Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

Part 1, "The Madness We've Seen..."

If Time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

-- Herman Hesse

It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.

-- Gerard De Nerval

We must remember that Satan has his miracles, too.

-- John Calvin

Fascinated, they stared.

The Beast was secured with massive black chains, still raging, still defiant, despite the fact it had been imprisoned for generations. It was held deep below within the gray, ashen depths below the subterranean underbelly of the labyrinth popularly referred to among star-going Nova Mariners as the Hagaishenn Breach, an isthmus off the western quadrant of the Quaternillion Port Layer.

Humanoid in form, the thick, heavily muscled creature had dimpled, collagenic flesh the bluish-gray color of submerged sea stone and at each flexible skeletal joint there were scatterings of overlaid scales, the texture of which resembled aged pewter plate. It was wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with flaring latissimus dorsi, a deep, armored pectoral thoracic region and long, beefy legs ending in cloven hooves.

There were open slits, like weeping gills, cut into the creature's lower external intercostal muscles and a sizzling blue radiance streamed from inside the giant brute, revealing a glowing orb of energy at the Beast's bodily core.   Rays of azure light from his cavity-slits cast jigsaw patterns on the uneven, stony ground of the gloomy cavern in which it was interned.

The Beast's head was a strange amalgamation of multi-fanged, amphibious predator and mammalian primate, with wide, extended shield-like plates of skin-covered bone emerging from the crown of the skull on either side of its heavily-warted face.   Its three eyes blazed with a bright, whitish blue brilliance, opened wide in an expression that hinted at unbridled homicidal insanity.

Its fierce ugliness made it mesmerizingly beautiful.

Despite the barbaric violence of its wild struggling against the chains bolted deep into the walls of the low-ceilinged cavern, it made no sound.

The cavern lay deep inside the oblong bulk of a rift-ship whose ridged and lamelated, poly-metallic surface was composed of interlaced, folding threads that visually resembled the tubular bodies of a massive ball of intertwined serpents. The many loops and ribbon-like cords of the craft slid in and out from under one another as the glacier-sized vehicle traveled through the void, and the rift-ship tumbled slowly revolving about a gyroscopic axis set some sixteen degrees off from a traditional north-south center. A set of bright scarlet lights crowned the northern pole of the mighty construct and from the ship's southern end there extended a blocky column festooned with antennae-like appurtenances which were obviously a complex array of external sensors. The rift-ship was devoid of any markings indicating its point of origin or the planetary of nationalistic culture to which it belonged. Its knotty alien design and scaly ugliness were sufficient to indicate it was of non-human, extra-galactic origin.

The beast chained in the cavern inside the vessel could attest to the inhumanity of the ship's masters.

And those creatures within the ship who stared wondered, awestruck, at the creature pondered the powerful threat its very existence presented to any and all who lived within the bustling metropolises of the Quaternillion Port Layer.  The sprawling cities housing The Beast's prison were communities in-motion, unstatic, shifting, crawling collections of amoebic housing quite unlike the rigid castles, fortresses and skyscrapers representing building constructs in the universe outside the Ventriculum.  The feral and brutish organism, a thing that was indeed a beast, was in truth , a majestic king among the monstrous denizens who wandered and raided the Free-Zones outside the boundaries of the Quaternillion.   It was an Aingyll of The Empyrikans, a non-human, para-biological race of militaristic hunter/predators.   Aggressive and tyrannical, The Empyrikans lived in a tightly-ordered, stratified culture that dated back further than even the first myths concerning the birth of The Ventriculum.   They were rumored to have come from Outside, from beyond the walls of the Reality that contained the meandering, serpentine shores of that anti-osmorphic river of SpaceTime identified as the Ventriculum.   Their ancient civilization supposedly resided on a humongous,wandering rogue planet , an artificially-constructed Dyson Planetoid called "Bayeshenibal".