Ghosts, the soul or spirit of a dead person, are theoretical. There is no concrete or uncontestable proof that such beings are possible. And if they were at all possible, what would be their purpose? Nature abhors a vacuum. So disembodied revenents would have to serve some purpose in this universe. Could we ever possibly understand what that purpose could be? They would represent an extreme aberration in humanity's understanding of What Is and What Is Not plausible. But if such things as specters are possible, then it stands to reason even a ghost can have memories. It would be quite possible, even for the questionable conceptualization of a being composed of no more than a still active consciousness living on beyond its flesh and blood container, for it to have recollections..., and goals..., and regrets..., and motivations.
Motivations. Another word for "purpose". And having purpose is having an Ambition. Ambitions born of the events that occurred in its history, born of memory...
*** Though the event had transpired so many, many orbital solar heliars ago, more heliars now in the past than the total of those he had lived when it had happened, he could still smell and feel the memory with an urgency that nearly rendered the recollection horribly real.
He had been traveling alone when it had happened, just before sunset, during the season of Xeshargloom. Xeshargloom was a period of ecological and climatic flux affecting the planetary northern hemisphere and reknowned as the Time of Storms, the shortest of Teshiwhaur's periodic calendar divisions, but it was easily the most precipitatively violent. He had been five heliars out from Peravendath, to the southwest and away from the Pnahrryian Sea, yet still under the shadow of The Ke'Tareveel, the slowly-rotating micro-moon home of the reptile-people. The dry air had been bitter cold and tasted of burnt metal when a heavy blackness had passed between the dying twilight glow from the planet's dual suns and the iron-hued cloudcover.
He had been chased from out the borders of the Elder Township in the crumbling, sprawling refugee encampment that had once been the city of Urab Kulphorem, once a proud and relatively wealthy city of Scrybes, Alkemysts, Algebraists and Wytchken-Hunters. He'd been driven away by the Provincial Marshalled Constabulary, a police force of expatriot former Emperium soldiers, because he'd dared to infiltrate the ranks of the Archivists Guild under a false identity, allowing him illegal access to secret and arcane documents that gave him concrete clues as to the recent whereabouts of the fabled Laukenmass Lazulux, an artificially-created artifact of the System Mages of the Fraternity Machus that was described as a "nondeterministic polyspatial mobile singularity module". The Archivists were an unfriendly and paranoid assemblage of scholars and educators, scientists and tinkerers, magisterial doctrinairians and rebellious heretics, all devoted to sequestering ancient knowledge away from the likes of the common public. It had given Koraevenus much pleasure in pillaging their sacred archives and releasing privately-held transcripts of technological history back into the hands of the public.
Because people had needed to know the Hows and the Whys.
Koraevenus had been many things in his relatively short life: outcast, soldier, deserter, territorial sheriff, thief, nomad, scholar, and eventually an apprentice to sorcerers, and he had traveled much the length and breadth of continental Qundin, roving both latitudinal sides of the expansive Forever Plain. He had been in ancient, majestic Jaggerheim when the people of the Withered Land had first seen the tumultuous approach of a screeching swarm of flaming meteors ripping across a dreary iron-colored sky. That event had been among the first of the dire celestial stigmata heralding the arrival of The Wound and the birth of the Long Death. That day he had found The Calling that had long eluded him, that thing he'd needed to give his scattershot, disorganized life its meaning. And so he had thrown caution and convention to the winds and he had begun his investigative crusade to uncover the secrets of The Wound and why it had chosen to split the skies in the solar system in which mighty Teshiwahur spun about its warring dual suns, gravity-locked in an eternal cannibalistic embrace.
But what he had learned about the object of his own personal quest had seriously disturbed him. He had been beset by serious doubts as to whether his single-minded crusade was an obsession worthy of continuing when he'd seen ... what he had seen.
The monstrously large, dial-shaped starcraft had descended from the higher altitudes beyond Teshiwahur's low-density exosphere and down to the thicker, richer air of the stratosphere. Its flattened shape resembled that of the radial shell of a burrowing sea urchin, but with scattered clusters of amber-colored lights along the circumference of its thin rim. A kind of ventral ridge bisected the dial's hemispheres, like an indented trough, and a series of deeply green lights ran along the trough's walls. Despite its mountainous size, the starship, if such it truly was, floated defying gravity with the lightness of smoke from a dying campfire and it moved across the sky with a deep, but faint, thrumming noise. The craft was clearly an alien design, marking it as a ship from unmapped sectors far beyond Teshiwahur's known galactic space and there was something hauntingly atavistic, and ominous, about its presence. Bright beams of tangerine-hued light had streamed from the undercarriage of the craft, rays of blinding radiance that swept the surrounding countryside like searchlights. It had looked like a physical representation of some kind of divine threat, like Judgment called from On-High.
Rarbuji'i Koraevenus did not know it then, but he had witnessed the uniquely rare arrival of one of the stellar shiftships of the legendary Xherim'efarr, who were also called "The HyperLords". The HyperLords were an ageless race of non-human, sentient alien mutations, a loose collective of ultra-cognitive, telepathic and telekinetic travelers who could manipulate the Space-Time Continuum. The Xherim'efarr rarely directly interacted with any lesser evolved biological species.
He had noticed as he'd watched that his heart was pounding rapidly and that he'd been unintentionally holding his breath. He'd attempted calming himself and was only partially successful.
And then Devils had descended from the sky. He'd seen the occupants of the mighty shiftship disembark... Their movement was as elegant and as unhurried as if they were part of a dream. Floating, they emerged from the hovering vessel by way of a docking bay, the serpentine hiss of its brilliantly lit maw opening seemed to Koraevenus somehow exceptionally sinister, and they began to descend towards the landscape in tear-shaped, filmy translucent capsules made of some flexible cellulose material.
Huge, each of them nearly seven times as tall as any large human man and four times as broad, they were a strange menagerie of hybrid creatures appearing to be part insect, part mammal, and part something else -- something slithery, pseudopodinous and asexual. They had with them as they descended on a rippling wave of anti-gravity energy, a prisoner, bound in thick, coiled bands of gleaming blue-black metal. The prisoner was as strange a creature as the Xherim'efarr, but its size was on a scale closer to that of a human being. But whereas the towering HyperLords were truly alien life-forms, this other smaller being's morphology hinted at a evolutionary origin somewhat human in nature, there was a familiarity about its shape and features, yet the details of its bizarre appearance rendered the creature an abomination. It was an intelligent man-beast dressed in a sleeveless, form-fitted metal carapace. He was an amalgamation of a male mountain gorilla blended with the anthropomorphic design of a species of bighorn ram, muscularly thick with long, heavy limbs, and he had cloven hooves.
The man-beast was clearly cursing his captors, although Koraevenus did not so much as vaguely understand the howling thing's language, and it was stubbornly, angrily maintaining a feverishly defiant attitude as the solemn and dispassionate HyperLords deposited its body deep inside a stony recess, still glowing hot and billowing steam from having been forcibly cut into the side of a tall kurgan lining the small vale.
Koraevenus did not know it at the time, but what he beheld was the imprisonment and banishment of Quhr, The First Decreer of the Mokaeren Host and the Invoker of Judgment, by the ancient and implacable enemies of the Host, the powerful and immortal HyperLords.
But the thing he had known was that he was witness to The Withered Land's invasion by Offworld alien life-forms, a thing so anathematic to Teshiwahurian culture as to bridge nationalistic, sociopolitical and racial divides to unite enemies against all non-native born foes. If anyone else was seeing what he had seen then, they would have raised an army of millions in defense of the purity of their Land.
But, ultimately, that would have been an act both foolish and futile..., after all, those beings upon whom he spied were the fabled Xherim'efarr. The HyperLords were far too powerful to risk antagonizing.
The sky shook then as it thundered and an icy rain began to fall in sweeping sheets.
The oft-shunned, nomadic adventurer and Archaeologist of the Unknown was the lone living witness to Quhr's shame. And that shame was the consequence of Quhr's capture, imprisonment and exile from the boundaries of The Infradimensional Realm by that Realm's cruel and oppressive ruling aristocracy.
There was so much back then that Koraevenus did not know. But his later research and investigations into what he'd seen that twilight evening in the dim past had forever altered the way he'd seen and understood Reality, forcing him to realize how incredibly complex it was, and how incredibly depraved and malevolent it could be.
It had staggered the mind. ***
Rarbuji'i Koraevenus remembered a storm. He remembered thunder. He then abandoned his moment's reverie and returned his attention to the motley group of living humans near him.
"He's not a 'ghost' or some kind of a 'Spirit from Beyond'," Lumynn said irritably. "That's sheer superstition. Listen, I was a cloistered monk, a man of religious faith, for many orbital heliars and I definitely believe in things unproven by science. I understand that the realm of the metaphysical permeates much of our physical, waking world. But while I don't know what he is any more than any of you, I would be more than willing to bet that he, this interactive mirage that we are all seeing, is most likely a projection of some kind of organized and catalyzed quantum post-existential energy that reacts to certain external stimuli."
"So he is a visual aspect, like an avatar, just a face for some kind of computational artificial intelligence that holds knowledge specific to one particular dead man ... out of all the hundreds of thousands of dead men in recent memory," Oerdyke remarked acerbically.
"An intelligence that knows how to hold a conversation, admittedly a very stiff and formal, unfriendly manner of conversation, but conversation nonetheless," Murshipaz added past a groan as he adjusted his wounded frame, confined by makeshift medical aid rendered by Nygeia.
"Or could be he's actually a ghost," D'Spayr said with sour finality. "And if anyone would know for certain, I would think it would be our resident practitioner of The Discipline, right Princess?"
Nygeia sighed, shaking her head, and said tensely, "I don't consider the subject to be all that important right now. We have other priorities."
"Too true," D'Spayr agreed. "Far too true."
Rarbuji'i Koraevenus chose not to speak, but he watched, oh so very intently he watched...
Nygeia was down on both knees hunched over the unmoving metal form of Akkitus Orthwaine, her hands wandering across the armored cybernetic shell housing what little remained of his fleshy physical morphology and containing the entire whole of his bio-electrical, nano-structural, and neuro-computational essence. She had reached out, focusing her mind on him, to scan him, or rather to scan the bio-electrical field permeating the matter that composed him, with her extrasensory psychokinetic abilities. Taking in that kind and amount of exotic data was a daunting task, but she determinedly set herself to it. The extraordinarily loyal and brave jetellin pilot was deserving of such an effort. He owed them no allegiance. He was only the pilot assigned to the skycraft Kolag Y'phree had given them. He was, in many ways, a prisoner of the old, arcane technology that binded him to the jetellin. Where the craft went, so, too, he went. It was hardly a matter of choice. Akkitus had known her, Lumynn and D'Spayr for only a short while and yet he had thrown his lot in with theirs without hesitation because he had decided that what they were trying to do was, when one considered the bigger picture, worthwhile. If she could at all help it, she wasn't going to let him die in the dark lying helpless on a debris-littered, blood-speckled floor inside a crumbling, partially fallen building.
D'Spayr and Lumynn had taken position at either side of Nygeia and Akkitus, weary but more than ready to unleash the fiercest of defenses against any who would dare try to again assault the group. Oerdyke and Murshipaz had fallen back to render aid to Yllvanea Razora as she doggedly fought her own losing battle trying to keep an increasingly more frail Vashnur Xhant out from Death's dark grip. And hulking over them all, at the rear and next to the chaotic mound of decimated cyborg-killbots and dead mercenaries, D'Spayr's fearsome steed, the Veranus Halodean, growled deeply and resonantly in the depths of its vast chest, as it watched protectively over the battered group of humans it considered its tribal pride.
Each of the others not attending to an injured comrade were staring uncomprehendingly into a rippling, cobalt-hued field of coruscating illumination surrounding a darker, light absorbing large central object... They shouldn't have been able to make out any of the central object's finer details, but they could, if only just. Rather than obscure its image, the shadows around it appeared to superimpose a light that stemmed from an inner source of radiance. The light was alive. The darkness teased and haunted and slid across the surface of the object like a filmy liquid. What they were looking at made no sense. What they were seeing was, simply put, a mobile wormhole engine, but it was not a device manufactured from any manner of Tekk they recognized, nor by any means they could imagine as possible.
It was the Laukenmass Lazulux. It was alive. And, in a flat voice neutered of human personality, it spoke...
"How is this possible? You? Can it truly be you?"
"Yes," Koraevenus answered, his manner reluctant and his distaste towards the Lazulux vividly evident.
"A shame. This One had enjoyed your death."
It was set deep into a broken, pulverized section of the corridor's flooring. It was a large semi-spherical cauldron, roughly the height of a tall man, which was actually a single ridged coil of interlocking, vented plates set into an entwined corkscrew configuration. Any single loop of the coil was slightly larger in width than a pair of men's torsos. It appeared to be made from some dull, pewter-gray metal, but it wasn't. It was flesh, but a burnished, poreless, nickel-hued flesh that held a hard, chitinous consistency. It had no warmth. It did not breathe. It had cracks and ridges like old steel. Its surface simultaneously absorbed and reflected the cobalt glow surrounding it. It smelled of glacial ice, stale ammonia, and iron smelt.
And, as it rose from the top of the huge cauldron into which it was coiled, it rose into a towering single tentacle that branched off at its top into a Y-shape from which hanged a lone human figure. The twin tines of the Y-branch connected into the top of the shoulder blades at the human figure's back. The shape of that figure was strong and muscular, vibrant, resembling the dangling form of an athletic and voluptuous woman, legs bound together by a series of flat, segmented straps. But a wide and drooping hood, like a cross between the hood of an earthly cobra snake and the heart-shaped lobes of a Venus Flytrap plant, obscured the majority of the head and skull topping the womanly form. What details of her face that they could see, though, was possessed of an elegant and fine-featured aristocratic beauty, a cold and dignified beauty marred only by the presence of a large bulbous crystal, an extrusion of an opaque obsidian spur, in the center of her wide forehead. Along the outside of the hood, on each side, were a pair of ropey, tentacular protrusions fused with the skin of the hood and those flexible protrusions each ended in a cyst-like bulb. Her skin was etched at the outer swell of her shoulders, her lateral rib cage and intercostals, and down along the front of her featureless pelvis with glowing, fuchsia-colored neon piping set definitively into the angular patterns of silicon-chip circuitry. It was evident that she was some unique manner of construct, and not a natural born living creature, but it also obvious that she possessed a native independent intelligence of a malevolent, undoubtedly alien, essence that was anything but machine-like. The eyes in the face under that wide, fleshy hood glowed a white-tainted scarlet, as if those cat-like, almond-shaped orbs were aflame.
If they had but known of his existence, the group would have immediately made a visual connection between her appearance and that of Ka'esh-Woganhi'e, Grand Vizier Karliandras Dru'ell's alien thrall back in Niyaddour. Although they were decidedly different beings, they bore a remarkable similarity in their extraordinary morphology.
The Lazaulux was a living being, a sentient biologically-based entity possessed of the ability to actively interact with generate and manipulate Space-Time macro-gravitational fields on-command, isolating and often negating -- or even temporarily inverting -- the physical laws governing normal Euclidean Space and its components. In order to do that, in order to be that, it took no great or special knowledge of human physiology or evolutionary biology to correctly come to the conclusion that the Lazulux was beyond merely being "alien". The creature was incompatibly variant, an deviant aberration, a mutation so far removed from the main bole of the human tree as to be unrecognizable as a "man" or as a "woman". And as such, its behavior could not be predicted...
It was presently staring through the gloom directly at the floating, intelligent manifestation of Rarbuji'i Koraevenus, observing the ghost with a calm, reptilian diffidence that was majorly unsettling.
"This One can see you. You are Here, but Not Here. Your time has passed, but you have not made the transition. Poor, poor Kohr-ay-veenooz," the she-creature intoned aloud, her full, plum-colored lips barely moving with the enunciation, "Of course it would be you. Here. Waiting for This One. Ever and always you. You cannot bear to part from This One."
Koraevenus said nothing.
"You are free, no longer a prisoner of the Darke Astromancers? They must no longer consider you a threat. The vitality of your essence has crossed the boundaries of Veil of Conscious Existence without any trace of their Blight. And yet, poor Kohr-ay-veenooz, you are still a victim of your own obsession. Well, be at last satisfied. You have finally succeeded in your quest. This One finally stands revealed before you," the Lazulux said in its sexually neutral, sing-song voice. "You see. And now you know. Yet what good can knowing do the Dead? So what will you do now?"
Koraevenus' apparition slowly tilted its head to one side as it said, "I will tell Quhr where you are."
"Quhr?" The tenor of her voice dropped, becoming hushed and reverent, and there was a frisson of fear behind her tone. "You would dare?"
"Yes."
The Lazulux's lassitude swiftly disappeared as she grew agitated, the rapid mood change heralding a more dangerous inclination, and her formerly motionless body was suddenly animated by awkward, jerky twitches as she spoke.
"Then Kohr-ay-veenooz is a fool. This One is the Lazulux. Quhr has no dominion over the Lazulux. And if Quhr's ambitions overstep his position, he will incur the wrath of the Xherim'efarr."
"The HyperLords have abandoned the worlds of Humankind and are deep in their slumber, having surrendered to the embrace of Eternal Torpor long ago, while you were held prisoner in stasis. They are beyond the petty concerns and rivalries of the humans infesting this planet. They will not come to your aid," Koraevenus said.
The Lazulux was silent a moment to unhappily consider Koraevenus' words. When she again spoke, an edge of barely suppressed anger colored her speech.
"WHY would Kohr-ay-veenooz do such a thing?"
"Because you are arrogant, undisciplined and out of control. Dangerous. You always have been. You are a creature of ego and of violence. Conflict and destruction are sustenance to you. You cannot be trusted to live peaceably among others that are not like you. That is principally why your makers, the Darke Astromancers, so quickly abandoned you. It was too much of an effort to keep you in check, but you are such a miracle of technical ingenuity they could not, short-sighted and prideful tyrants that they were, bring themselves to destroy you. So they put you to sleep and discarded you, casting you out to exist in a state of twilight-consciousness. But the thoughtless and greedy lizard-folk, the Saurotetramorphs, couldn't resist the urge to use you as a weapon against their mammalian enemies. They found a way to wake you... and to use you as their puppet. They felt no compunction against doing this since, to them and to the rest of the world, you are seen as nothing more than a device, a cleverly constructed thing."
The Lazulux squared her shoulders at the apparition's words and her lips drew back over her triangular, shark-like teeth. She hissed, her anger so great she was unable to form coherant speech. Her blazing eyes narrowed into fiercely glowing slits as her fleshy hood expanded, stiffening.
"Is he serious? How in the name of sanity does he figure this is helping? Could someone please shut that self-righteous jackass up?" Lumynn growled irritably.
"No, wait, there is a method to his madness. I think I can see what he's trying to do," D'Spayr said.
"Whatever he is doing, he'd better conclude it soon," Nygeia remarked tensely. "Down here, we're at the center of the storm and I don't have strength enough to stem another oncoming tide of null hypersurface vector-energy."
"There are so many miracles you can perform, so very much that you can do that no other being can, and yet look at you," Koraevenus said to the Lazulux, continuing to deride and verbally torment the creature, "Satisfied to do the bidding of those who have kept you in bondage, satisfied to be the wolf on a leash hungrily waiting for its Master's word to unleash its fury. Such a waste."
"You gamble with your existence, frail specter, guard your tongue," the Lazulux interrupted hotly. The liquidic darkness that hovered above the floor, ceaselessly undulating and rippling, began to surge, writhing and spinning around the middle circumference of the coiled cauldron that was composed from the serpentine remainder of the Lazulux's body. There was a feeling of increasing gravity in the air, a growing sense of pressure. It was as if they were all watching a tornadic storm cloud amass.
"For all your power, the staggering power of a black sun that permeates your every molecule...," Koraevenus continued.
"Stop."
The cybernetic mutant amalgamation of biology and celestial quantum force was visibly agitated beyond her limits. Her strange energies had begun to arc brightly across the surface of her skin, birthing multiple loops of sunfire dancing in jagged crescents, while Koraevenus spoke. She seethed, spitting out the words past a snarl.
"Stop it. Now. This One will not warn you again."
The apparition ignored her and finished its thought. "You're really not much more than a slave."
The Lazulux screeched with a wrathful ferocity bordering on naked insanity and the world erupted into a breathtakingly tumultuous, blinding chrome maelstrom.
* * *