The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Nineteen

They'd made the cage of his body and the dry, arid moon of Pex'Insava his prison. And his prison's warden had been asynthetically-constructed, bio-engineered mutatation that They, in their pitiable, fearful ignorance, called a "Prophet".  But it wasn't a Prophet.  It was an Eradicant. The ugly, gaunt gene-'bot was certainly not any product or servant of celestial prophesy... it was instead a jailer, a fleshy turnkey that had moored him to this broken moon, a warden that kept him imprisoned by anchoring his physical form within a stasis field that fed from off his own bio-energetic vitality. The Prophet was an anchor that rooted him to Pex'Insava by vampirically draining his own vitality and power and using it against him. It was anything a near-mindless thing, this Prophet, only barely sentient, and he could not psychically penetrate its cypher-coded stub-mind to telepathically corrupt and control its limited intellect.  They had passed sentence upon him and the penalty had been brutal, but not unexpected. He'd known that there had been no possibility they would've understood. The Directive of Obtrusion was the bedrock of their civilization and he would not deny what he had done. So he'd been punished. But he did not hate them for it.

He was still a HyperLord. He still possessed the cosmic keys to Eternity. He was immutably part of the fabric of Forever. And he still had this, the realm he had created. A realm populated by the dirty ragamuffin primates he considered to be his children...

After so long in torpor, in what was nearly an endless dreaming sleep, watching the organically-eccentric mammalian castoffs that had grown to infest this broken space rock as they died was unexpectedly quite entertaining.

Let them die. He would make more of their kind. Smarter, braver, undeniably more beautiful, more divinely-inclined. Better.

Let them die.

                                                                                                * * *

Drehdfynitor's homicidal objectives suddenly ran from off the rails, his spree of killing all he encountered in the city's interior unexpectedly curtailed...

He could see the sixteen story-tall monster as its massive form wandered in and out from between the buildings of Abyssium's ruined skyline, tracing a snaking, rambling path from out the deep pit from where it had risen to where it now stood straddling the wide boulevard that was the city's main central artery.

When first he'd seen the giant, he'd been seized by shock and horror. It was an impossibility. One of THEM. After all this time, one of THEM dared to show their face to him again, something he'd despaired would never happen twice in his extraordinarily long, tragedy-haunted life. But there it was... And the sight of it inflamed him. It inspired in him hateful reminiscences of his fragility and impotence from when he'd confronted them in ages long past. It reminded him that he had been a fool and how that folly had ended in the punishment he now suffered. His idiocy in confronting the HyperLords had resulted in them rendering him a punishment he'd scarce imagined. They doomed him to live between worlds, between Realities, in a perpetual wraithlike apparitional state. They disunited him from Life --- and tied his funereal existence to their own. He could feel the behemoth's non-human alienness tugging and pulling like some eerie magnetic attractor at his own mutant anomalousness.

A Xherim'efarr. One of those who had made him. One of those who had forcibly stripped away his humanity and torn him from Time, estranging him, banishing him, from physically interacting among his brethren and sisters in the Plane of Reality in which he'd been born. Imperious, arrogant, aberrant and mystifying, the presence of the alien colossus now goaded him on towards blind, almost mesmerizing fury.