The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Eight

All around the isthmus, rising and falling at preset, but ill-defined, unanticipated intervals, massive hexagonal prisms enclosing miniscule adolescent Realities emerged from the temporal flow.

An alien Overmind who served the role of the Invoker of Judgment, Quhr was attended to in his castle-fortress of violet-hued crystal by his Assault Host Troopers, hulking, biomechatronic goblins whose geometrically-latticed, metallic flesh was adorned with glowing amber-gold gems at their massive shoulders and inset into their broad, muscular chests. Their triangular insectile faces resembled a cross between the skull and face of planet Earth's preying mantises and those of its hornets, but their eyes were not an emotionless collection of compound lenses. Their upturned almond-eyes were preternaturally alert, betraying the feral emotions of an intelligent breed of hunter-slayer. The Assault Host Troopers were epigenetic microRNA biological robots with limited autonomous intellects. Their genetic matter had been harvested and collected from that of a little known race of beings called "Divisibles" who were creatures living inside the Fold of a geomorphous dimensional 4-space that bordered Euclidean Space and its temporal flow. They were organic beings, but they were not wholly biological in a traditional sense. They made no sound while they waited for Quhr's next set of commands, content to bide their time while he twitchily perambulated and ranted aloud.

"This is not how the plan was supposed to unfold. Calculations were made. Contingencies were deliberated. Omniscience is not the same as prediction and prediction is not the same as certitude," he muttered, the harshness of his inhuman voice grating to the listener's ear, "Events do not so much flow one to another in neat mathematical progression as they rather burst forth half-formed, incomplete, and tumble about directionlessly, but not at all randomly, to collide with one another, sometimes explosively, creating new possibilities. This is how primitive, compulsion-driven, semi-rational animals like humans manage to unwittingly influence the algorithmic certainty of universal formulas. This is how they spread the disruptive disease of their anarchy throughout the physical universe."

His taloned fists, clenched behind his expansive back, were clasped and interlocked. He stopped his pacing long enough to fix her with a baleful stare as he said, "And that is one reason why I exist to judge them."

Fianaxis did not speak. Quhr had not asked an overt question and she knew from experience that unless he did so, he was not predisposed to listening to the ideas of lesser sentient beings.

Quhr's Dominion-Keep, a sprawling multi-tiered, violet-colored structure existing inside a wide-based hyaline, three-dimensional octagonal pyramid, was composed of a series of tall parallel towers, each tower shaped like a shark's dorsal fin, joined at the base by a three-tiered saucer-shaped disk, a set of concentric disks of decreasing circumferences. The surface of the outer glassy pyramid-enclosure was a series of moving plates that continually moved and shifted, constantly dissembling and reconstructing the visual image of the castle-fortress within it. The subtly-placed ramparts and battlement walls of the castle vibrated silently, shifting in and out of visual focus, creating the illusion that the dorsal fin shape of each section was moving forward or back on the horizontal axis, independent of the other fins, with each fin etched and striated with intricate exterior designs resembling electrical circuit boards. The Dominion-Keep was an omniversal, transchronal projection, a kind of quantum physical mobile oasis originating from the furthest edges of the Mokaeren Host's central station hub in the Infradimensional Realm. The octagonal pyramid and the Keep existed simultaneously, but without continuity of timeline, along the rivulets and tributaries of the macrocosmic energy membrane separating twenty-seven different dimensions...

None of those dimensions could be considered "home" for Quhr. He was elemental and ancient and celestial -- a member of an alien race beyond definition, a racial species originating outside normal Einsteinian space. To such as he, "home" was a subjective term that held no true meaning.