She was beginning to get more than a little exasperated with and annoyed by the accumulation of mysteries, most of those being exceedingly dangerous, she encountered in this unique and terrible place.

She observed the carefully choreographed, eldritch performance of the shamanistic void-wizard with growing pessimism.

The Old Man was physically built, in Earth-human Terran terms, on the idealized grand scale of a muscular Greek God. He was bare-chested and barefoot, standing on an oval metal platform, exposed to the firmament, at the end of an extended mechanical crane arm. Apparently, he didn't require a protective, atmospheric exo-suit to keep himself alive outside the artificial climature of a shiftship. She and Mune'stahr had only met him five solar heliars ago, or approximately seven Terran Earth-days ago as time was measured in linear Einsteinian Space, and neither of them particularly liked or trusted him. However, the ages-old, alien artificial intelligence guiding the course of their sentient shiftship's path through the Ventriculum, had decided that it was absolutely vital that Pylott and Mune'stahr meet with the nomadic void-traveler.

The Old Man had said his name was Klauvane Tregg and he claimed to be a Temporal Chronadigitator, a uniquely special species of Reality Mage. He also had said he was a recent escapee from one of the hyper-morphic prison camp-colonies maintained by the Nebulancers.

Keeshura Pylott wasn't sure how much he'd told her was or wasn't truthful, but, regardless, she was already bored with the narrative dramatics and conversational meanderings of the mustached and bearded, leather and metallic mesh-garbed space sorcerer. He was a refugee, albeit one with exceedingly rare special talents, and he was trying to be helpful, trying to find the point of origin for the rogue Ascendant Integernarian Colonial Expeditionary Naval Fleet marauding at the edges of the distant Quaternillion Port Layer. The Integernarians were giving the always bellicose Necrodemons and their Council Adeptum every excuse they needed to once again start a War of Expansion against their neighboring, more peaceable Void Dwellers.

Considering the Interval Break that the Metacosm was now experiencing, the last thing anyone wanted or needed was the further complication of a full-scale war erupting between the few humanoid species existing within the Ventriculum.

The Metacosm was a place where, to the vast assortment of alien races inhabiting the anti-osmorphic interdimensional ocean, humans were a rare and precious curiosity, not quite worthy of either trust or enmity. Humans were, simply put, biological aberrations to be tolerated as long as they did not overvalue their worth as a species or intrude into matters better left to Higher-evolved lifeforms.

Pylott, aboard the enormous shiftship popularly referred to as "The Glide" by most civilized sentients in the Ventriculum, didn't like the way humans were generally regarded or treated by the Metaflow's extrahuman and hyper-human races. Pylott, who had once been a Master Gunner holding the rank of Crusader-Sergeant in the Hegemonic Emperium's Territorial Expanse SpecOps Extrasolar Navy, was a hard core pragmatist. But she knew it was her job to be considerate of situations beyond all that. She was here, aboard a gargantuan alien vessel sailing the ocean of interdimensional Otherspace, to keep the peace.

Pylott was, for the most part, a fighter, a soldier, purely and simply an enforcer of The Law, and the intricacies of interplanetary-interspecies politics were of little interest to her. That was more Mune'stahr's focus of interest. What DID, however, interest her at this moment, a moment wherein Klauvane Tregg was extra-vehicularly isolated in the scalar voidal continuity on that crane-supported platform, was the cosmic anomaly that was stretched out in every direction on her Bridge-Nav monitor's viewscreen.

She was looking directly at a colossal, curvilinear, geometrically phase-morphic cloud nebula bisecting this sector. It was called "The Inter-Tangent Projective" or "the Blue Ring". It represented the still-smoldering, nuclear-reactive remains of a collapsed Star Well. The importance of that, the anomaly's structure, was a mystery in and of itself. After all, there were no celestial objects that could be classified as "stars" inside the parameters of the Ventriculum. Spatial objects possessing an elemental congruency with stars and suns were, in this place, known as "wells" and they served a similar purpose, supplying the Metaflow with enormous energies to support material evolution and organic life. But, the Blue Ring was different. It truly was a vast cloud of nuclear and electromagnetic detritus from a dead star. The question was how in the name of sanity it manifested itself here, in a place where there were no stars.

And how was a humanoid Temporal Chronadigitator capable of manipulating it?

"It is disturbing, is it not, that a creature so evolutionarily stunted, and so rife with physical and psychological frailty and imperfection, is able to wield the Energies of Creation with so few limits," a smoothly modulated, mechanical imitation of a human female's voice said from a position at the Obscan Cam-Monitor behind her right shoulder. "If an individual were to believe in the actual existence of deified 'Gods', one would think that the extrahuman abilities channeled through this so-called Chronadigitator would represent some kind of an affront to their authority."

That voice belonged to the Governing Artificial Intelligence of The Glide, the mobile, interactive physical avatar of the massive shiftship. The A.I. inhabited the sculpted, armored body of a "Synthautotron", an android-like, synthetic humanoid hybrid implanted with bio-cybernetic enhancements. The A.I. had assumed the identity of "NeeSharim" to allow it to more fully integrate and interact with its humanoid host-command.

"Indeed, if one were to believe in the existence of Gods...," Pylott wryly remarked, keeping her personal views about the Reality Mage closely guarded. "But we know better than that, don't we, NeeSharim?"

The exo-armored, hyperaware Synthautotron shrugged, a small hunching of its metal-clad shoulders, and replied, "Do we?"

Since being drawn aboard The Glide and adopted as its new crew after the fall of the spaceport city of Annet Galjeshir and the desert fortress necropolis of Shidraih-Hakaba, Pylott and Mune'stahr had become the semi-sentient vessel's new crew and caretakers, replacing the villainous, and now deceased, Time-Assassin named Uhzaysuhl.

As time was measured back on the planet Teshiwahur, seven solar orbital heliars had passed since Mune'stahr and Pylott had become the sentient "Organyk" occupants of the vessel. That was roughly equal to 8.6 years Earth-time. During that time period, they had been forcibly and unenviably exposed to the weird complexity governing the Ventriculum's paraphysical sub-frequency slip-torrents and turbulent Time-rapids. They became castaways aboard a technologically advanced supership the size of small moon, a ship that saw to their biophysical mammalian needs, feeding them, clothing them, maintaining a perfect atmospheric and gravitational climate for them to inhabit and inoculating them from assorted exotic diseases and viruses. The two former Extraplanetary Expansionist Forces troopers had become intimately acquainted with a cosmic topology composed of a profusion of Multiversal reflections. They saw actualizations of What-Is, What-Was, What-Could-Be and What-Could-Never-Be in a discordant array of alternate universes.

The Glide sailed through these strange vistas possessed of its own navigational directives, the result of ancient programming from some ultrahuman, hyper-natural source, opting to voyage to an alien Here on its way to some unguessable There.

Mune'stahr and Pylott had been dynamically drafted midway into the execution of some mysterious mission through interdimensional space defined by overlords from a powerful and secretive civilization of which they could scarce imagine.

The Glide was an eons-old craft sailing through the planar corridors between the Higher Dimensions, its propulsion supplied by the electro-magnetically stimulated, targeted warping of proximinal gravitational fields as it roved the Metaflow. An alien "shiftcraft", that term referring to the vessel's ability to traverse the stream of non-linear, SpaceTime through power provided by an out-of-temporal-phase dark sun, essentially a pocket black hole. The ship's structural matter was physically anchored within a specific frequency, that frequency being the ultra-spatial corridors of the Purple Spectrum, of which the Ventriculum was primarily made. It traveled along the overlapping borders of various Four-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds, physical translations of Higher Dimensional alternate geometry in Space/Time. The true origins of the ship and its purpose were a secret long lost to the foggy passage of Time --- no one knew who built the craft or why. Even the voluminous computer records contained by the vessel itself did not contain any clues its insipience or its genesis.  And there was something worrisome about that...

Pylott had yet to allow herself to wholly trust the ship's purpose and, therefore, did not fully trust NeeSharim's motivations.

Some subconscious primal awareness warned her that the A.I.-avatar was potentially dangerous.

"Are you in some manner of distress? I am sensing a reluctance to engage with me on your part. If you find my presence distracting or somehow troubling, I can leave you to your tasks," the tall, sylph-like, metal-shelled A.I. synth-'bot offered diffidently.

"I am not in distress. Just mulling over recent events and feeling a bit uncommunicative because I'm not sure what it is Mune'stahr and I are getting hooked into..."

A different female voice intruded into the conversation. She spoke earnestly, if a trifle impatiently, with the harsh tonal accents revealing her to be a member of the Metaflow's isolated, promontory territories where organic mammalian, outcast races gathered. Pale skinned, she had long, luxurious purple hair, rib-like bone-protrusionsrunning down her back on either side of her spine, and a pair of curled, spiral horns emerging from above her facial brow ridge. She had come aboard the shiftship with the barrel-chested, brawnily-built mage. She identified herself as a Hexabreed mutant and, until she'd boarded The Glide, she was only the second of her kind Mune'stahr and Pylott had ever encountered. Standing at a partially enclosed, podium-dais where she was laced into a cable-connected, exo-frame skeleton with gesture-control gloves, the lithesome, elvish mutant monitored Klauvane Tregg's position outside the ship.

"Don't talk about us as if we are ignorant or as if we weren't here," she said. "If we had our way, we would have handled this on our own, but we didn't have much choice given the overwhelming opposition we encountered. The damn Authoritarch Primacy had targeted us for elimination. They were going to kill us. They have an army of assassins at their beck and call. You, your partner, and this vessel represent the closest thing to honor and fairness in this planar manifold."

"Yes, Poli'Artta, I think NeeSharim and I fully understand that," Pylott replied patiently. "I meant no discourtesy. This wasn't any kind of an insult aimed at you or at your situation."

"People have come to depend on you two, you know," the Hexabreed woman said, a note of petulance in her tone. "The Authoritarchs, the Nebulancers, the Quegfellum, and the Necrodemons have pretty much sown up all the political power and socio-economic resources in this region. Common folk don't have any kind of a say in anything anymore, not even in how we die. For many of us who seek some kind of equity or due process, some form of Justice, you and Mune'stahr are all we have."

"Apologies, Poli'Artta," Pylott said, feeling momentarily chastened. "My responsibilities are clear. I allowed my uncertainties and frustrations to override my manners. I spoke out of turn."

"Never mind being mannerly. Just help us keep from getting killed, soldier," Poli'Artta muttered crossly.

"You did not answer my initial question," NeeSharim said quizzically, bringing the conversation back to its earlier iteration.  "The one about the belief in greater-than-human gods."

"No, I didn't," Pylott replied distractedly. She was concentrating on Klauvane Tregg's physical display of patterned movement and the digital read-out crawl at the bottom of the Power Flow Actuator on the Obscan Cam-Monitor. It revealed a graphical observance of pitches and ebbs in the projected energy field the mage manipulated.

"The presence of the Temporal Chronadigitator troubles you. You are suspicious of what it is that is motivating him. You and Mune'stahr are former soldiers, so you are accustomed to having your motivations dictated by an authoritarian committee dedicated to the preservation and protection of a state, a population or a system. A Reality Mage is not subject to such mandates. Perhaps you question the wisdom of allowing him to become involved with our mission, perhaps you don't like the idea that a sentient human individual possesses the very non-human ability to manipulate dynamic quantum state vectors, or perhaps you entertain preconceived prejudices about the loyalties and intentions of a solitary, nomadic, quasi-human, mercenary Reality Mage," NeeSharim said. "On meeting with him on the outskirts of the Syntopic Field Isthmus off the Tertiary Matrix Tributary, you clearly outlined your reservations about taking him into our confidence, aboard this vessel. Obviously you expect to experience an episode of some variety of treachery instigated by him. But why? And to what end?"

She wasn't in the mood to entertain another of the Synthautotron's apparently endless interrogations about the intricacies of human interaction. "Timing, NeeSharim, timing. When I work all that out, I'll let you know. What say we focus on the immediate situation, shall we?"

NeeSharim frowned and tilted her head as she replied, with an unexpected hint of peevishness in her electronically modulated tone, "As you wish. And exactly what is the 'immediate situation' you wish to more deeply examine and assess?"

"The Mage is attempting to tap into some kind of cosmic web or paraphysical network of communications. He's looking for information. But what is it that Klauvane Tregg seeks to interface with?"

"He already provided us with an explanation, although, admittedly, though it was concise, it was lacking in specific detail," the artificial intelligence mobile avatar alluded. "He said he needed to 'tap into the etheric planar reticulation'. I believe that term to refer to the extrasensory psychic echoes of the Metaflow's collective sentience. He is locating and tying together the ghosts of the overlapping threads of organic humanoid thought regarding his targeted objective."

"And what is that 'objective'?"

The question momentarily nonplussed NeeSharim. She thought for a handful of heartbeats and then said, "Our assumption was that it concerned the state of the armed conflict between the Nebulancers and the Necrodemons."

"And we're certain of that?"

"No, I can see now that we are not," NeeSharim admitted. "How interesting. If he can do what it is he says, then he may be accessing information only marginally related to the armed conflict. We would be none the wiser since we cannot 'see' what he sees."

"Do we, meaning you, have the capability of duplicating or approximating this method of intelligence gathering?" Pylott asked pointedly.

"No, we do not. The electronic sensory augmentation networking devices of The Glide cannot replicate organic extrasensory psychic faculties like clairvoyance, or prognostication, or chronal telepathy... these abilities are hyper-evolutionary abnormalities of organic consciousness," Neesharim said. "And that means that we cannot verify the information he says he has collected is what he tells us it is – even if his summation of the data is honest and without reproach. Moreover, we will not be able to validate the sources of those transmissions."

Pylott allowed herself a tiny smile of wry satisfaction as she turned to face the Synthautotronic woman. "Now you begin to know what's troubling me about this. And about him." 

"What? Uh, hello, you DO know I'm standing right here, right...?" Poli'Artta said, making no effort to hide her frustration with the direction of NeeSharim and Pylott's comments. "Just what IS it with you two? Do you think Tregg and I volunteered to have contracts taken out on our lives? Are you our allies or not? Exactly what is it that we have to do to not be considered enemies?"

"Well, it is a surety that no one is going to mistake you for a deep thinker...   How long have you actually known Klauvane Tregg?"   Pylott countered, letting her impatience seep through as she placed her hands on her hips while facing the Hexabreed fugitive.   "A few solar heliars?   Less than a quarter of an orbital solar passage?  How much of his story have you actually verified? What do you really know about him or his intentions?"

Poli'Artta refused to back down.   "I have lived alone and on my own since I was a child left to discover that being Hexabreed means that almost everyone I'll ever meet will look at me with revulsion.  I've been threatened and chased and hidden in cold, damp, dark places at his side, listening while a small army of mercenaries bearing official permission to commit murder have whispered jokes to one another about what they would do with our dead bodies after they found us...  I've seen him angry and bitter, and I've seen him frightened witless and he hasn't yet given me reason for regret or to doubt him.   Our misery is a shared one.   Do not dare lecture me about his 'intentions' as if I were ignorant or naive."

"In my not inconsiderable experience, one doesn't ever trust Sorcerers, Mages or anyone who practices Magycke,"  Pylott rebutted with brutal honesty.   "Trust is not something they trade in.   They frequently color the truth and tell you what they think you want to hear so they can obtain their objectives.  Their motivations are as mysterious as their powers and their loyalties are mainly to themselves."

Poli'Artta glared furiously at her, yet stayed silent, restraining herself from continuing the argument.

NeeSharim raised a glittering metallic eyebrow and took the silent pause as time to share her own thoughts.   "If I may be allowed to postulate, in this instance Consultancy Battle-Captain Mune'stahr would, upon considering your misgivings, advise that you, Crusader-Sergeant, remedy the situation either by retracting the staging-bridge, closing the external hatches and marooning the Mage in Null-Space or by simply targeting him with your weapons system and assassinating him."

"Yes," Pylott responded slowly. "I agree those would be the most likely suggestions from Mune'stahr. But unlike the former Consultancy SpecOps Battle-Captain, I am not a mercenary. I am a soldier. The Code of Conduct upon which I swore an oath does not permit me to randomly murder people I don't happen to trust."

Pylott referred to the fact that Riktonn Mune'stahr had not been an enrollee or conscriptee in the Hegemonic Emperium's military academy, coming instead into service in the Extraplanetary Expansionist Forces Territorial Expanse SpecOps division via the Emperium's regional Inter-territorial Battle Lottery. Whereas, Keeshura Pylott was a graduate of the Emperium's Baronial Extrasolar Naval Battle Academy. Though the pair were often in-sync personally and professionally, whatever occasional differences they had in how to handle stressful and dangerous situations usually stemmed from that fact. Mune'stahr had the potential to be more coldbloodedly pragmatic than she would ever allow herself to be. It didn't happen with any degree of frequency, but on a trio of specific occasions she'd seen a darker, unsettlingly homicidal side of him come to the fore as he'd decided the best way to resolve a mission-critical situation. She didn't hold it against him, though. It served to motivate her to become a lot more thorough in proactively analyzing potential outcomes to fluid operational undertakings.

If she didn't allow them to be trapped and backed into a corner, then she wouldn't have to worry that he'd decide it worthwhile to kill his way out of that trap.

"Apologies, Crusader-Sergeant. One would have thought that I would have known that by now," NeeSharim remarked.

"Former Crusader-Sergeant," Pylott corrected.

"Once a warrior, always a warrior," NeeSharim said, quoting from her historical databank regarding organic human veterans of military actions. "You both still are stalwart adherents to duty."

"It's the training. It never leaves you," Pylott said. "And you, NeeSharim, what's YOUR training?"

The former soldier didn't really expect the cybernetic synth-'bot to answer, but, when NeeSharim did answer, Pylott struggled to contain her surprise.

The Synthautotron A.I.-avatar shrugged as she said, "To be forever vigilant."

Away from the labyrinthian interior complexity of the technological wonder-world of The Glide...Outside the mammoth shiftship, standing surrounded by a Voidal Harbor under the immeasurably huge cloud of The Inter-Tangent Projective, against a swirling silvery-gray backdrop of para-quantified linkage matrices between intra-dimensional planar walls, the mage Klauvane Tregg struggled to maintain the intensity of his concentration...

The thick-corded muscles in his arms strained and trembled while his dual hearts hammered asynchronously inside his broad, tattoo-inscribed chest. He could genuinely, physically feel the weight of corporeal actuality as it became unsound, sagging and distorting. Challenging was not the word for it. It was a term far too narrow in its implications. Tregg's efforts were draining, nerve-shredding, and brutally punishing.

He knew he shouldn't have tried to attempt something like this, he absolutely knew it, but desperation had driven him to take the risk.

He'd been on the run from Authoritarch Sentinels for nearly two dozen Teshiwahurian heliars when he'd managed to gain entry to and sanctuary inside the floating city-fortress. The city-fortress was one built in the Telequarian Discharge on the Nullstream-side of the Nexxion Jump-Gate. The city, called "Na'Dharka Hennol", was a sprawling, armed camp defended by an automated, orbital fleet of"cyberdevyll" macrotech androids. Na'Dharka Hennol was an expansive territorial outpost where organic, sentient "dinoms", a.k.a. Dimension-Nomads, gathered as they waited for legally authorized and validated topological segway to and from different manifold-pockets within the Ventriculum. The Authoritarchs, a powerful, draconian, non-human race of legislators, controlled access to and passage through the enormous, sickle-shaped space station that was the Nexxion Jump-Gate. Tregg's fear-filled, violence-riddled journey had taken him along the inward outskirts of the astronomical inverse-singularity rift that separated Teshiwahurian galactic space from the Metaflow of the Ventriculum. Getting through the Nexxion Jump-Gate had been vital to staying alive. But, once he had exposed himself and his unusual extrahuman abilities to the Authoritarchs and to the other dominant civilized races populating the colonized manifolds inside the Metaflow, Tregg discovered he was once again the target of greedy, ambitious, unscrupulous individuals.

His brief time amid the deadly underworld of dinoms of Na'Dharka Hennol had exposed him to some dark truths about possessing the type of parahuman power he had unthinkingly cultivated. There was a price to be paid for transforming oneself from being a normal humanoid being into an ultrahuman, a dark price indeed. He'd become a pawn in a convoluted and dangerous game played by a cabal of ruthless, invisible manipulators.

And he was getting damn tired of that. To his mind, he had committed no crime and yet he was treated as if he had and he'd been forced to become a fugitive. What modest a life he'd built for himself had been stolen from him by people he barely knew for reasons he could not fathom. It wasn't right. He was tired of tolerating things that weren't right. A person could only suffer so much before they decided the potential for dire consequences wasn't enough to keep them from rebelling. But he had to be honest with himself... He had never thought he'd willingly breach the barriers of Time and Space to leave his home universe and take refuge in the alien madness of The Ventriculum. It was a one way trip. Once the Veil was pierced and an organic being moved from one State of Reality to another, they could not go back. Not ever. The attempt was always fatal.

It had been through the intervention of a young Hexabreed warrior woman named Poli'Artta Ranzireth, an outlaw herself from the Lawless Zone in the valleys of the Monnien Cascade's Arakkime Isthmus, that Tregg had learned of The Glide its chivalrous, high-principled occupants, Mune'stahr and Pylott. They were OutPlane humans, meaning that their point of origin had been Einsteinian-Locus Space, from the distant, giant planet Teshiwahur, former Star Legion space fleet troopers. They had come to Poli'Artta Ranzireth's aid when she had run afoul of the Uber-pious, species-bigoted Quegfellum Union, who considered her and her race of Hexabreed mutants to be unclean genetic aberrations guilty of sorcery and sedition against both the Union and the Authoritarchs.

Poli'Artta had come with him to rendezvous with Mune'stahr and Pylott, convinced he should not attempt the meeting alone, realizing that he needed someone to intercede, someone to liaison and negotiate between him and the crew of mammoth shiftship. Though not particularly friendly or personable by nature, she was a strong and indefatigable proponent of maintaining law and order in a place where the definitions of "law and order" changed every few heliars.

When they'd heard his story, when they'd realized what was being done covertly, behind the scenes, to usurp the natural order of the multiple cultures sharing dominion within the multiversal domain, they'd accepted him and they'd taken his cause as their own. They'd accepted the Hexabreed warrior woman as a temporary member of their crew and the synthetic cyberbot-intelligence, the Mekk-woman named NeeSharim, had reluctantly allowed them both aboard The Glide for the duration of the mission.

He was losing the Thread... He ended his reverie and gathered his energies.

He reaffirmed his tri-dimensional position in the geometricality of the coordinate axes holding him and the shiftship to which he was tethered. There, looming behind him, was The Glide. It filled his vision, illuminated by the cast off glare from multiple, tiny, quantum flares that cascaded across its surface, flowing from back behind it to the front where Tregg was positioned. The vessel was an immense sphere of blue-white metal, with an interior volume equal to that of a trio of Earth-Terran football stadiums, and it was externally featureless, seamless, excepting its downfacing forward quadrant, the face of which was covered by a diamond-shaped field of one hundred thousand closely-packed antenna-quills, each quill being two meters in circumference and eighteen meters long. Projecting out from The Glide was a crane-like arm, nearly sixty meters long by three meters wide, and it was the mechanized catwalk-ramp leading to the platform on which he stood.   Back on the ship's surface skin, the vague outline of a docking bay door could be seen as it swallowed the far end of the catwalk-ramp.   That door was not an actual construct made from plate metal, but was instead a fissure opening, a molecular displacement field, creating an energy-protected chasm in the ship's surface.  

The old man concentrated: he heard no sounds, he felt nothing on his exposed flesh, he ignored and then could no longer feel the pull of gravity against his body, he was no longer cognizant of his own breathing or of the insistent, slow pounding of his twin hearts. He isolated and compacted his conscious mind to recede into the dim grayness of Limbo, bifurcating his Awareness, and he reached out with sensory probes from a deeper place inside his mind. His arms rose up and his hands touched non-material filaments of an etheric continuum beyond the sight of his open eyes. He stared beyond the physical imagery projected onto his retinal wall, redistributing the bio-electric impulses flooding his optical nerves to project onto a mental web that reshaped the pictures of the spatial sea around him.

The etheric continuum was alive with crisscrossing, flowing streams of impulses and signal-waves carrying photovoltaic Relativity data and quantum TimeSpace integration particles to and fro. This was the focus of the Chronadigitator's manipulative abilities. Those streams were called "threads". Tregg could "read" the multiplicity of interconnected and overlapping stimuli-reactive possibilities extant within the threads in any particular Metacosmic locale, allowing him to isolate and separate particular sets of information about people, places and things and distill that information into a coherent web of Causality and Probability. It was a rare and useful talent for any humanoid being to possess, a mixture of psychic Clairsentience, Claircognizance and Clairvoyance. It was also incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.

It took very little in the way of deductive reasoning of imagination to understand that the Authoritarchs, the Quegfellum Union and the Nebulancers could most definitely be considered the wrong hands.

But that wasn't what Klauvane Tregg was seeing, or had seen, since he'd first become an outcast refugee and a fugitive after traveling through the Nexxion Jump-Gate...

He had seen the covert actions of the Black Sun Seraphs of the Intercosm Paranescience as they'd moved across the scattered civilizations in the Ventriculum. He had peered into the secrets hidden within the Conjoined Planescape of the Banborough Aggregation, the dark domain ruled by Queen Infernyya Rebekkon.

And the tyrannical Infernyya Rebekkon had, courtesy of her own powerful metacosmic senses, seen him, in return.  That parapsychic look, that touch of her twisted, diseased mind, acknowledging his existence and measuring his value to her as a thing to be manipulated or something off which she could feed, had left him scarred.

Part of her had infected him.

It was Klauvane Tregg's reading of the Thread-visions he'd experienced that had guided Riktonn Mune'stahr as he'd ventured out into the war-torn Ridge-Surf Cascade and its coastal Wrathbeurne Hive Domes.

And there was one term, one word, that kept repeating again and again among the impulses racing across the etheric continuum. It was the name of a terrible and chaotic, inhospitably lethal place where few dared to venture.

"Hellmarrow". It was the point from which the all-pervasive, overpowering force that was imprisoning and preventing the Ventriculum's omnisynchronous Interval Break originated.

Tregg disconnected from the Threads. There wasn't anything further he could learn here in this place. He waved his arm in a prearranged motion to signal to the ship's bridge. Summarily the catwalk-ramp began to slowly retract back into The Glide's docking bay, surging and streaming in a river of heavy metal liquid. The venerable and seasoned Mage stared down at his feet and shook his head woefully.

Black Sun Seraphs. Damn.

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