The Herald of the Far Silences could not believe what it was he was hearing. It was unfathomable. Unprecedented. Stupefying. And, quite frankly, more than a little frightening.

He stood amid low-lying patches of swirling dust on the surface of an orbitally detached, irregularly-shaped rocky body. The building-sized, gravitationally-unanchored rock was a large fragment from a more massive celestial void-object that had been shattered by repeated hits from particle beam weaponry during the recently-concluded battle.

"You surely realize that answer cannot be considered at all adequate," Dumarechiel said cautiously, painfully aware that he was treading fragile ground. "Your presence is required back among the Paranescience's Extra-Territorial Operations Command Center in the Nautilus Redundancy, amid the higher-ranking Black Sun Seraphs of the Conjoined Planescape of the Banborough Aggregation. The Queen's forces cannot afford you to be wandering the unincorporated territories of the Ridge-Surf Cascade..."

"I am not 'wandering'. I am completing my mission," the armored giant answered, tossing the ice-white, scarlet rune-tattooed wasp-man a withering look of disdain. "There is nothing of magnitude occurring at the ETOCC that cannot be handled by another Agent-Seraph. The Queen favored me with a task and my work here is not yet done."

"I am uncomfortable reminding you that the unfortunate course of events you just experienced, though aggravatingly frustrating, constitute nothing more than the fortunes of war," Infernyya Rebekkon's Envoy to the Oceanic Void explained. "One cannot guarantee the outcome of any particular battle campaign set amongst an environment we do not fully control. Things happen. Sometimes we are not wholly successful in our endeavors."

"What are you saying?"

"We have known one another for quite some time now in the Queen's service, Seraph-lord," Dumarechiel said reluctantly. It was obvious he felt he would be walking upon fragile ground in broaching the subject he presented to the Black Sun Seraph, but it was just as obvious he felt compelled to do so. "And, while we cannot describe our interactions as exactly 'friendly', we DO, I hope, share some mutual respect for one another's rank-station and abilities. I say this because my next words may bring you offense. It is not intended, should you feel that way. I am simply seeking want your truthful assessment. So then..., I do not suppose that you asked yourself WHY the Noble Court needs you, particularly YOU, to do this thing, have you?"

The Seraph's massive armored head turned slowly towards the Herald of the Far Silences, his broad face covered by the rakish helmet with its vented face-guard, and his eyes hidden behind a visor lens of iridescent crystal material. "Your tongue flirts with sedition, Messenger, but I sense that your intent is fired by your patriotism. What is it you mean to say? Speak plainly."

"I think the Court is plotting against the Queen."

Opthas Kandyruu's dry laughed was a series of humorless barks. "Of course they are. They should. With each new decisions she makes, it becomes more and more apparent that her mind is diseased. The Queen is mad."

A great tension appeared to be released from Dumarechiel at Kandyruu's words. "So, you know. But isn't it equally madness to continue to follow her commands?"

"Oh yes, it is. Undoubtedly. Our forces are no match for the Authoritarchs and if the Devolutioners decided to invade the realm of the Paranescience, we would be hard pressed to defeat them. And should the Quegfellum come knocking at our doors... disaster, absolute slaughter would ensue. She knows this. It frustrates her to no end. But she is insane. That insanity fuels her fury. Her fury provides her empire with its dark and withered heart. Her madness is a glorious thing, is it not?"

Dumarechiel's heart sank. He abandoned any further attempt at engaging the Black Sun Seraph in any further discussion along those lines. The creature was a Nihilist, fascinated by and attracted to the idea of a cynical, fatalistic life of murder and warfare in service to the Paranescience.

"So, Seraph-lord, if she commands, you will obey, even though you know the reasoning behind her commands is fractured."

"Do not speak to me as if I were a novice recruit or an uneducated mercenary brawler," Kandyruu said, his low-pitched voice rumbling with angry thunder. "I am not an idiot. I am well-versed in the art and principals of warfare. I am a professional. And this misadventure was not the result of mere chance. This was the result of incomplete or faulty intelligence. WHY did we not know that the crew of The Glide were in any way involved in what should have been only a border skirmish? The Glide! The greatest, most powerful and most enigmatic alien vessel abroad the MetaFlow! Not even Queen Infernyya Rebekkon can control or predict the strange methodology and goals controlling its mission. Its crew are literally the Instruments of Fate. Were I told of their possible interference in these proceedings, I could have better prepared an attack strategy."

"No one places you at fault," Dumarechiel said. "There was no way to anticipate their interference..."

"You are certain of that, are you? Do not play me for a fool... I know that there is unrest and intrigue, even sedition, plaguing the Paranescience at the highest levels. You are sure that Zigmus A'arkenum, the Minister of Foreign Interactions, was not aware that The Glide would stand between the Devolutioners and the Quegfellum? You are sure that the Court of Territorial Nobles did not conspire to undercut the Queen's wishes?"

The being known to the Queen and her subjects as The Messenger bowed his head, sighing. Opthas Kandyruu's paranoia was no secret to the Royal Court. "I cannot speak on such things, my lord, I am not privy to the private counsel of the Nobles."

"No, of course not. THAT privilege belongs to your counterpart, Zigmus A'arkenum's toadie, that disloyal bastard Kahlyndaar, the Angel of Cataclysm..."

"My Lord Opthas Kandyruu, the Queen wants you to return to home base," Dumarechiel said, the tension in his eerie voice stressing the message's urgency.

"No. My prey is still out there."

Dumarechiel realized any further discussion was pointless. He gave up and changed the subject. "So what do you plan to do? What would you have me tell Her Sovereign Eminence? How far are you willing to go in pursuit of the crew of The Glide, these Out-Planar human-hybrid adventurers named Mune'stahr and Pylott?"

"You can, as ever, tell the Queen that Opthas Kandyruu will enforce her will. And to do that, I will go as far as needed, or beyond, until the original mandates of the mission are completed."

"This is a dangerous thing you do, my lord, dangerous and impulsive. I fear for your safety..."

Kandyruu's booming voice softened as he said, "Do not fear for me, Dumarechiel. I have not lost my reason. I am simply weary of being told to abandon my duty and stand down. I will run these rogue mongrels to ground and then return to smash the armies of both the Devolutioner Protectorate and the Quegfellum to blood-stained dust --- and I will do it for the greater glory of Infernyya Rebekkon."

The Killer of Gods then turned away from facing The Messenger, over whom he loomed like a weaponry-festooned armored mountain, and projected his mutant extrasensory directional perception out among the byways of The Flow, searching for the path The Glide took as it flew away from the battle zone.

There. He had them. If he didn't know better, he could almost swear they were heading off towards the Fluidic Topological Highway to Kadaverign-Space and thus, thereafter, to Hellmarrow.

                                                                                                * * *

The headache plaguing him was gradually growing in intensity and it was beginning to adversely affect his vision. He concentrated and refocused his eyes. The onset of persistent neuralgia occurred every time he ventured too far away from the confines of the Banborough Aggregation and the malady was not an uncommon one to people who populated that area of the Ventriculum. Zigmus A'arkenum was experiencing a planar vibrational-frequency feedback effect. It was a backlash of his body's vibrational energy-envelope against the disemblage wave emitted by the physical presence of any organic being from Kadaverign-Space..., like The Qaan'Rai. As Infernyya Rebekkon's Minister of Foreign Interactions, A'arkenum actually wasn't forced to subject himself to such discomfort, he could have dispatched an Ambassadorial Envoy in his stead, but as a conspirator covertly working against the Paranescience's regime and the Queen's reign, he had no choice if he was to continue working with The Qaan'Rai. And keeping his secret rendezvous with the Lord-Master of Kadaverign-Space was of paramount importance.

The pain he experienced from that meeting seemed such a very small price to pay for toppling Infernyya Rebekkon from her throne. Moreover, the seditious scheme in which he was involved also included the possibility that A'arkenum would have the opportunity to watch the freakish Queen die -- and that was a pleasure he wasn't about to deny himself, regardless the relatively miniscule amount of suffering he might have to endure.

For his part, Taekonus Helmstrype, The Qaan'Rai of Hellmarrow, was quite aware of the throbbing agony Zigmus A'arkenum underwent in his proximity and the knowledge he was the cause of that hurt very much pleased him. Taekonus Helmstrype vehemently despised every living being not from Kadaverign-Space and took pleasure in any unease or torment he caused them.

Standing two and a quarter meters tall, with a torso as wide as two normal-sized human men, Taekonus Helmstrype dwarfed the waspish and dandified Minister of Foreign Interactions. Attired in hematite-colored, spike-studded body armor adorned with pewter highlights running along the upper shoulders, the sides of his muscular torso, and down the outside of his thick legs into his multi-buckled boots, Helmstrype presented an imposing figure cut from nightmarish cloth. Falling from his shoulders was a cloak composed of myriad, knee-length straps of flexible kevlar-like material, and each tubular strap moved with a mind of its own, like the prehensile tentacles of some dark, predatorial cephalopod. Over his long, lantern-jawed face he wore a bone-white half-mask, a stylized representation of an animal similar to a Terran-Earth hyena baring its fangs, that left his blazing burgundy-hued eyes, slits of fiery energy, bared for the world to see. The Qaan'Rai, a title meaning something similar to "Imperial Warlord" or "Warrior God-King", was one of the few remaining members of an ancient species that had once lived in Jaometron, the innermost collinear circumcenter of the Ventriculum. Those beings were known as "Arkyngales".

Jaometron, a great and wealthy, mighty technological metropolis that extended contiguously across three different Planes of Intradimensional Reality, had ultimately been destroyed by a Concurrency Erasure, a rare event wherein the MetaFlow, undergoing an eruptive Co-Relational Schism, severed all its geometric Trust Relationships with neighboring Cartesian Axiomatic point-determinants. The Arkyngales had been the ruling gentrified class in Jaometron. A place where once seven hundred thousand sentient organic individuals had lived, had been forcibly overwritten by a negative lattice emerging from TimeSpace. There were less than a handful of survivors. Helmstrype, a violently aggressive, yet far-thinking outlaw warlord before the Concurrency event, was the most fearsome of those survivors.

Ensconced inside a large, translucent blue-white globule of effervescent quasiparticulate froth floating freely over top a spinning micro-moon, the two men had met at Zigmus A'arkenum's behest. The micro-moon sat in geosynchronous orbit next to the Reality Fortress at Leviathan's Helm, long declared a free-zone beyond and exempt from the control of the Authoritarchs.

The Reality Fortress at Leviathan's Helm was a moon-sized star station, an enormous computerized artificial intelligence system and autonomous datacloud built into the internal core of an S-type nickel and iron asteroid that sprawled onto the rock's stony surface. Shaped like the exposed, skinless skull of an enormous bull, Leviathan's Helm had been constructed by a Void-based, non-human race predating even the ancient Authoritarchs. The Reality Fortress was now populated by an isolated, self-governing sub-species of Geometricians called "Xaotitans" who both served the Authoritarchs and yet remained politically independent of them. The Xaotitans at Leviathan's Helm were ascetics, almost priest-like in their dedication to and obsession with collating and cataloguing the evolution of the cultures that had begun to develop inside the confines of the Ventriculum.

They were among the few intelligent beings that both Zigmus A'arkenum and Taekonus Helmstrype trusted.

"This place stinks of fire, ash, flesh and rot. It is tainted by the biology of wet meat. I can practically taste the decay of every molecule trapped within it. I truly do not like it here," Helmstrype snarled in a flat, metallic voice that echoed faintly with the sound of sizzling electricity and hissing steam. "I have traveled far. Tell me why it was necessary for us to meet face-to-face."

"I have it on good authority that the crew of The Glide have inserted themselves into our affairs," A'arkenum said bluntly.

"So?"

"You know who I am speaking of, do you not? The soldiers, the armored avengers who confronted the Thetangauss's Asynkronus Bridge Corsairs at the Lithius Iode Netgate at Authentikorre Junction. Remember that? Two against nineteen -- and they won. I'm talking about the two Outplanar devils who took it on themselves to shut down operations for the crime syndicate of Lumiss Ochika, Overlord of the Aokira Clan, over in Hallorberk's Maelstrom at the Y-Spiral of the Locus Swirl Collective," A'arkenum recited. "A veritable army of Aokirans died. They have proven themselves to be formidable foes of ...independent-minded, extra-legal entrepreneurs... whose interests run counter to the Authoritarch status quo."

"I know full well of whom you speak. And I do not consider myself in the same class as those muddle-minded gene-jokes. What I mean to say is that I do not know why I am expected to care," Helmstrype said.

"You need to care. It is important to the continued survival of you and your kingdom. Because the Ventriculum is changing, slowly, ever so slowly I admit, but even the Authoritarchs can feel it... There's a twisted and slightly insane kind of evolution occurring here, amid the streams and tides of the MetaFlow," A'arkenum explained. "Quite a few of the existing, ancient spatial manifolds and the topological isomorphisms that separate the dimensional planes have begun to bleed one into the other, merging, and the old map of the Ventriculum is metamorphosing. We no longer exist within the framework of a Void existing Between the Worlds of Time. We are instead living in a blended Metaverse, a geometrically differentialized Möbius strip where every edge of the Ventriculum touches and overlaps onto another TimeSpace platform. Infinity has wandered far and away from the Void's constant state of Zero. We are becoming part of ALL Realities."

"NOTHING IS SUPPOSED TO LIVE HERE! NOTHING!" Helmstrype raged. "We are separate in our existence and we are organically clean and we are untouched by the decomposition and decay of Meatspace -- that was always how it was supposed to be! We are OUTSIDE of Time! If what you say is happening happens, then we will be no more than just another polytopical Cartesian 'bubble universe' where everything born is just waiting to die, embedded with its own preset termination point. The Glide and its crew are representatives of a cancerous infection that we need to destroy!"

A'arkenum sighed. "That may well be, but there's every likelihood their investigation will lead them to come visit Hellmarrow."

Helmstrype's eyes glittered. "I do not want such pig-flesh to set foot inside my domain. Their interference could compromise The Endeavor."

"Exactly. Hellmarrow is the principal territory within the Tychonoff Axiom's 'Realm Differentius'. If the Glide's crew discover any links leading to The Endeavor, then there's no way they'll avoid invading your kingdom as they look to set things back to how they once were. I predict you'll need to do something to prevent that, something extreme."

"Why couldn't you get Queen Rebekkon's minions to sidetrack them? I would think it would have been easy enough to do," Helmstrype growled.

"Command of the Black Sun Seraphs is not a matter of bureaucratic policy so much as it is a command of mutant extrasensory ability -- an ability I do not possess.  But I have a contingency," A'arkenum admitted. "But it involves diverting and repurposing one of the Black Sun Seraphs. I'll need to make use of Kahlyndaar, the Angel of Cataclysm. And for that, I'll need your help."

"How so?"

"The Aingyllian Horde. You'll need to catch the attention of Androkambryah the Dissenter and get him to steer their migration over to the Inferno Pits at the city of Lobarth Ceryndum..."

Helmstrype grunted appreciatively and, momentarily satisfied with A'arkenum's plan, nodded his approval.

"Consider it done," he said.

                                                                                           * * *

An additional 17,280 seconds, or 4.8 Terran-Earth hours, had passed since the last successful cyclical reboot and reassertion of the Ventriculum. That meant that the structural re-ignition of The Flow was just over nine hours overdue, which further meant that they were a third of the way into the passage of yet a second synchronic cycle without a restart. The Metaflow was beginning to show definite signs of increasing distress as voidal integrity began to further decline.

The periodicity of erupting Extant Aggregations, volcano-like quantum extrusions that rocked the Ventriculum's border membranes that created tremendous cavities, breaches that acted like reverse gravity wells, increased as they spewed space-warping physical geysers of Chronal Instability.

Gravitometric plasma streams writhed like vast electrified worms as they fell prey to radioactive infection and suppuration, spilling diseased, syrupy quantum-string particles throughout planar zones. Planet-sized Brachiamobes, semi-sentient, eukaryotic astral-bacteria moving through chronally-syntopic fields, sandbars in the Flow, underwent violent seizures that created cracks in TimeSpace. Schrödinger particles began to separate, the Here-and-Now ripping away from the There-and-Then. Huge sub-frequency slip-torrents flared, caught fire and burned with frenzied abandon, immolating large expanses of Bosonic scales.

Any sentient, living organic creature became brutally aware that something was forcing the gray oceanic space in between the Macrocosm's spatial dimensions to eat Itself.

The oncoming view of their flight corridor was intimidating. They were traveling along the Ventriculum's Tychonoff Axiom before accessing the Andrayevich Manifold Network's "Incidence" zonal region. As mammoth a vessel as The Glide undoubtedly was, with its equatorial circumference and internal volume being equal to that of three sports stadiums on Earth, the relative size of the ship was no more than that of a standard metropolitan skyscraper as it sailed the path between the enormity of The Frozen Kohlaussaye. The lifeless, petrified bodies of eight titanic humanoid beings, each of them three times the size and mass of Mount Everest on planet Earth, lined the space lane four to a side preceding the outermost perimeter of The Incidence. The Kohlaussaye were locked in stationary quanta-synchronous relativity to the tail end of the passage through the Tychonoff Axiom as the passage inserted into The Incidence.

Few sentient humanoids had ever dared travel to this region to encounter The Kohlaussaye.

Mune'stahr sat suspended in the exo-housing harness of the access-cradle built atop the Z-axis armature of the centralized Systems Command Ring controlling The Glide's Macroplane Sector Aggregation Monitor. The Macroplane Sector Monitor was a vast machine, a monolithic mechanized cylinder studded with various output connectors and fiber-relay cable patch-panels affixed to the inner wall of a well-like doughnut cavity set into the mammoth shiftship's internal radial center.  At the top of the quarter-kilometer high cylinder was a housing shaped like a huge tortoise-shell and it's equatorial region was inset with curved, almond-shaped semi-transparent windows that were scanned by glowing bulbs at the ends of arching, snake-like metal protuberances. The Sector Monitor was a sensor-fed data-collector and collation warehouse fed by impulses from The Glide's external antennae array. It allowed human minds to catalogue and interpret the external spatial contours,fields and topography of the Metacosm through which the vessel traveled in away understandable to the limited interpretive abilities of human mammalian psychometric spatial recognition. It mapped the Flow, rendering it into viewable, modular composite parts and translating it into a high-definition, 4D holographic projection.  The Macroplane Sector Aggregation Monitor had been an innovation from the shiftship's previous pilot-navigator-captain, the vicious and amoral space warlock named 'Uhzayshul', he who was also known throughout some Planes of Reality as "Strayn'juhr" and among others as "The Journeyer". But he had also been more famously called "Forynnuhr" and that name, particularly on the arid macro-planet Teshiwahur, was the name of a deadly, villainous being. He had been intelligent and he had been powerful, but, ultimately, he had also been thoroughly unsuited to command the power of as advanced and intricate a wonder-craft as The Glide.

Forynnuhr/Uhzayshul was long dead, killed through misadventure as a homicidal plot of his own design backfired against him, but he had left his mark on the design of many of The Glide's more interactive, human-centric networking systems. His death had heralded and initiated the unplanned arrival and installation of Mune'stahr and Pylott as the vessel's new crew.

"Well, the Argossyan cyborg naval-commander is aboard now. She followed us, as you predicted. Neuronia Syngulareous. I am guessing the Argossyan Navy wants her to monitor and somehow influence our decision to obstruct or terminate the military campaign directed towards their sector of the Flow. But we don't play favorites. They should know better," Pylott, who was standing at the circular machine's collar-rail on the sixth level's port side mezzanine, said to Mune'stahr. "It's always nice to see you still know how to make friends, but you should know that both NeeSahrim and I think there are too damn many strangers aboard ship right now. So do you want to share with me WHY we were instructed to allow this person through security?"

Mune'stahr interrupted his spatial monitoring and sat back in the access-cradle's exo-housing harness, taking the opportunity to take his eyes away from the tripod-mounted scanning goggles.

"You know that the Argossyan's aren't really native to that planar zone, right? They were a community of emigrees from the Trapezyeum Disk's Diffusion Tundra when they originally came upon the Argossyan Isthmus outside the Wrathbeurne Hive Domes."

"So?"

"So normal mammalian humanoids can't survive the atmospheric and climatic conditions of the Trapezyeum Disk's Diffusion Tundra. It's a poison zone for organics residing here in the Flow. But the Argossyans survived there, even if only for a few generations. That makes the Argossyans evolutionary bio-variants, mutants. The Devolutioners know that and that is special to them. They can use that DNA data, artificially replicate its structure, maybe even harvest the actual macromolecules, and enhance their own people. After all, that's part of what the Devolutioners do when they invade new territories -- they look for ways to supplement and augment their own native genetic superiority by stealing biochemical traits from other species and races," Mune'stahr explained, his manner slightly distracted as he thought aloud. "But not the ultra-reverent followers of the great Meta-Pious Eminence. The Quegfellum realize that, too, but unlike the Devolutioner Protectorate, the Quegfellum Union want nothing to do with that DNA strain except to stamp it out from existence. That's because, in accordance to their religious scripture, it is by definition labelled as 'impure' and 'aberrant'."

"Again, so?" Pylott said, unmoved.

"I'm relatively sure Lieutenant Commander Neuronia Syngulareous isn't a native-born Argossyan, but has been raised to believe that she is," Mune'stahr said. "I think, well, actually I'm fairly certain, the Lieutenant Commander is in truth a Nebulancer."

Pylott stepped forward closer to Mune'stahr's exo-housing harness, her anger flaring. "A Nebulancer! She'd better NOT be! Those cold-blooded psychopaths have crossed our paths half a dozen times and each time they've done everything they could to murder us. If NeeSharim finds out, she'll kill her on the spot...!"

"No, actually, NeeSharim won't," Mune'stahr said. "I already relayed my suspicions to her during the meta-space dogfight outside the ship and she surreptitiously ran a masked bio-scan on the Lieutenant Commander. The result was that Neuronia Syngulareous is genetically 72 percent Nebulancer. Yes, NeeSharim did strongly request I sever all diplomatic interaction with Syngulareous and she mentioned she was exploring the possibility of maximally-demoting her under the guise of a 'random battle casualty', but I argued counter to that. Neuronia Syngulareous was not raised inside The Hive. She doesn't know that culture. Besides, we're not in the business of conducting targeted assassinations."

"You must have presented a damn good argument besides just that," Pylott said. "The Nebulancers are relentless colonizers, fanatical, imperialistic Ascendent Integernarians intent on realizing the violent, expansionist, manifest destiny of their Hive Nation. They are xenophobe bigots. If just over seventy percent of her genetic make-up is Nebulancer, you can believe those compulsions are slumbering just below the surface of her waking mind. She will betray us. Worse, she may directly try to kill us after she meets a Hexabreed like Poli'Artta Ranzireth..."

"She's a hybridized cyborg-anthrobot. She has been imbued with Transhumanist Robotic Ethics Behavioral Engrammation," Mune'stahr argued. "Don't you see? The parameters of her Artificial Intelligence non-subversion alignment ethical sub-routines won't let the Nebulancer within her take command of her actions. Her mind has been programmed to be anathemic towards anything and everything the Nebulancers are. She is, for all intents and purposes, human and capable of free will unless it countermands her ethics programming."

"So WHY do we need her?"   Pylott demanded.

"I think the Nebulancers are somehow behind this territorial border conflict.   I think they may have somehow engineered this mini-war for their own ends."

"And you're basing this theory on what evidence?"

"I don't have any solid evidence. Just a hunch, a feeling... I can't quite put my finger on it. But there's something going on out there and it's somehow linked to the cessation of the Flow's reboot periodicity. I think the Nebulancers have a lot to do with what might be waiting for us in Hellmarrow."

Pylott thought a moment, absorbing what Mune'stahr said. Then she sighed. It was a slow noise of grudging agreement, but there was more than a little resentment in the sound.

"After all this time, I expect better from you. This is the kind of thing you and I should definitely have discussed beforehand, before you made an independent decision to potentially endanger the ship and endanger me..."

Mune'stahr's eyes widened. "Whoa! Wait, you KNOW I would never intentionally or unintentionally do something reckless enough to put you in danger..."

"And yet, you did. Now's the time for you to shut the hell up."

And with that, Pylott turned her back and walked away, clearly letting her disappointment show.

                                                                                                * * *

...tinkle, flicker, twinkle, clatter, click-clack... so fragile, so delicate, musical and yet atonal, the reverberation of memory and place, a dream beginning, a nightmare spawning ...

The sound had returned. She could feel it rather than actually hear it. Her heart caught in her throat. She fought to control her breathing, tamping down and squelching the urge to hyperventilate, to huff and puff and wheeze as the music of broken spheres danced inside her head. At first she'd believed she'd only imagined its presence, but now, after repeat occurrences, she was sure that it was real. The acceptance that what she'd experienced was a true thing was disturbing. She had experienced a trio of sleep cycles since the last time it had teased the edges of her perception, but there it was again, enticing her, beckoning her.

She was afraid. She could not afford for this to be happening. Everything within her, her intellect, her intuition, her very soul, told her this was wrong... Something was knocking at the door. Something dark and alien. Something very, very bad that threatened to infect her with a ferocious and uncontrollable rage --- a rage for Chaos.

What had she been doing? Focus, remember... Yes, she and her intimate coterie, Royals of the Noble Court, had taken the Imperial Yacht, a Wavecraft Flowship, out from its slip at the Paranescience Dry Dock. They had been headed out for a brief tour of the nearest incorporated territories.

The sound... flicker, twinkle, clatter, tick, tick, tick...

Do not respond. Don't answer the sound. Turn away, think of something else. Concentrate. Desperately seek some kind of distraction, something all-encompassing and difficult, quantitative genetics and statistical population evolutionary synthesis, DNA haplogroups, associative linkage disequilirium, the ingredients of cell surface antigens... anything. Don't let it him. Don't let HIM in. Stupid, stupid woman, where is your pride now? A queen, remember that, focus on that, Ego, let all that is megalomaniacal run free and wild. You are the Queen. Be The Queen. Arise and know the Righteous Power of Command, know that all that can be imagined can be...

His. No. His, yes. Nononono. She forced her fevered brain to fight, and fight, and fight... the trembling that seized her was so powerful her face contorted in speechless agony and she doubled over, clutching the arms of her chair so tightly that her fists left indentations in the formerly smooth, featureless chrome-skinned metal.

I am here. I am the Prayer you fear admitting you recited. I am the fire that fills the emptiness inside you. When you are weak, when you are broken, I am the Will and The Way. You need me. Without me, you are nothing. I am Power.

Can you not hear the music of my Glory?

Tears began to roll hotly down Infernyya Rebekkon's face.

She wasn't sure of who she was anymore, the sound permeated every corner of her consciousness. It enwrapped her. It possessed her. She was no longer in control, HE was.

Fellmanghul, that was the word, the name, that blazed across the wide panoramic screen of her sentient wakefulness. Fellmanghul.

Sitting in the Ready Room of her wavecraft's Command Deck, just off the ship's bridge, Infernyya Rebekkon reached across to the intercom system transmit button on the arm of her mechanized Guidance Center Throne. The trembling that had seized her limbs as the sound had enveloped her mind had now stopped.

"Make course for Lobarth Ceryndum," she abruptly commanded of Bridge Navigation. "Increase propulsion velocity by twenty-five percent."

Good, good. That would cut her flight time in half. She'd get there just in time to see the streets run red with hot rivers of fresh blood.

And then, afterwards, they would travel onward, deeper into the MetaFlow. To Hellmarrow.

                                                                                               ***