreen of the aging, worm-treaded, armored troop carrier carrying Tarwook and his Nahztreme Ops-unit. The carrier was a clanking, creaking rust-bucket with an interior that stank of old oil, oxidizing metal plate and stale human sweat, but the vehicle was as densely armored and nearly-impenetrable as a small neutron star. Despite the carrier' front-grill array of high-lumen headlamps, visibility along the rutted and pitted, rocky trail was severely limited, so the vehicle's pilot-drivers were relying heavily on the carrier's forward-directed acoustic-scanners.

They weren't watching the darkened night's sky.

That fact, that oversight, was the principal reason why they were unaware they were being tracked from above by a strange, aerodynamically-flattened, oval-shaped aerial craft of distinctly non-Emperium design. The other reason they hadn't noticed the persistent presence of the skyship was due to their attention being morbidly attracted to the sight of the Caged Ones whose gravity-defying, translucent chrysalid encasements floated over the lane-ridges lining either side of the Uffraza Trail. Illuminated dimly from within, each of the thirty floating chrysalid shells were stationary, relationally anchored in-place at the trailside borders by a short, sparkling cascade of brightly burning violet sparks. Inside the sectional, thin crystalline plates comprising the encasements something vaguely anthropoid, ape-like in appearance, floated coiled in an embryonic position, apparently sustained and preserved by the dim glow inside. The Caged Ones.

Tuwerbleek Atun had once been the metropolitan center of an ancient governorate city-state populated by a small, sophisticated indigenous civilization dominating the Pil'ayyat-Reishenschall Valley before the sleeping subterranean mutagens beneath Pex'Insava's external crust were released by a period of violent seismic activity. The moonquakes that had rocked the surface created deep, wide crevices from which the mutagenic gas had flowed and cloaked the city and its surrounding rural area. The ancient humans living in Tuwerbleek Atun had trans-volved, morphing into cunning, predatory monsters, intolerant of other life forms unlike themselves, attacking and killing unaffected humans and even one another in a brutal, charnel frenzy. They destroyed their own civilization without hesitation or regret, only concerned with bloodshed and battle and carnivorous excesses better left untold. Once they'd run out of victims, the largest, strongest and most bestial of the mutated creatures went into an eerie hibernation within crystalline pupal cocoons and were never again seen roaming the Valley or its wild patches of bleak tundra.

Knowing they were socially and politically ostracized from the rest of Pex'Insava's sentient mammalian population, knowing they would eventually succumb to cannibalistic hunger, knowing their homicidal instincts and violent urges would drive them to self-inflicted extinction, they voluntarily surrendered themselves into enacting a mental and biological stasis state. It was survival of the fittest, literally. Only the most powerful among them could adopt the open-ended state of animated suspension that would foster and maintain the strange spark of life as they shut themselves down.

But who would awaken them and how --- no one among the living knew or understood how the clock of their stasis incubation worked.    

The Caged Ones were the last of Tuwerbleek Atun's grotesque and malformed sentient abominations. Not dead, not quite alive. Forever imprisoned. Waiting.

Captain Tarwook and his small compliment of troops had warily watched the procession of chrysalids as their carrier had passed between them on the roadway, unaware of the approach of and surveillance from the silent skyscraft overhead. The dust and grit-laden wind gusts played havoc with the limited efficiency of the carrier's obsolete proximity-defense scanners and the design of the vehicle had not included anything resembling a skylight or ceiling portal, so the outmoded armored personnel combat conveyance rolled on oblivious to its impending peril.