The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Eighteen

The dark, khaki-shaded sky was rife with the retina-searing glow from erupting Red Sprites, large-scale electrical discharges in the moon's mesosphere, rapidly-moving bursts of positively-charged lightning between underlying cumulonimbus thunderheads, as the secondary effects of the Anti-Time tsunami flooded across Pex'Insava. The unmodulated fluidic nature of the massive chronal energy wave tore apart the molecular matrices of the moon's middle atmosphere, creating aggressive wind-based rip currents that struck solid objects with the force of a speeding wrecking ball.

Squadron-Primak Voq-Devroy'Zenus' saucer-craft and the group of three other ships in his attack group were being brutally pummeled by the atmospheric chaos, unable to maintain a stable flight pattern as the navigational and electrical avionics-systems of the ships quickly began to fail. The transit slide-shielding around the crafts' outer hulls dissolved, leaving the ships vulnerable to electromagnetic and gravitational fluctuations from which they'd previously been immune. They could no longer keep aloft and their propulsion units suddenly failed them.

Voq-Devroy'Zenus desperately transmitted several warning alarms, but no one in the Gorgahnun Coalition's Off-Planet Space Militia responded. They couldn't escape the catastrophic influence of the Anti-Time wave and, horrifically, they belatedly realized there wasn't anywhere to which they could escape. The unceasing clamor from the Imminent-Danger klaxons on the bridges of the saucer-craft became deafening as the aerial vessels surrendered to the pull of gravity.

The Rayth'kine-governed, covert Talemexxite flight-squadron began to drop uncontrollably from out of the sky...

Elsewhere... A flurry of feathery, fragile crescent-like objects, cascaded down from the aerial gloom that had settled over the city. At first glance, everyone thought it to be snow, then they thought that perhaps it was ash from the many small fires that had flared throughout Abyssium now that its massive, protective spinwall was down. Those who weren't hysterically running and seeking shelter took a brief moment to raise a trembling, upturned hand towards the sky to catch a few of the buoyant, airy flakes... And then they dropped them in horror. The feathery flakes were slightly oily and scorched, blackened at the edges.

They began to collect in growing piles upon the debris-scattered streets of the city.

Flesh. They were flesh, not the skin of humans, but instead that of an avian creature, a cross between a box jellyfish and a semi-porous pyrosome that flocked in kilometer-wide gaggles high in the atmosphere above the arid desert floor. Keph'ralmiken. Literally translating to mean "Angelworm". They were semi-intelligent beasts. They lived off of the absorption of highly energetic cosmic rays, preventing the gamma-energy from raining down on the human population of the disc-moon. The visually blind creatures were relatively such harmless and considered omens of good fortune that the spiritual myths of both the Ahmezygg and the Shachtferadi'im imbued them with a divine benevolence.

Flesh. They were being cooked and shredded. And their burnt skin fell on the streets like snow.

Since the tumultuous onslaught of the Anti-Time wave, it seemed even the sky itself now hated Abyssium.

Far outside Abyssium, on the compacted stone subgrade of unpaved road beyond the borders of a now-abandoned Dryfte-Town, The Rayth'kine threw their oblong-shaped heads back and looked up, closing their collagen-fiber adipose eyelids over insectoid compound eyes, in an expression of pious joy, as they bathed in the silent fall of burnt, fleshy snow. Haq'Ja-Rashaei and his Korhng'Nathi Battle Raydurrs lie dead and slaughtered, nearly unrecognizable as little more than tattered bio-debris, on the gritty soil all around the immediate vicinity of the alien invaders.

Only one remained still breathing...

The compliment of Haq'Ja-Rashaei's repulsor-float mobile cannons had been reduced to metallic sludge, left as little more than piles of smoking wreckage and slag, and the Anomaleunne Vale-Ogre named Dalseth Qri'Loth, one eye swollen closed from a brutal impact that had nearly split his skull open wide, spat onto the ground to rid his mouth of the acrid taste of burnt metal. His left hand was a shredded mass of bone and meat that pulsed agonizingly, drooling blood onto the ground. Qri'Loth had never seen anything like what the scarecrow-like Rayth'kine aliens had done: they had gathered geographically localized strands of invisible energetic force from astro-molecular web-matrices throughout the lunar atmosphere and telekinetically woven that energy into whips of lightning that had pierced, shattered and immolated whatever they'd been directed towards. Each gaunt and ungainly, goblin-like Rayth'kine invader had lashed the terrain with those lengthy, spark-spitting filaments of energy and they tore apart the attacking Korhng'Nathi brotherhood with merciless precision and expertise. The end result had never been in question. Foe against foe, they'd been nowhere near being evenly matched. The Knife-Clan had been destroyed. And now Dalseth Qri'Loth was dying.