If Time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.
-- Herman Hesse
It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
-- Gerard De Nerval
We must remember that Satan has his miracles, too.
-- John Calvin
Fascinated, they stared.
The Beast was secured with massive black chains, still raging, still defiant, despite the fact it had been imprisoned for generations. It was held deep below within the gray, ashen depths below the subterranean underbelly of the labyrinth popularly referred to among star-going Nova Mariners as the Hagaishenn Breach, an isthmus off the western quadrant of the Quaternillion Port Layer.
Humanoid in form, the thick, heavily muscled creature had dimpled, collagenic flesh the bluish-gray color of submerged sea stone and at each flexible skeletal joint there were scatterings of overlaid scales, the texture of which resembled aged pewter plate. It was wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with flaring latissimus dorsi, a deep, armored pectoral thoracic region and long, beefy legs ending in cloven hooves.
There were open slits, like weeping gills, cut into the creature's lower external intercostal muscles and a sizzling blue radiance streamed from inside the giant brute, revealing a glowing orb of energy at the Beast's bodily core. Rays of azure light from his cavity-slits cast jigsaw patterns on the uneven, stony ground of the gloomy cavern in which it was interned.
The Beast's head was a strange amalgamation of multi-fanged, amphibious predator and mammalian primate, with wide, extended shield-like plates of skin-covered bone emerging from the crown of the skull on either side of its heavily-warted face. Its three eyes blazed with a bright, whitish blue brilliance, opened wide in an expression that hinted at unbridled homicidal insanity.
Its fierce ugliness made it mesmerizingly beautiful.
Despite the barbaric violence of its wild struggling against the chains bolted deep into the walls of the low-ceilinged cavern, it made no sound.
The cavern lay deep inside the oblong bulk of a rift-ship whose ridged and lamelated, poly-metallic surface was composed of interlaced, folding threads that visually resembled the tubular bodies of a massive ball of intertwined serpents. The many loops and ribbon-like cords of the craft slid in and out from under one another as the glacier-sized vehicle traveled through the void, and the rift-ship tumbled slowly revolving about a gyroscopic axis set some sixteen degrees off from a traditional north-south center. A set of bright scarlet lights crowned the northern pole of the mighty construct and from the ship's southern end there extended a blocky column festooned with antennae-like appurtenances which were obviously a complex array of external sensors. The rift-ship was devoid of any markings indicating its point of origin or the planetary of nationalistic culture to which it belonged. Its knotty alien design and scaly ugliness were sufficient to indicate it was of non-human, extra-galactic origin.
The beast chained in the cavern inside the vessel could attest to the inhumanity of the ship's masters.
And those creatures within the ship who stared wondered, awestruck, at the creature pondered the powerful threat its very existence presented to any and all who lived within the bustling metropolises of the Quaternillion Port Layer. The sprawling cities housing The Beast's prison were communities in-motion, unstatic, shifting, crawling collections of amoebic housing quite unlike the rigid castles, fortresses and skyscrapers representing building constructs in the universe outside the Ventriculum. The feral and brutish organism, a thing that was indeed a beast, was in truth , a majestic king among the monstrous denizens who wandered and raided the Free-Zones outside the boundaries of the Quaternillion. It was an Aingyll of The Empyrikans, a non-human, para-biological race of militaristic hunter/predators. Aggressive and tyrannical, The Empyrikans lived in a tightly-ordered, stratified culture that dated back further than even the first myths concerning the birth of The Ventriculum. They were rumored to have come from Outside, from beyond the walls of the Reality that contained the meandering, serpentine shores of that anti-osmorphic river of SpaceTime identified as the Ventriculum. Their ancient civilization supposedly resided on a humongous,wandering rogue planet , an artificially-constructed Dyson Planetoid called "Bayeshenibal".
The Aingyll's name was Zahmmael and the half-dozen humans who watched him were called "Nebulancers".
They were the mysterious and secret group of human beings who had planned and executed the capture and the imprisoning of Zahmmael. They were the people who had started The War.
"It is evolutionarily deficient," one of the observers said in a voice that was all frost and metal echoes. Humanoid in shape, the observer, like most others in the group watching the captive alien beast, was encased in a body-hugging, charcoal-gray metallic sheathe over which were an assortment of mechanical overlays and interlocking gear-like appurtenances that gave the appearance of being hybridized organic robots. "Its array of biophysical sensory organs are primitive. Its bodily adaptations for extraplanetary environmental conditions are few and only of nascent maturation. But it is apparently imbued with the limited ability to mutate and adapt to external stimuli. It temporarily makes itself different so that it can survive in places it should not. How it actually survives and flourishes for extended periods in hostile climature has yet to be defined."
"Be that as it may, it managed to brutally maul and kill eight of our most experienced, tactical weapons-equipped Colonial Expeditionists and it rended their Transit-Sphere shuttle-craft, a shuttle armed with neutrino projector torpedoes, into a smoking, twisted ruin. All that remained was absolute wreckage. Do not misjudge this brute."
The First Speaker hesitated before responding to being chided by his compatriot. It appeared that he had taken a moment to struggle with a primitive, knee-jerk flare of anger.
"Point taken," he said softly.
A fellow observer responded. "Although we share with it several bio-organic signatures, its species did not evolve as we did. It is almost entirely composed of differing types of organic flesh. That is both a weakness and a limitation once it is removed from its native environment."
"Yes, but we have yet to isolate and identify its native environment. It is a native of the Ventriculum, a locality both averse and unsympathetic to sentient organic life," the observer who first spoke continued. "We need to be able to ascertain and distinguish its mutant malleability so that we can engineer and construct a simulacrum through which we can develop a means to assume similar such characteristics. This will greatly benefit the Colony as a whole and ensure our culture's continued dominance and ascendancy."
"We are Ascendent Integernarians, the pinnacle of Bernoulianite development, the Royalty of the Infradimensional Realm. All that we Are is All that Excels," the second observer dutifully recited, giving voice to the guiding credo by which the nomadic Colony lived.
Those-Who-Watched, the Nebulancers, were traveling through a narrow spatial ventrical-construct that lay between plantiliar shelves of the massive, omnidirectional fractal metaflow surrounding them, a corridor existing in the Gap between the Higher Dimensions. The Flow, which essentially a liquidic particle energy scar in Non-Space, was a manifestation of a Four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, a physical translation of a transmatter alternate geometry on Space-Time. It was a devolved, anti-osmorphic quantum void, a sub-frequency oceanic canal with slip-torrents and turbulent Time-rapids, providing the pilots of two planet-sized, metallic bullet-shaped Generational Cruisers with fleeting glimpses of inter-relativistic Multiversal States, states of What-Is, What-Was, What-Could-Be and What-Could-Never-Be in discordant, unconnected alternate universes.
Nothing alive was supposed to exist there. But Life was a powerful Force of Nature with its own agenda, with a will of its own, and it evolved and took residence wherever it decided conditions were rife. Despite all odds, there were sentient organic beings living within the Ventriculum. Small and unique civilizations existed inside the metaflow.
"The Flow" was just another name for the labyrinthine sub-universe properly known as The Ventriculum. And Nebulancers were, for all their technological and macrophysical sophistication, most commonly considered to be hunters and killers. They were predators of other predators.
The savage Aingylls were among their favorite prey.
"The Mesmerinaut Necrodemon Fleet will be looking for It," the second observer calmly stated. "Much has been said within the ranks of our Council Adeptum about the Mesmerinaut Fleet's obsessive interest in any living thing rumored to have originated on the mythical sphere-world of Bayeshenibal..."
"They are Necrodemons. Their endless pursuits of the most perverse and transgressive varieties of biological anomalies has become something of an embarrassment among the ranks of the civilized sovereign-states residing inside The Flow. They think that if they perfect their command of the techno-alchemystry of organic flesh, it will allow them the means to mass produce mutagenetic weaponry we cannot defeat. They are fools," the first observer said, not bothering to hide his distaste for the subject.
"I do not doubt you. They are indeed fools. But fools can be deadly dangerous."
The lead Watcher shrugged. "The passage of the Necrodemons through the byways of the Ventriculum are limited by both their technology and by their biological shortcomings. It is quite hard for them to survive, even in a mutagenetically-enhanced and techno-augmented state, beyond the borders of The Underwhorl. Once their ships take them beyond the Omnimoebian Plane at the foot of the Monnien Cascade, they begin to physically degrade. They are time flow-dependent creatures."
"They are prisoners of the genetics given them as a species evolutionarily locked into a non-malleable matter-state. However, that means that, when they are inside the parameters of an environment climature favorable to their species, they are close to being physically unstoppable. But what is of more importance than that is the fact that they have made long-lasting, solid alliances with Void-ranging consortiums outside the Omnimoebian Plane. They have friends who can assume the mantle of battle for them. Underestimating their resources and their resolve would be ill-advised."
"We are Ascendent Integernarians. I misjudge and minimize nothing. I simply state facts."
"Ah yes, facts... The Flow is awash with so-called 'facts' rendered meaningless by history and circumstance, orphaned by the intrusion of the unexpected into their formulaic frameworks," the second observer, his mouth cast into a sneer, chastened. "Facts are bloodless. Not so Destiny. Remember that we are the wolves of Destiny and we deal in blood."
The First Observer shook his over-large head disapprovingly, and that cranium was embedded with chrome-plated silicate circuitry, as he said, "There is truth to what you say, but it is vital we remember that, though we remain organic, we are no longer 'flesh'. Blood is the basis of parenchyma and stroma, its decay and corruption are natively hard-coded into it. Humans are born to die. It is blood that make them nakedly human and we are not that. We have left that behind us as a species. We are no longer mere mammals, we are no longer evolutionarily limited by random emotional impulse or by our muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and connective tissues. We have outgrown those limitations. We have become Integernarians, organic expressions of rationally finite, cosmic mathematical abstractions. We are, each of us, living, significant celestial datum."
"We are predators," the Second Observer spat. "It is our duty to hunt and to feed."
The First Observer was visibly saddened by his cohort's short-sightedness. This difference in philosophies, this anti-intellectualism, had begun to infect more and more of the Colony. It was a schism that lessened their collective potential and societal influence as one of the dominant sentient species within the Ventriculum. It was both a distraction and a weakness.
And, plainly put, it was the kind of thing that made the First Observer angry. He had to be careful about that. To an Integernarian, anger, which was generally considered a wasteful emotion, was a luxury, a decadence. It was the first step down a path towards cultural frailty and inefficiency. But worse...
Anger was a drug.
He turned away from the rift-ship's scarlet-lit, internal cavern and walked out through the iris-portal onto the sixteenth deck mezzanine's central promenade. The staggering panoramic view of the interior of the massive rift-ship left him cold and unimpressed. He left without saying another word to the Second Observer.
Idle conversation was over-rated, anyways.
* * *
The Ventriculum was a place, often defined as a "topological space", which was an enclosed aggregation of assorted and varied sets of interdimensional points, wherein there exists a set of regions or neighborhoods for each of those points, with a set of algebraic cosmic axioms relating points and neighborhoods to one another along the borders between universes. It was a place where "Space" was not really Space as human minds conceptually understood it. In the Ventriculum, when a sentient biological entity looked out upon the vastness, they did NOT see "stars" or suns, nor did they "see" comets or meteors. They saw instead, physical representations, solid constructs, of algebraic or geometric fractal structures existing against the background of a vast and turbulent, graphite-colored ocean. There existed within the Ventriculum a defined cartography, individual coordinated defining the locations of a multitude of structures and convergences that collectively formed a "map" of sorts. It was Space, fractalized, which meant that it possessed both patterns and scale, through which one could travel, going from one destination to the next. Though it was, as a whole, segregated from "normal" Einsteinian Space and Linear Time, it possessed identifiable traits similar to each. It was Real, but it was not Real, not in the way that common Humankind had come to know and define the term "Reality".
And it was a place of constant violent conflict.
The Metacosmic Narrative of The Antiquity was written in neo-frequency bands across the hive-mind collective of the Black Sun Seraphs, who were the servants of Infernyya Rebekkon. Living on the Conjoined Planescape of the Banborough Aggregation, Queen Infernyya and her cadre of Black Sun Seraphs policed the variant sentient communal constituents inhabiting the territories of the Nautilus Redundancy and of those territories outside the Monnien Cascade's Arakkime Isthmus, where the massive Discontinuity Junction had been erected.
The Metacosmic Narrative of The Antiquity was an arithmetic master chronicle of the events occurring in The Ventriculum, but that history was recorded in a non-linear, nonuniform modular fashion, becoming resident in the minds of the Black Sun Seraphs, who were anthropomorphic celestial mutations.
It was the closest thing to Order that intricate vastness of The Ventriculum could accommodate.
Infernyya Rebekkon herself was a variant undetermined coefficient chimeral mirror of an Empyrikan demigod. She was not human. She could not be entirely classified as an alien life form because in The Ventriculum all sentient organic entities were classified as "alien". Neither was she a product of organic evolutionary development in so far as she was not a being native to the voluminous, ever-shifting, omnidirectional fractal metaflow. She was not a member of a "family". She did not belong to a "bloodline". Her parentage, if it could described as such, was the chromosomally non-disjunctive result of genetic endoreduplication, making her transheterozygotic. An alien among disparately unique aliens. Infernyya Rebekkon was a demigod-like being with an impossibly long lifespan. And she was, like most living beings in The Ventriculum, a metacosmic castaway, trapped there, unable to summon enough physical energy and temporal focus to shift her frequency-state out from the multi-stacked, intersecting planar corridors existing in the Gap between the Higher Dimensions.
But, nonetheless, prisoner or not, she ruled over a powerful and wide-ranging celestial empire.
And she was a ruthless and unforgiving enemy of the Nebulancers.
"The Intercosm Paranescience recognizes the Visitor's petition from the Envoy to the Oceanic Void. The Presence welcomes the return of The Messenger," Zigmus A'arkenum, Infernyya Rebekkon's Minister of Foreign Interactions, announced to the gathering of her Court of Territorial Nobles.
"The Presence acknowledges The Messenger. Let all in attendance hail the return of the Visitor from the Oceanic Void," the Queen of the Black Sun Seraphs responded in an oratorial tone she reserved for official state business.
Zigmus A'arkenum was a pod-grown clonal humanoid, recruited from the Skin Farm population of the Krytidian Collective, a synthezoid incubator colony based at the Mandelbrotian Mass just outside Breakmatter Junction. He was a slender, unsmiling, severe-looking adult male of indeterminant age with close cropped iron-gray hair and long-fingered hands wrapped in shiny, metallic black gauntlets with complexly-articulated finger joints. He had a reputation for incorruptibility and unbiased fairness. No one knew the exact nature of his qualifications to be the Queen's Prime Advisor as Minister of Foreign Interactions, but they could all agree that his wide-ranging intellect and insightful deductive reasoning made him invaluable to her.
Infernyya Rebekkon was, herself, possessed of the physical attributes of an unusually tall, athletically-built humanoid female with a longish, heart-shaped face framed by a tumble of whitish-bronze hair. Brilliantly intense violet eyes dominated a face of aristocratic beauty. She had an olive-skinned complexion devoid of blemishes, large-feathered, palomino-blonde wings emerging from her sinuous back and reddish-black cloven hooves draped by extensive silken leg-feathering. Upon her head she wore a silvery chrome, six-sided crown topped by an egg-shaped large jewel that resembled a fire opal.
"Dumarechiel, Herald of the Far Silences, what brings you before the Noble Court?" the Queen inquired.
The Herald of the Far Silences was a strange creature even by the exotic, hybridized morphologies common to non-humanoid alien species within the civilized zones of the Ventriculum. Dumarechiel was an anthropomorphized wasp-man, covered in an ice-white, jointed and segmented exo-carapace that was accented by scatterings of angular, ruby-red runes along the outer sides of his shoulders, ribcage, arms, and legs. His triangular, vaguely humanoid face and head were encased in an spiky, ivory-hued, thorn-studded helmet. Inside the ovoid and elliptical, oyster shell-shaped palace throne hall, he stood surrounded by a visible, plasma-like, pulsating aura of unidentifiable energy that suspended him a handful of centimeters above the slick, smooth floor.
"Just as you predicted, the Nebulancers, that homicidal, colonizing swarm of Ascendent Integernarians, have taken the Aingyll captive," he said in a hollow, cold voice. "They were unaware I was observing them. In their arrogance, they suspect nothing. They do not know what it is they've actually done."
Infernyya Rebekkon smiled. It was a humorless expression permeated with malice.
"Perhaps we should dispatch a cadre of Black Sun Seraphs into the Quaternillion Port Layer and begin the second phase of your plan," Dumarechiel said.
"No, not quite yet," Queen Infernyya responded. "There are still other elements in the plan not yet activated, elements vitally necessary for us to secure our final Objective. We still need events to play out in the wild areas off the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes, beyond the Time Wall."
"Your Highness undertakes the Grand Game several moves ahead of play. You're sending The Crusader out to oppose the Quegfellum Union, aren't you?"
She didn't answer.
The Queen and her Black Sun Seraphs were yet another face of the cracked, fractal puzzle that made up the complex, algebraically transformational ocean existing between physical cosmic dimensions. The Spawn of the Black Sun were synthetic replicants, biological robots housing the transferable neuroengramic mental patterns of a species of phylogenetic sentient extradimensional intelligences. Though their physical bodies adopted many forms, they were, for the most part, bipedal humanoids. Some were philosophers and academicians, some were scientists and healers and others among them were adventurers and explorers, but the main body of them were soldiers and gladiators. The Black Sun Seraphs assumptively thought themselves to be the protectors of The Ventriculum's ever-shifting narrative of civilized development. About this, this notion of their collective secular identity, they were dangerously rabid. They would kill to safeguard and secure a Cosmic Order to which they themselves were practically the sole adherents. Keepers of History or no, the Empire of the Black Sun and its synthetic "biot" army were the face on the cosmic gem that represented Fury Personified.
Opthas Kandyruu was one such soldier in Queen Infernyya's army. He was both a hero and a villain. He was, in the eyes of the Queen, her Grand Crusader. He was considered the blackest of the Black Sun Seraphs.
He was often called the "Killer of Gods".
He had been sent to contain and quash the disorder running rampant near the outer perimeters of the territory in the Ridge-Surf Cascade...
***
The cacophonous roar of the Overhorn resounded throughout the vista above the treeless, frost-caked tundra. A trio of spindle-jets, black as obsidian and shining with a quicksilvery wetness, ripped across the sky, emerging from the cloudless horizon's dusky shadows, but their screeching engines could not be heard above the mighty blare of the Overhorn as the Devolutioner War-Mage again and again activated its sonic emitters.
The naked force of the Overhorn's auditory explosiveness shook buildings and pounded the cold, dry land on which they stood, cracking foundations, shattering glass, and pounding human and alien bodies alike as they fought to move across the embattled landscape.
The armies of the Quegfellum Union clashed with the retreating Devolutioner Protectorate's Extrasolar Cavalry at the shores of the Ridge-Surf Cascade, just beyond the time-wall of the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes. The gloomy skyline above the nearby city was polluted with a moving, cascading wave of ash and cinders as the conflagration inside the city's protective time-wall raged uncontrollably.
Riktonn Mune'stahr, former Territorial Expanse SpecOps Troop officer in the Hegemonic Emperium's Extraplanetary Naval Fleet, deftly recalibrated the navigational feed on his extra-orbital Streek-craft and course corrected away from the incoming, heavily armed spindle-jets.
They were 450 seconds, as time on planet Earth was calculated, into the Ventriculum's 32,400 second, five hundred and forty minute, structural re-ignition when the war hit its violent stride. The bizarre, oceanic, omnidirectional fractal metaflow regularly dissolved itself into a hollow bowl of Nothingness, only to reboot itself and re-assert its position between alternate universes inside of a nanosecond. This was how the Non-Spatial paraphysical medium maintained its Four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold geometry in the face of the cosmic pressures from the many other neighboring Universes surrounding it.
But something went wrong, really, really wrong at the end of its last reset. Inside the seven and a half hour period since then, familiar territorial boundaries in the semi-sentient sea of chronal liquidity, boundaries that defined the multi-stacked, intersecting planar corridors existing in the Gap between the Higher Dimensions, broke.
The Metaflow stopped flowing.
Planetary systems that should have remained stable for multiple millenium were suddenly and eruptively disassembled, leaving their natural orbits and following unprecedented, strange orbital paths that created orphaned ghost worlds. Ravenous, matter-devouring black holes inverted and became turbulent white wells vomiting matter from one broken dimension into another, infecting the new dimension with a chaotic, anti-clockwork randomnicity.
Monstrosities that had formerly been unable to predate on one another were now able to hunt and kill their alien brethren with relative ease and impunity.
The wolves of the multiversal cosmos were at last able to prey upon the unprotected flocks of interdimensional sheep.
It was the kind of cosmic accident that put a smile on Death's face.
There was an explosively loud and abrupt whoosh and hiss as a quartet of Gaussfyre particle beams punched through the air next to the Streek-craft. The bulky, alter-atmospheric personal veloci-cruiser, a two-passenger, gyro-stable, single-track vessel that resembled a very large aerial motorcycle, zipped out the path of the Gaussfyre artillery. Mune'stahr quickly adjusted his axial balance into the navigational lean and re-targeted his helmet-controlled weapons systems to sight on the armored, Mech-Shell robo-assault team racing across the tundra below him. He set the Streek-craft into an altitude drop and swerved to starboard past a towering cloud of ashen debris in an effort to keep his targets in optical register.
He had them. A team of eight, all dressed in oversized exo-armor that greatly enhanced their visual and audio-acuity along with their physical strength while protecting them against biologically hostile external environments. Mune'stahr was familiar with the technology and identified the troopers as wearing Dominator Class, powered-carapace Mech-Shells that were designed to give each soldier the mobility and firepower of an artillery support launch-carrier. Nasty stuff fitted with hyper- ruggedized computer components. Locking them in his crosshairs, the former Extraplanetary Expanse SpecOps officer unleashed a destructive volley of coherent light beams from his forward-mounted, ion emitter array. The particle ray-bolts hit the robo-assault team in a metal-shredding rain of a thousand superheated, radioactive light packets.
Mune'stahr didn't stick around to review the results of his work. The fact that he'd had to join in the fray between the two battling military forces at all frustrated and incensed him to the point of exasperated anger. He wasn't here to do this. His mission had been to come to the Ridge-Surf Cascade to intercede between the Quegfellum and the Devolutioners before things degenerated to this level of bedlam. But the damned cessation of forward progression in the Ventriculum's normal march towards regulatory regeneration threw a rather large, ugly and bewildering wrench into the machinery -- bluntly put, all his plans fell to hell.
He'd traveled solo to past the tiered time-wall of the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes to keep the peace. Armed conflict between different bio-nationalistic, variant-species cultures in the Ventriculum always managed to expand past the boundaries of the original dispute, pulling other neighboring civilizations into it. It was a pattern. NeeSharim, the independent A.I. that was the physical avatar of the mammoth interspace/higher dimension Shiftcraft called "The Glide" which served as Mune'stahr's home while exploring the ultra-spatial corridors of Purple Spectrum space housing the Metaflow, had run multiple scenarios of the pattern, producing a formula of logarithmic predictability that could not be ignored. The conflict had to be contained. Sooner as opposed to later.
But things hadn't worked out.
Pylott was going to be all over him about that. She'd warned him that the timing for an emergency ambassadorial mission was all wrong given the latest cosmic circumstances, but he'd stubbornly insisted that he could broach a temporary cease-fire if he could just get the Quegfellum's Meta-Pious Eminence to sit across the table from the Master Cosmologist of the Devolutioners long enough to point out that their military rivalry was both wasteful and futile since there was a blanket discontinuance of Topological Manifold expansion in the Ventriculum's Metaflow. Pylott had rolled her eyes and shaken her head. She'd told him it wouldn't work. She'd said it was because, despite their lofty oratory and socio-political posturings, the two civilizations just plain enjoyed fighting each other. Simple as that.
He should have listened. It really pissed him off when she was right about things like that.
Again the Overhorn blared, unleashing a stone-breaking peal of thunder and for a painful heartbeat, it was as if the fabric of the cosmos enveloping the Ridge-Surf was hammered down to the atomic level.
The Devolutioners were a cruel, uncompassionate nomadic nation, a strident political coalition who'd over time become an actual biological race, of beings called "Lemniscatants" who were a small population of technologically-advanced aggressive warrior-raiders, with a coarse, combative culture much like the Huns of ancient Earth's Asian Steppes. They natively possessed the rare, psychokinetic extrasensory ability to move between physical and paraphysical time-frames, going into either the Immediate Future or into the Immediate Past, existing there only for moderately brief periods, through sheer effort of will. They were biogenetic mutants who lived outside the normal envelope of measured and quantified Time, able to perceive its interjunctions, called "time forks", where differing possibilities for isolated events occurred. They frequently visited bubble galaxy-pockets inside the Ventriculum to ply their trades as assassins and sell-swords, spies, weapons-makers, and privateers for whomever or whatever had need for a technologically advanced attack force of amoral warriors. They had, over the years, become quite unwelcome among the humanoid governments in many manifold-quadrants of the multiversal metaflow.
Conversely, the Quegfellum were a fanatical, rigidly stratified, quasi-spiritual culture. A liquid-silica, amoebic-circuited, asexual race of giant machine-like beings, they were a collective of devout, xenophobic warrior-priests. An ancient, militaristic culture, they became a nihilistic society that worshipped their god, "Heffayestos", as a literal, physical being resident in the biological form of their Meta-Pious Eminence. They spread their Gospel, "The Locution of the Macro-Algebraist", wherever they could among the civilized territories of the Ventriculum. The Quegfellum were honorable in their insane, fanatical way, but they were also murderous, relentless and possessed of powerful, autonomous, artificially intelligent, technological weapons of war. They considered it their duty to spread the word of Heffayestos across the metacosm through any means necessary, usually involving means through violent force of arms.
The Ridge-Surf Cascade was one of those areas in which neither race was favored or wanted.
A Macro-Class Command ship, a twelve story-high, thousand meter-long, ion-powered void-ship with a hard-chined, inverted bell-hull, slowly moved into position across from the conjoined scattering planescape that extruded from the Surf Cascade's coastal downsweep. The naval void-ship was in service to the Argossyans of the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes. The Argossyans weren't supportive of either the Devolutioners or the Quegfellum Union. They were just the poor, under-served sons-of-bitches who actually lived within the territorial boundaries of the Cascade. They were attempting to, through the presence of their small Drift-Force Militia, protect their community. The battle being waged at their front door was not for their benefit. As it sailed into an attack position better suited for its stacked, dual array of emitter cannons on the port-flank, eclipsing the fiery, cobalt-tinged light from an orbital chronal-flare, the Macro-Class void-ship unleashed a low-frequency rumbling noise that shook the ether. That burst of electronic thunder was a side-effect of it moving into a position where it was on a direct firing line with the Overhorn.
The Overhorn itself was a strange and arcane device, a gravitationally-highjacked artifact of orthonormal vector science, meaning the construct was a physical representation of an intuitive notion of perpendicular vectors to higher-dimensional spaces. It was an algebraic, N-dimensional subspace contained in a finite field... but, to the sentient eye, it looked a lot like a colossal metal octopus, its mighty tentacles splayed out in a fan around its bulbous head, and each serpentine arm bolted to a rocky substructure by manacles, the beast entire chained to an asteroid trailing a crackling arc of flames. The Horn was an ugly and ominous thing one hundred and twenty square meters in size, unanchored in space, the front face of which was partially draped in an ever-shifting, dark cloud composed of minuscule particulate matter.
It projected columnar bolts of gravitational force that crushed and pulverized anything those bolts hit.
And Riktonn Mune'stahr had taken upon himself the mission to stop and destroy the damn thing, allowing the Argossyan Defensive strike force the opportunity to fully join the battle and forcibly repel both the Devolutioner Protectorate and the Quegfellum Union.
So when the Null-Environ tactical-armored, herculean form of an evil cyborg-beast abruptly appeared from out a glowing Timehole-Whorl, appearing at the forward coastal edge of the Ridge-Surf Cascade, Mune'stahr sensed that everything he'd planned was about to go sideways. When the feral, android battle-behemoth then began indiscriminately murdering anything and anyone in its sight, Mune'stahr felt the first stirrings of cold fear. Then when Mune'stahr observed the colorful insignia of Queen Infernyya Rebekkon's Black Sun Paranescience stamped upon the cyborg's heavy-duty combat exosuit, the former Territorial Expanse SpecOps Space Legion officer knew the time for subtlety had passed.
The time for Total War had now dawned. Opthas Kandyruu had risen from out the deepest pits of his demented, alien Hell.
***