The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Fourteen

In the Withered Land, Time was broken. The passage of one series or collection of sequential moments to the next was not guaranteed a logical or reliable path.

Only a few sentient minds noticed, some refused to notice fearing the loss of the moorings of their sanity, while others could not notice because they were caught up in the wild rip currents of events affected by the spillage. Time threatened to pull them down and away from Reality, to drown them...

And that was because Time, at least the way the human mind could conceive or interpret it as a concept, was hemorrhaging, actively pouring from out a huge and open cosmic Wound...

Time was bleeding.

Moving at a velocity that would be, in terms of describing how Terran-Earth humans measured speed, only a little in excess of forty-six times Mach acceleration, the glimmering, scintillating flood-wave of Anti-Time streaked into Teshiwahur's solar system. It emitted a barely detectable, extremely high-pitched wail that bounced from off the smoky strands of galactic clouds. It created explosions of plasma that erupted into fiery blossoms of electromagnetic starbursts. Punching through the turbulent, macro-radioactive Makkaryenne Elasticity, it flowed rapidly by the hidden planet Ombrusthylax, also known as "Shadowhold". The chronometrical-gravitic mega-tsunami from the depths of the distant celestial Wound rolled across the void to collide with an unnamed asteroid cluster outside the orbit of the three massive moons of the planetary object Ourubus Adranto. The colossal cosmic tidal wave then enveloped the one hundred seventy thousand kilometer wide, two thousand kilometer-deep, eighty kilometer-high, chaotic expanse of the asteroid cluster, swirling and eddying as it desolidified, becoming fluidic, or demolecularized most of the rocky, metallic matter it encountered.

It was Anti-Time. It was a flood composed of the fractured and misshapen, warped and inverted pauses between the passing seconds of Eternity's clock. It was a physical deconstruction of the objective concepts of "Then" and "Now" given weight and mass and set aflame, like a transcendently infernal, white-hot avalanche of chronometrical lava. Metamathematical Dimensional barriers diminished and quickly faded away, dissolving. Nuclear bonds froze and then swiftly decayed, the structured field-matrices of binding forces between nucleons devolving into frayed, unstructured and unmediated sub-particles. Energy flared and then dissipated into quantum nothingness. And then the slow process of regrowth and re-evolution began as the cosmic structure reasserted itself, rebuilding. The outpouring arterial spray of Anti-time was threatening to become an unstoppable flood.

It was three solar heliars out from reaching the irregular parabolic orbit of Pex'Insava...

                                                                                            * * *

Once a traveler proceeded past the whirling outer wall of the city's paramagnetic spin-field, they could see the portal. The portal was three stories-tall and incredibly intimidating, around the edges of its huge doorway was a carving resembling a gargantuan death mask lit from within by the fires of a cold furnace. Sitting under the crest of a thick brow ridge, the downturned, prominent eyes of the monstrous face streamed silvery-white light. The portal entrance itself was a mighty arch positioned where the face's mouth would have been, were the bottom half of the face complete, and the scenery behind the entrance was obscured by an ivory white glare that radiated no heat.

No one alive remembered the name of the angry, silently howling god or devil whose furious face was architected as decoration onto the portal and no one could recall, if ever they actually knew, why the high bas-relief imagery was put there, but the detailed figurework was a pagan sculpture of which the Hegemonic Emperium greatly disapproved. No idolatry could be considered as representationally more august and imposing than the emblem of The World-Father. Yet, the forces of the Emperium military had not seen fit, for some undisclosed reason, to disassemble, hide or mar or otherwise erase the ancient imagery from Abyssium's towering walls. It was likely that decision had something to do with the unmistakably familial resemblance between the demonic death mask and the helmeted face of the giant sculpture of The Vulcanodian at the city's center.