The Glide was screaming.
Uhzaysuhl's mouth was set in a grimace and his teeth clenched as the mountainous, semi-sentient shiftcraft resounded with a prolonged ear-piercing shriek. The craft trembled and quaked while it connected with the quantum passage that would take it from out of the interdimensional Non-Space of the Ventriculum to intersect directly with the dimensional plane of the Withered Land. Possessed of a rudimentary alien self-awareness, built containing its own separate intellect so as to prevent it from being used as a weapon, The Glide was resistant to instructions to leave its native anti-osmorphic void and penetrate the barrier veil between differing Planes of Reality. It was meant to wander sailing the corridors of the Purple Spectrum. It was not meant to intrude into the Here and Now of any one singular dimensional manifold within Einsteinian Space.
The shiftcraft was fighting Uhzaysuhl --- and it was losing.
He activated the inertial flux-filters and disconnected the mimetic shielding that inhibited the drive engines, allowing the vessel to achieve escape velocity from within the Ventriculum by decelerating its titanic mass, essentially slowing it down enough to allow The Glide to pop into a sub-light envelope and enter regular, physical, cosmic space.
He hadn't wanted to do this, but he had no choice. He was the Prime Template Pilgrim for all the various versions of The Pilgrim across the Multiverse and he had to get back to his own Point-of-Origin, crossing his own Timestream in the process.
This was because inside the technological sprawl that was the nerve center of the Autonomous Administrative Command Node under the Duskhelm Priory in Shi'draih-Hakaba, the mummified giant on the X-shaped cross, the comatose being called 'the Gatekeeper', was none other than himself. Uhzaysuhl was the Gatekeeper. And being imprisoned inside the central node of Teshiwahur's planetary megacomputer was his ultimate destiny... unless he could change his own past and defeat the Beast Who Awakened.
Uhzaysuhl threw the throttle-levers forward and set his legs against the base of the command chair, anticipating the ferocious sudden deceleration of the speeding shiftcraft, as he defied the Laws of Creation and challenged all of Reality.
The Pilgrim-Prime went to war.
* * *
Xemyazzus felt hot tears flowing down his cheeks as, awestruck, his heart thundering in his throat, he watched the Avatar return to life. The Wenkrang warlord was covered in a layer of pale dust and grit from the eruption, but the night's rushing breezes fanned the particulate debris from off his skin in shifting clouds.
Roaring, Xemyazzus had dropped the telescoping, tube framework device Atu'ihma had given him after its activation. The device had burned and blistered the palms of his hands as it had uncontrollably vibrated, much like an immense and misshapen tuning fork gone amok, and the Speaker for the Wenkrang had been amazed at the weird construct's surging power.
Downhill and towering before him, half illuminated by flames and weapons fire from the combatants still locked in cruel and raging battle at its feet, the Avatar stood. It felt like standing at the foot of a living mountain.
The demonic thing was the color of dried blood under a noonday sun. It loomed above the desert floor some eighteen stories tall, a vaguely humanoid creature nearly half the width of a stadium playing field. It was a commanding, and impressive sight, parts of it almost lost in the deepening night's gloom. What more illumination there was reflected from off the far away face of the planet's disk-moon, Pex'Insava.
The creature was swathed in a tunic, layered over a form-fitting sheath-suit, covered by a scapular with oval-shaped epaulets and a high-collar with an attached cowl. The outer tunic was decorated with inlaid metal patches, designs that reflected an alien prehistoric bestiary, and there were arabesque cut-outs at the rib cage and pectoral regions revealing the silver metal of the sheath suit. Around its thick waist area was a gleaming belt that possessed a flattened dragon-like creature's fearsome face as its buckle. From under the spike-studded shoulder epaulets, the things thick and muscular arms were covered with elaborate multi-banded sleeves that, at its wrists, were attached to flexible overlapping segments attached to a metal glove from which grew large, saw-toothed axe-blades as fingers. There were six such fingers to each hand and the fingers were half the size of an adult man. The creature's thick legs were encased in lizard-scaled, metallic leggings with overlapping shells. On each massive knee was a protective knee-shield onto which a bas-relief carving of an alien beast's screaming skull had been imprinted. From mid-calf down, each of the thing's booted feet were lost in a hill of sand and shattered stone.
But it was the savage colossus' head that transfixed any and all observers. Atop the chimeric alien creature's mighty neck was a head made for nightmares. The huge skull was in the roughly triangular shape of a warrior's shield and it was both lipless and without a nose. Under its prominent brow, it had a set of three glowing, almond-shaped eyes set side by side. It's rough, leathery dark flesh was covered with blood-red patterns, like massive intricate tattoos, and, one to each side of its head, a massive curved horn the color of aged bronze arched out from where ears would have been on a human being. And floating on the night air around that huge head was a radiant, turbulent and continually-morphing halo of orange-red energy, like serpents made from lightning. The towering behemoth gave off an invisible, physical vibratory aura that shook and rattled the insides of anyone nearby with much the same effects as an assault of low frequency harmonics.
Such a creature was an impossibility. It was beyond the classification of merely being "alien", it was an abomination, a nightmare made flesh. No known species of sentient life form was a match for such an amalgamation of bizarre characteristics.
This was one of the legendary HyperLords. This was Dessimathiah, the Dreaming Executioner.
Slowly, the Avatar turned its great head from side to side, surveying the landscape, taking in the human drama unfolding before it on the blood-splashed sands below. And then the towering monolithic, ancient alien began to walk menacingly deeper into the necropolis, towards the Duskhelm Priory...
That was when the thundering cannons of Bur'heddam opened fire on it.
* * *
While under the glare of moonlight outdoors, the giant Xherim'efarr alien, Dessimathiah, focused his growing homicidal ire towards the impudent, miniscule human vermin scurrying at his feet. Inside the musty, lower levels of the Duskhelm Priory, violent chaos was unleashed upon the normally tomb-like stillness.
A quintet of angry Ashen Brood Tekk-specialists had burst into the chamber, unexpectedly encountering Forynnuhr as he had rummaged at a junction console connecting a pair of cable-terminated power nacelles. Two of the five men carried sear-guns at readiness, already alerted to the invasion of their sanctuary by hostile intruders. The Pilgrim had anticipated their presence, his clairsentient sense of perimeter-awareness warning him of their approach by sensing their minds ahead of the arrival of their physical bodies, and, as a defense, he had unleashed a deadly pyrokinetic bolt, brutally setting them aflame.
The men had screamed briefly as the intense fury of the napalm-like blaze rapidly engulfed them.
Forynnuhr ignored their horrific deaths.
The floor rocked as an explosion resounded from above, causing a rain of dust and particulate debris to fall from the shaking, rattling ceiling.
Below Forynnuhr, inside the subterranean pit housing the networked server racks for the Autonomous Administrative Command Node, Harqwenne rose unsteadily to his feet and leaned against a columnar conduit as he recovered from his fall. He grit his teeth as he experienced a sudden flash of pain from his right knee. Damn. He'd hit the grated metal floor harder than he'd first imagined. The fall had nearly hobbled him.
The Scribe drew in a deep breath and looked around. It was a far larger space than he'd first imagined, as seen through the portal opening in what was now the chamber's ceiling, and it was architected unlike anything he'd ever seen. Mechanized turrets dotted with lighted nodules and systemic read-out display panels rotated with synchronized precision as large boxy cabinets, each easily five times the height of a tall man, thrummed and hummed as their multi-bundled microprocessor units ran bursts of coded impulses throughout the network. A trio of tremendous support columns, each ringed with metal bands through which clear glass tubes ran like enclosed highways, sank deep into the cavern floor, dropping away into darkness. The illumination from the free-floating, aerial saucer-lamps did not extend far down enough to reveal anything more of the computer nerve center's details.
This was all as alien to Harqwenne as a ancient monolith or a pyramid found buried on Teshiwahur's distant moon. He did not truly understand what it was he was seeing and he could only begin to guess at what functions it performed. But of one thing he was now sure... The monstrous Gatekeeper, that giant-sized android duplicate of The Pilgrim by whom he'd been betrayed, was at its center, like a macabre, mummified spider squatting menacingly in a cybernetic web.
"So you're still alive," Forynnuhr remarked wryly, speaking loudly over the persistent sound of the collected network devices. "Hadn't expected that, honestly. Thought for sure the fall would have killed you. You're a lot more sturdy than I gave you credit for being."
"This entire affair was a ruse, all of it a complicated, homicidal ploy through which you could access the planet's computer system and avoid encountering resistance from the network's different guardians, whether they be the Ashen Brood, the savage Wenkrang, or that demonic alien abomination you awakened," The Scribe deduced bitterly. "Through some forbidden act of scientific Tekknomancy, another version of You, the version trapped here and forever locked in a deathless comatose state within this secret, forgotten computer network, contacted the alternate universe version of You to set him free from this imprisonment. Why?"
"Again you ask 'why'," Forynnuhr said. "Why this and why that... You never tire of that word, do you? That is so very annoying. And short-sighted. Anyway, it's simple, I need to change the past to change my future. Well, not exactly MY particular future, personally, since being from Upworld has apparently shielded me from my ultimate Fate to a degree, but to change the future of my various doppelgangers throughout the Megacosm. The bottom line is simply this: I don't want to spend an eternity slowly dying anchored to this diseased and broken world, locked away in darkness as a slave and power source to some damned, parasitic, alien electronic brain."
"Self-preservation," The Scribe said distastefully, "Self-preservation at the expense of an untold multitude of others."
"Self-preservation across a million, million different, alternate Realities," Forynnuhr said. "I am, and have always been throughout the millennia, the one single constant behind the rise and fall of galactic empires across this sector of space. You lesser creatures may come and you may go, but it is MY existence that truly matters."
"And?"
The Pilgrim looked down into the electronic nerve center at the The Scribe and crossed his muscular arms across his wide chest. His posture was that of an arrogant someone who was extremely pleased with himself.
"And The Withered Land's doomed destiny is accelerated," Forynnuhr said. "Teshiwahur will be permanently set on an irrevocable path to a hellish and bloody end. The forces of Chaos will triumph over those of Order."
"Do you truly hate this planet and its people so very, very much?"
The Pilgrim shook his helmeted head in the negative. "It's not like that. It's not at all personal. Hate is at the core of my nature. It's my purpose, my reason for being. This is what I do."
Much to Forynnuhr's surprise, The Scribe solemnly nodded. Momentarily wordless, the man appeared to have come to a decision about some unnamable thing, and then he looked back up at the Pilgrim. Harqwenne's eyes were hard, glittering slits of intensity as he stared up through the chamber's luminescent glare and into the Pilgrim's face.
"It would appear we all have our crosses to bear," he said, his steely voice emphasizing the word 'crosses'.
For a moment, Forynnuhr was confused, and then, slowly, the meaning behind The Scribe's words dawned on him. His mouth dropped open as he watched Harqwenne reach into his tunic's vest, under his robes, and quickly unholster the ancient lightburster pistol he'd mentioned when they'd first met.
He aimed at the looming, motionless godling on the X-shaped, saltire cross, targeting the Once and Future Pilgrim who was called "Gatekeeper", and fired five times. As Forynnuhr screamed, those brilliant, sizzling beams of irradiated coherent light each punched into and through the crucified giant's torso. The myriad assortment of luminescent conduits connecting the elephantine figure to the power distribution box behind the cross, abruptly snapped from off the metal frame, showering the grated floor with hissing, white-hot sparks.
And from the mortally wounded Gatekeeper, ebony lightning, black as liquefied obsidian, flared...
* * *