The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Thirty-Six

But what he had learned about the object of his own personal quest had seriously disturbed him. He had been beset by serious doubts as to whether his single-minded crusade was an obsession worthy of continuing when he'd seen ... what he had seen.

The monstrously large, dial-shaped starcraft had descended from the higher altitudes beyond Teshiwahur's low-density exosphere and down to the thicker, richer air of the stratosphere. Its flattened shape resembled that of the radial shell of a burrowing sea urchin, but with scattered clusters of amber-colored lights along the circumference of its thin rim. A kind of ventral ridge bisected the dial's hemispheres, like an indented trough, and a series of deeply green lights ran along the trough's walls. Despite its mountainous size, the starship, if such it truly was, floated defying gravity with the lightness of smoke from a dying campfire and it moved across the sky with a deep, but faint, thrumming noise. The craft was clearly an alien design, marking it as a ship from unmapped sectors far beyond Teshiwahur's known galactic space and there was something hauntingly atavistic, and ominous, about its presence. Bright beams of tangerine-hued light had streamed from the undercarriage of the craft, rays of blinding radiance that swept the surrounding countryside like searchlights. It had looked like a physical representation of some kind of divine threat, like Judgment called from On-High.

Rarbuji'i Koraevenus did not know it then, but he had witnessed the uniquely rare arrival of one of the stellar shiftships of the legendary Xherim'efarr, who were also called "The HyperLords". The HyperLords were an ageless race of non-human, sentient alien mutations, a loose collective of ultra-cognitive, telepathic and telekinetic travelers who could manipulate the Space-Time Continuum. The Xherim'efarr rarely directly interacted with any lesser evolved biological species.

He had noticed as he'd watched that his heart was pounding rapidly and that he'd been unintentionally holding his breath. He'd attempted calming himself and was only partially successful.

And then Devils had descended from the sky. He'd seen the occupants of the mighty shiftship disembark... Their movement was as elegant and as unhurried as if they were part of a dream. Floating, they emerged from the hovering vessel by way of a docking bay, the serpentine hiss of its brilliantly lit maw opening seemed to Koraevenus somehow exceptionally sinister, and they began to descend towards the landscape in tear-shaped, filmy translucent capsules made of some flexible cellulose material.

Huge, each of them nearly seven times as tall as any large human man and four times as broad, they were a strange menagerie of hybrid creatures appearing to be part insect, part mammal, and part something else -- something slithery, pseudopodinous and asexual. They had with them as they descended on a rippling wave of anti-gravity energy, a prisoner, bound in thick, coiled bands of gleaming blue-black metal. The prisoner was as strange a creature as the Xherim'efarr, but its size was on a scale closer to that of a human being. But whereas the towering HyperLords were truly alien life-forms, this other smaller being's morphology hinted at a evolutionary origin somewhat human in nature, there was a familiarity about its shape and features, yet the details of its bizarre appearance rendered the creature an abomination. It was an intelligent man-beast dressed in a sleeveless, form-fitted metal carapace. He was an amalgamation of a male mountain gorilla blended with the anthropomorphic design of a species of bighorn ram, muscularly thick with long, heavy limbs, and he had cloven hooves.

The man-beast was clearly cursing his captors, although Koraevenus did not so much as vaguely understand the howling thing's language, and it was stubbornly, angrily maintaining a feverishly defiant attitude as the solemn and dispassionate HyperLords deposited its body deep inside a stony recess, still glowing hot and billowing steam from having been forcibly cut into the side of a tall kurgan lining the small vale.