A dry wind whistled a haunting, unmelodious tune.  She kept her eyes scrunched tightly shut.

The hornet’s buzzing at the back of her mind a few moments ago had long-since evolved into an insistent shrill scream.   Now there was only a ringing silence.  She sucked in a huge draught of air and it hurt.  Her ribcage throbbed with an onset of cold pain.  The air as it flowed into her open mouth tasted of metal and ash.  The skin of her exposed flesh felt as if it was effervescent, fizzing and rippling, and she could feel a psychic wave of dark passions rolling up and down the length of her spine.

Some noxious part of her subconscious had stretched her mouth into a twisted smile.

      The fundamental forces of the universe had turned themselves inside out and the Laws of Attraction had taken over, the Hilbert Lattices framing the corollary of Retracting Co-Linearity were promoted to Ascendency, and temporal cohesion momentarily disintegrated, freeing the irreducible components to stream in particulate fashion and invert.

She’d completed the transit.  Again, despite the fact she’d promised herself she’d only cross the void if the situation were impressively dire enough to warrant her dive into dark corruption.   But here she was.   She was back.

 She slowly opened her eyes.  She was on a beach, the sluggish waves from the gray sea slid off the gathered dunes lining the shore like cold oil.  Light fell upon the land like dead leaves.  She saw, in the distance, a crumbling fortress of aged granite rising from behind the imposing wreckage of a broken statue, a mighty colossus that once had stood taller than the fort's highest parapets, straddling a graveled road that led to the redoubt’s huge twin doors.

 This was once a place of majesty, of legendry, of power.  Once.

 Now it was a hollow ghost of a place, the shell of some great departed beast, the stony carcass of a primordial predator once master of this dry beach head.

 She did not belong here.  She had been summoned here against her will.     Above all else, she had not wanted to come here.

 She was home.  And with that thought, that realization, her memories of her life as Meredith McCrae Chapel began to rapidly fade from her conscious mind…

 Nygeia.  Her name was Nygeia and she was royalty, a princess to this dead world.

 She recalled that not far away there had once been a place of kings, tyrants, knights and rogues, a fortress of aged granite that had dwelled ever in the shadows cast by an imposing metal statue, a mighty colossus that towered taller than the fort's highest parapets, the massive steely figure straddling a wide graveled road leading to huge twin doors set into the fortress' walls.  In time, it had become a hollow place, the cracked and crumbling shell of some great departed beast, a primordial temple to predation, once master of the dry and blank-faced plains beyond the shore, and it resided in the memories of only the very old and those gone mad.

 The Pahrayah had lived within that place. Monstrous and waiting.  An enigmatic and often incomprehensible creature imbued with a duality of mutant morphology and psychology.  It had, in this region of territories on the edge of the Forever Plain, ruled over the lives of tens of thousands of broken, bitter survivors of the Long Death for decades before she had turned against it, rebelling against its tyranny and oppression.  It had lived and ruled from that dark ruin which had once been her home.  And it had died there.  At her hands.

She quickly pushed the memory from the forefront of her mind.

“Been a long time.  Truth to tell, I did not believe I would miss you as much as I did.  And that is a very disturbing thought,” a sonorous male voice said edgily.  It came from atop a sloping sand dune to her left…

Nygeia stared up, squinting against the silvery-white light cast by one of the planet’s sickly, dying suns.

She smiled.

It was the Knight.  The imposing, sonorous voice that greeted her belonged to a wide-shouldered man in gray armor astride a towering and intimidating four-legged reptilian steed.  The dragon-like animal possessed a long-face and muscular, armor-scaled legs like the stalks of gnarled trees, its flowing mane of coarse hair ran down its thick neck across muscular bull-like shoulders and ended at the beginnings of an ornate, metal-studded saddle.  The beast’s long, saurian tail was segmented and ended in a bony, spiked ball resembling a large, knobby battle mace.  The creature was not like the majority of beasts of burden one would encounter, it possessed an unusual intelligence beyond that of most beasts, being quick to learn and capable of rudimentary deductive reasoning.  Though it was not what one would call friendly, it was mostly tolerant of other non-threatening life-forms and possessed a strange symbiotic bond with its rider.  Both animal and rider were alien, inscrutable, and engendered an air of menace and of violence held barely in check.

 The Knight’s name was D’Spayr and he was a masterless soldier who had once been an Outlands Marshal, a Knight in service to the Council of Free Territories, a survivor of the dread Emperium Crusades.  He had suffered the chaos and savagery of the Fall of the Emperium and was a survivor of the unchecked barbarity that followed.  He was a stern and contemplative man of intelligence and high moral fiber, a celebrated warrior through and through, and, though he was predominantly a loner, he was a loyal and steadfast companion.

 And he was her friend.

 “I feel I should apologize for not preparing you better for my rather abrupt transit back Upworld,” Nygeia said.  “I am ashamed to admit that I am not always in control of when and where I appear…”

 “Nothing to apologize for,” D’Spayr said evenly.  “I am owed no explanations.”

 “But I feel that you are…, there’s something a little horrifying about having someone you know just disappear.”

 “I would choose to say ‘disturbing’ as opposed to horrifying,” the Knight said.  “There are so many other more visceral and violent things in this place that are better suited to the description of ‘horrifying’…”

 Nygeia detected a stiffness in his tone, a formality, that brought her a moment’s feeling of hurt.  It was as she’d expected: she herself had felt that she had abandoned the Knight when she’d been drawn back to Earth, and his reaction now showed her that, indeed, he did feel that she had abandoned him to his Fates all alone.  In the short time they’d been together, they’d come to rely on one another.  Now she knew he felt as if she were no longer reliable.  She was, to his mind, merely a visitor here, able to leave and achieve some form of freedom, if only for a short time, from the tension and the horror that governed life in this place.  He had no such escape.  He was doomed to remain amongst the mad landscapes of the Withered Land.

 “I am a both a victim of and a slave to cosmic forces that are far beyond my meager abilities to predict or control.  I don’t know the whys or wherefores of my strange dual existence, though I have tried on many occasions to find out.  I’ll admit that part of me is afraid of discovering the truth.  But you need to know I would not have left you had I any choice,” she said.

 “When you go away, when you are Upworld, do you remember us back here?  Are you some version at all of the person I have come to know?  Are you even still you?

 She hesitated before answering.  “I remember everything that has happened here even though I am not here.  But Upworld is a vastly different reality from this… my life feels --- is --- nothing like the one I have here.  Sometimes I doubt my own sanity, not truly knowing which world is real.”

 “A dreamer dreaming of being in a dream,” D’Spayr remarked with more than a touch of acid in his tone.

 Neither spoke for a moment until D’Spayr pointed to the four foot long, rune-covered pole she carried.

 “And when you are not here,” he asked, “Do you still have that?”

 She looked at the scepter-like wand in her metal-covered fist with a thoughtful almost rueful expression.  It was almost like she was seeing it anew, like she had not expected it to be there…

 …or perhaps she looked at it like it was such an extension of herself that she could not imagine it being anywhere else.

 “No, I do not,” she admitted.

 The Knight’s steed chuffed and made a brief, ragged whistling noise.   Sometimes it reacted symbiotically with its master’s mood, even though the great armored lizard was not entirely enamored of him or his choice in companions.  Nygeia had noticed on more than one occasion that there was an undeniable link, a symbiosis of sorts, between the two that transcended the common relationship between a steed and its rider.

 She drew in a deep breath.  “I think that the dream’s inevitable body count has a tendency to keep me better grounded than that.”

 “Ah, yes, the dead we have left in our wake.  Interesting choice of an anchor, that.  So you might suspect that I am nothing more than a figment of your imagination,” D’Spayr said ruefully.  “I suppose, then, the question is ‘Which Reality feels more real’?”

 Nygeia frowned.  She answered slowly.  “I can’t tell.  Really, I can’t.  I’m sorry.”

 The Knight nodded without speaking.  She could tell by his body language that the discussion was, for now, finished.

 Disconcerted, she decided it was time to change the subject.  “For what it is worth, you seem well.  Of that I am glad.  And Lumynn?  Where is he?”

 “After a bit of misadventure in service to a usurper king-in-exile in Oshplaktur, Lumynn took on a consignment as a guide across the Cold Wastes of the Forever Plain.  We were growing scarce of coin.  He is again on caravan in service to a nobleman from the Duchy of Wyst Terringer.  He and I have planned to rendezvous soon outside the Baroncy of Khanderveel, just east of Wyst Terringer.”

 “In the market for a traveling companion?”

 “I am.  But a friend would be better.”

 Nygeia felt her face flush.  Despite her normally reserved and cautious nature, despite her not inconsiderable discipline and self-control, she could not suppress the happiness she felt at D’Spayr’s response.  All may not be fully forgiven, but they were still on relatively good terms.

 “A friend you have, sir.  Now and always,” she said.

 “Don’t get all sticky,” he said.  “You know how I am with sentiment.”

 She was about to say something playful in return when she noticed Mystikyll striding purposefully from over the top of an ocean-facing sand dune.

                               *     *     *    

 He saw her.  There she was.  Nygeia.  The legend was real: tall and proud and beautiful, defiantly female in a world shaped and ruled by male power, unconsciously arrogant with the blessings of her power and position in this fractured decaying society.  The Princess.  The Rebel.  The Chaos Witch.  The Warrior.  She was dressed in a pewter button-studded, tan-hued leather tunic.  Her face, a strong woman's face, classically aristocratic, just beginning to know the lines of age, was draped in shadow under a voluminous drooping hood attached to a billowing cloak.  Her piercing hazel eyes were cold and calculating.  Under the cloak, she was clad in form-fitting, banded, green-hued metal armor.  She held a four and a half foot long, segment-banded walking stick, a lightning staff, in her gauntleted fist.  A wavy tumble of thick auburn hair fell across her outer shoulders to midway down her shoulder blades from around the edges of the hood.  The destroyer of legends, she had once commanded an army of sorcerers.

 It had been her testimony that had been principal in the condemnation of the Fraternity of Machus.  It had been her sword that had set the armies of the Great Purge upon their march to the destruction of mighty Qatedralle Zwarte in the Vorgianis Territories.  She had been one of the loudest voices calling for the death of the Machusians.

 The sight of her set his teeth on edge.  She was an alien.  She did not belong here in his world, among his people.

 Taking his gaze off from the watery horizon beyond the bleak shore, Mystikyll also recognized the figure seated astride a massive reptilian steed to which the armored woman was drawn.  He was a rarity among the remains of the fallen caste-system remaining of Withered Land royalty.  His name was D'Spayr and he had a reputation as a dedicated and ferocious champion of the downtrodden.  He was a professional soldier, a Knight and a war-hero of some manner, though Mystikyll would be hard-pressed to name which of the Withered Land's many brutal wars in which the Knight had fought.  It didn't matter.  The Knight had once been an integral part of a military unit who had mercilessly hunted cannibalistic ruin-dwellers in the Western Hills and in the crumbling remains of the abandoned outer fortress ringing the perimeter of a metropolis known only as "The City".  Worse, it was rumored D'Spayr was secretly rogue royalty within the upper echelons of the Emperium, related to a tyrannical, conquest-hungry madman known as Bishop Bluhd.

 Mystikyll decided he would enjoy dragging this man into the dirt, making this man know the shame and the pain he and his brethren of the Fraternity of Machus had been made to bear.

 Mystikyll was no warrior, but his hate made him strong.

 “Well, she’s an interesting one, isn’t she?” a masculine voice commented from over his shoulder.

 Mystikyll turned to see Broken Mirror Covert Ops team members Madigan and Carmoody standing on either side of him, flanking him in case of danger, either danger posed by him or danger originating from him.  The Broken Mirror team were exhaustively trained and highly pragmatic, with enough active field experience to know when to adapt to any number of fluid field situations on a moment’s notice.  Although their automatic rifles were carried at rest across their torsos in a three-point harness sling, the men were combat-primed.  The level of trust to which they held their association with Mystikyll was not particularly high, so they were, it became increasingly obvious, always ready to make the adaption of considering him a “hostile” as opposed to a “friendly” now that they’d arrived in the Withered Land.

 “Dunno about that, Sarge,” Madigan said in response to Carmoody’s comment.  “She’s a looker, alright, but the big guy in armor on the wingless dragon kind of has my attention.”

 “That doesn’t look good, does it?”

 “No, sir, it doesn’t,” Madigan said.

 Madigan favored Mystikyll with a hard look as he said, “Anything special we, meaning the Broken Mirror team, should know about these folks?  Is she the local contact with whom you were going to rendezvous?  ‘Cause I don’t remember you mentioning your contact might have a chaperone.”

 “She is the one,” Mystikyll answered, his manner cryptic.  “But, no, I did not expect her to bring anyone else.”

 Madigan turned to Carmoody and made a dissatisfied face.  “Looks like we might have a situation here.”

 “Hell, Mads, we already got us a situation with those other two folks coming at us from across that damn desert…”

 Carmoody mic’d-up and radioed his observations back to Major Holloway.

 ** Every sentient, thinking creature knows that there is more to their Reality than what their senses can reveal; there are layers piled one upon the other than make up the complex skin of the physical universe.  And there are places where the layers bleed one into the other, places where the lines blur, where the membranes separating one layer from another are porous.  Within the hidden framework of every world in the Universe, there is a substratum, an Underverse, and much like the composition of our own physical bodies, there are pores and pathways that crisscross and intersect between the layers, bisecting the stratum.  It is possible to travel those pathways and there are those who have been born with the talent, the awareness and the power to do just that -- transition from one layer to another, from one place to another, defying the standard laws governing physical travel.

 Znoviah of the Night Marshals was one such person.  She was a Teleporter.  She could be anywhere and anyplace, often so quickly it appeared as though she were in different places almost simultaneously, and she traveled a very special, very obscure pathway known only to a few.  This unique boulevard of egress was known to the few scholars remaining in the Withered Land as “the Null Trajectory” or, to those learned, spiritually-leaning intellectuals given to less mathematic mien “the Cold Barrens”.

 The Cold Barrens represented a path that could only be traveled by those no longer physically bound to one single domain, to one Plane of Existence.  It was only open to the Dead.

 Znoviah was of a race of extrasenorily-gifted people who could “see” where the Time/Space membrane between physical destinations was thinnest.  She was imbued with a power to manipulate a wavelength of paradoxically dormant kinetic energies in the magnetic fields at such points and then temporarily open a gateway though which she, and others whom she could envelope in a bubble of dissolution, could travel.

 The Cold Barrens was an avenue of travel only beings like the Night Marshals could use.

 It was through just this portal that Chybbo had directed Znoviah to guide his team as they hunted the invaders from Upworld…**

 “So now that she’s here, how are you planning to approach her?” Madigan asked Mystikyll.

 The alien the Earth soldiers called The Ambassador made a grumbling noise in the back of his throat and opened his mouth to speak…

 And froze, his eyes widening in horror as blood began to suddenly pour from Madigan’s open mouth.  The soldiers face went immediately white and pasty and he slowly cast a very surprised and alarmed glance down towards the center of his chest…

 A foot and a half of a serrated edged metal blade had emerged from between Madigan’s pectoral muscles, the razor-sharp buzzsaw teeth of the blade dripped blood and bits of flesh.  Madigan coughed wetly and his trembling hands scrambled spastically as he tried to bring his weapon to bear on a target, any target, as his mind realized he had been impaled…

 But his assailant was behind him.

 Looking just past Madigan’s shoulder, something gnarled and decayed, a menacing scarecrow figure that moved with ungainly jerky movements, like a sped-up film animation that was missing random frames as it played, stepped from out of a shimmering translucent portal that had formed in the air itself. Mystikyll immediately recognized them for what they were.

 Night Marshals.  Dead things still impossibly galvanized by eldritch energies, still following the dictates of the last memories they had, still fighting for causes and commanders who were likely long dead themselves.  Relentless and furious, tireless and implacable --- you could not negotiate with them, you could not bribe them, you could not reason with them.  They pursued their prey, hunting.  Eternally.

 Without so much as a word, Mystikyll ran.