The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Nine

This unstable place was where the Universe, scarred and torn by a titanic Wound of unknown causality, deposited the planet Teshiwahur. The planetary network of that solar system became a place devoid of outward and inward pressures creating hydrostatic equilibriums and where the Continuity of Energy could not be calculated or predicted and where the State of Energy changed the way a chameleon changed its colors. This was where The Long Death transported Teshiwahur, its moon Pex Insava, and the entirety of its solar system, forcing all of it to exist under the macroversal outpouring of a paraphysical flood cascading from The Wound.

The concept of Balance, including its recognition and its maintenance, was an essential part of Reality in the collective compositional awareness of The HyperLords. The Xherim'efarr dutifully saw to it that, regardless the reasons for the intrusion of primary disruptors like Chaos and Anarchy into the aggregation of elements comprising the astrophysical universe, the resulting disequilibrium was controlled and contained. More often than not, forcibly so.

Ayunn Bahzee'lysk, he who was called The Retriever, observed the madness and violent disarray infecting and afflicting Niyaddour and its people and was profoundly repulsed.

His "vision" was not limited to that which was channeled through the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye. This was not the way of the HyperLords. Their manner of vision was more of a "Shift Perception". Ayunn Bahzee'lysk's "saw" multiple images of TimeSpace activity in a particular topographical zone all at a time, at once, looking into the area's recent Past and staring down the Present, while simultaneously visualizing several different Futures as they related to possible outcomes of whatever series of events transpired in the zone he physically occupied.

He saw the prehistoric magma-flow beginnings of the volcanic sand wadis before the foundation of Niyaddour were first laid, a place of giant reptiles, burrowing worm-dragons and elephantine bovine carnivores. He saw Jebenna'Seid and its huge primal, water-rich oases as assorted nomadic tribes of hunters wearily scoured the unforgiving landscape, finding the voluminous artisian aquifers in the gullies between tectonic craters and the fruit-bearing trees surrounding it. He saw the industrious tribes reach an uneasy truce to build a blended community to accomodate all their peoples, customs and religions only to have it all destroyed by a brutal, bloody civil war that presaged an unforeseen meteorite impact, creating the ion fields. He saw the armies of the Hegemonic Emperium invade and resettle the area, stamping out the sprawling cityscape, enslaving the ragtag population, and leveling the ancient monuments of the previous civilization to leave the World-Father's technocratic, militaristic mark upon the land. He saw intrigue, betrayal, torture and, eventually, mass death due to infections from viral and chemo-biological diseases manufactured Offworld, but carelessly brought to Teshiwahur by the Extraplanetary Expansionist Forces crusade. Nyaddour fell, broken.

And then he saw the arrival to the area of the The Decreers of the Mokaeren Host, invaders from Outside the Macrocosmic Veil, the elite advance guard of The Council of the Ebon Quincunx. They infected the local humans with their alien spore, altering their DNA. That which was primitive achieved a heretofore unheralded level of biophysical sophistication and again The City rose, rebuilt, but in service to harsh extraplanetary masters. The Mokaeren Host had then plotted to expand their nascent empire throughout the populated territories above the longitude of the Forever Plain. The Ebon Quincunx could not allow that. Such ambitions were insanity. Ayunn Bahzee'lysk saw the brief, but mighty conflict that had resulted from The Xherim'effar's unilateral decision to repel the predatory, interdimensional invaders...

The Balance had to be defended. The Balance had to be maintained.

All this he saw in a single blink of one of his tractor wheel-sized, compound eyes. So far as the HyperLords were concerned, the matter had been settled. And yet, there he was, returned, little more than a precocious species of beast, standing below him, still murderous, still psychotic, still defiant. Quhr.