The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Eight

Rae'vynn didn't know how much longer she could keep up such a furious pace.

Don't think. Fight. Keep moving forward.

She nimbly darted back to the corridor's entrance and signaled to the rest of the jetellin's Landing Party that she'd cleared the way deeper in of any further resistance.

A sound, the slap of metal on stone masonry... she turned. At first, she didn't recognize just what it was she was looking at, but then the details of the picture fine-tuned themselves, rapidly resolving into a startling scene. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw him.

He was astride his steed, a massive, hoofed lizard with a flowing mane of wild hair, and the beast had the broken mechanical remains of a huge humanoid figure caught in its cruel jaws. The metal body flopped and jerked with a sick, inanimate slackness. The steed's rider, a menacing and brooding figure, carried the scarred and dented decapitated head, an oval-shaped, bulbous wreckage, that likely belonged to the same mechanical entity in one of his gauntleted fists. The other hand, holding onto the twisted reins to the lizard's bridle, also managed to be clasped around the hilt of a dual-bladed sonic sword. A rain of orange sparks still rained from inside the ragged edges of the remaining stalk of the metal thing's severed neck. Smears of black oil and crimson blood streaked the rider's scuffed and abraded tactical armor. The lizard-steed growled from deep in the back of its wide throat with a sound that resonated with the savage satisfaction from having slain its prey.

The pirate captain vaguely recognized the splintered and sundered metalloid form as belonging to a Scyke-Bane A.I. unit, a formidable, autonomous man-machine called a Connexion Algorithmyste. It was common knowledge that it took a lot to bring one of them down. Not for the first time since meeting him, Rae'vynn Wyyng felt herself intimidated by The Knight.

Rae'vynn heard familiar footsteps behind her as the rest of the assault team caught up with her and she opened her mouth to speak ---

The air ignited, as if the very atoms that composed its molecular structure had all suddenly combusted.

The walls of Reality cracked and the First Construct bled away into the Foreverness...

Then, amidst the eruption of a blinding flash of searing light, it suddenly seemed as if the whole goddamn world collapsed down upon them all.

                                                                                           * * *

It was a million wildly beating hearts pounding against the restraints of a crumbling, colossal rib cage, it was a hot knife blade thrusting through her inner Mind's Eye...

Nygeia was on-board the jetellin back inside the bridge's pilot-house, standing under flickering fluorescent lights next to Durkka-jan and Pnoom-Aig as Akkitus Orthwaine physically reconnected the damaged craft's failing Global Locality Navigation system to the Emperium's planetary sky-grid. She felt something alien and hungry abruptly claw at the back of her brain, seizing her psionic senses with a feverish grip that was all fish hooks and scorpion barbs, invading her consciousness.

It was Realization. Not "a" realization, but actual physicalized, crystallized, unrestrained Cognizance -- a full-on look at Realization Itself on a macrocosmic level. Nygeia's senses became flooded with and immersed in a stupefying rush of apocryphal input, raw data about this little section of the greater universe in which they existed.