Regret.  He was consumed by a deep and all-abiding regret.  He should have stayed in Oshplaktur.  There, amongst the thieves, whores, witches and power-play intrigues between a trio of battling, exiled kings, he had known where it was he stood.  He had no such sense of certainty in this dire clime.

 Driven by angry gusts of wind, blue-black smoke rolled over the body-littered expanse of the battlefield, catching the edges of the tattered tunic remaining intact over The Knight's heavy armor.

 To his right and just at the edges of his peripheral vision, the ruins of the fortress creaked and groaned as the structure continued its slow collapse following the hours-long assault.  The Knight stood on a weed-covered knoll above a ragged outcropping of rock at the western edge of a thirty acre clearing, larger than twenty football fields.  It was midday, though the casual observer would not have been able to tell from the position of the pallid suns riding the foggy sky.  A flurry of hot cinders near his position was suddenly caught in the wind, the sparks flashing a deep reddish-orange, tumbling in a spiral like a nautilus shell laid on its side.  Rent and battered fragments of body armor from fallen cavalry riders littered the pebble-strewn sand and the blackened, charred remains of their dead or dying steed-animals were lumped in with other debris from the battle.  And there were far too many dead men to count.

 Everything stank of blood.

 The Knight took his gauntleted hand from off the sore shoulder he'd been ineffectually massaging and he slowly began to walk across the killing field, taking care not to trip over the debris or to stress his already exhausted muscles.  He passed the skeletal frame from a shattered breach-machine, the huge stone and metal head of the machine's ramming piston detached from the device and lying in the gritty, dry soil like a severed head from some defeated war-god.  But that was a poet's conceit.  There was no grand metaphor at work in this place, no poetry, no art.  He knew better.  The war-gods were never defeated.   They were not like other gods to which men prayed.  Places like this were their cathedrals, their altars.  They drew strength from carnage such as this.  Prayers meant nothing to them.  Only blood.  Only pain and death.

 The Knight had seen far too much of this kind of madness in his life.

 He cast a sidelong glance through squinted eyes at the crumbling remains of the fortress.  Men fought to take it.  Men fought to keep it.  Did it contain money or treasure?  Perhaps.  Did it hold the prideful heart of a kingdom?   Possibly.  Did it house a royal family or a knavish exile?   Maybe.  But to look at it now... Wreckage.  Ruin.  Humans imbued it with a value it did not truly have.  It was only a construct of stone and wood and steel.  It represented only what they imagined it did.  In the eyes of the Universe, it had no value.

 Two centuries ago, The Long Death had arrived heralded by a massive, flaming meteor swarm that had preceded the uncovering of a colossal rent, a huge tear in the dark ocean of the sky.  A hole had appeared in Space itself.  The populace of The Knight's world had named that slash in the cosmos, “The Wound”.  It had heralded the end of everything he'd once held dear.  Empires fell, technology died, histories were either erased or rewritten.  His entire world suffered beyond common imagining.

 And yet, somehow, for some reason or another, humans still fought over worthless, desiccated, dying pieces of real estate like the field on which he stood.  Men and women stubbornly maintained that the contents of castles, villages and townships still maintained some value in this shattered world, a value worth fighting over.

 It was not worth what had happened here this day.

 The Knight had come to this place seeking to save a single life, looking to find and rescue a lost traveler running from the injustices of poverty and slavery to a greedy and cruel warlord.  He had come too late.  Worse, he had come at the height of the battle and had been forced to defend himself in a conflict in which he had no part.

 The war-gods were doubtlessly laughing at him today.

 He regretted the entertainment he had inadvertently provided them.  He should have stayed in Oshplaktur.

 He sheathed his double-bladed shatter sword just as he heard the first blaring blasts of the Membrane as it was pierced by cosmic energies he did not fully understand.  That astoundingly loud, unnerving noise shook the very air hovering over the battlefield and the few other survivors of the conflict raised their heads wearily, sadly, realizing what it meant... 

 Someone was coming, someone from Upworld.  Strangers were coming to the Withered Land...

                   *           *           *

 For Benjamin Veneralli, holder of doctorates in quantum mechanics and in non-linear analysis and set theory, the whole affair had begun nineteen months ago at a joint National Science Foundation and Collaborative Scientific Research Federation conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

 Veneralli, a misanthrope and a cynic, considered most conferences and seminars to be dry, pointless affairs and preferred to read about impending or new breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical organization journals.  He found his fellow scientists and theoreticians to be tedious, egocentric didactic little men who shared little with him.  Veneralli had been, in his youth through his early forties, an Army paratrooper, a mountain climber who had tackled the Himalayas, a motorcyclist who’d pursued the land speed record, and a martial artist as a practitioner of Kempo, one of the oldest of the Japanese karate forms.  Now in his late fifties, Veneralli had little patience for the fragile, often timid or befuddled, socially-awkward scientific recluses who frequented the conference circuit.  They were politicians and toadies.  He was, though embarrassed to admit it, a bit of a Nietzschian and frequently found himself at odds with the aloof and disconnected ivory tower intellects he met.  They were paper tigers.  Veneralli was not a paper tiger.  To Veneralli, science was a challenge thrown out to Mankind by the Cosmos, a puzzle daring to be solved, a beast waiting to be tamed.  Only the bold should take up the cause and carry the banner.

 Dr. Veneralli was not terribly well liked within his professional community.

 And, it should go without saying, that Doctor Benjamin Veneralli was working on his fourth marriage –- and his seventh job in eleven years.

 So it was strange that, in the sweltering summer months of the Brazilian summer, he met Crofton Wettinger from the mysterious Harbeckke Institute.  Croft Wettinger, a strange reptilian man nearly as wide as he was tall, was not a scientist, although he was very well versed in physics and higher mathematics for a lay person.  Wettinger had a reputation in the physics community of being something of a synthesist, a generalist who pulled together many scientific theories and hypotheses to create a dynamic, almost organic, tapestry of interconnected reasoning: he prided himself on seeing the “Big Picture”.   Like Veneralli, he made it apparent he did not much like the other people attending the conference, carrying himself apart from them in that way only very, very wealthy men of industry could.   More than just confident, influence and a sense of command were native to the core of him.   He was an entrepreneur and more, he was a recruiter.   He had come to the conference with his own agenda.

 He was looking for someone who wasn’t afraid of upsetting the proverbial apple cart, not a crackpot or a revolutionary necessarily, but someone credentialed who liked to take risks.  He was looking for someone like Benjamin Veneralli.

 Likewise, though he didn’t know it at the time, Veneralli was looking for someone like Wettinger.  Their meeting was less an act of Fate than it was the first accident in a sequence of disasters.

 “It’s all damned disappointing.  What crap.  They’re a bunch of egocentric, frightened rabbits, aren’t they?”  Wettinger had begun, directing his brief tirade towards his nearest audience, that being Veneralli, without introduction or preamble.

 Veneralli had regarded the man with an expression of extreme skepticism.  His comments were neither courted nor particularly welcome.   Veneralli had thought the man crude and disrespectful.

 Later he’d come to realize that Wettinger was a consummate salesman, a satanic master of seduction and manipulation, who’d played on Veneralli’s deeply seated frustrations.   More, he came to suspect that Wettinger wasn’t really a human male at all, but something else altogether, an emissary, an alien, a visitor from Outside…

 “Oh come on, don’t put up that clichéd wall of the academician’s defensiveness,” Wettinger had chided.  “You know damn well there isn’t an original idea in that conference chamber and that if they did, by chance, stumble over an original idea, they’d do their very best to ridicule it and summarily stamp it out of existence.  They’ve all got too much invested in the current status quo, too much invested in their fragile reputations, and they’re running scared of frightening off grant money by being seen as ‘radicals’.  What complete crap.”

 “And, of course, you know better than they.  It’s a conspiracy, right?  But only you can see it.  Wow, that’s original.  I suppose you have something different and groundbreaking that you’ve decided they are all studiously ignoring?” Veneralli had retorted.

 “Yes,” Wettinger had said simply, “I do.  I have proof of the other side of Reality, the darker side of Infinity.”

 “What?”

 “Worlds beyond worlds,” Crofton Wettinger had whispered reverently.

 Thinking back, Veneralli realized that this had been the point where he should have run away from the little man as quickly as his legs could carry him.

 “Jesus, please tell me you’re not wasting my time babbling about so-called ‘alternate realities’… I don’t need to hear about that crackpot other-dimensional idiocy,” Veneralli had said impatiently, eager to get away from the brash, insolent think-tank executive.

 “Well, I guess I assumed you were a bit more independent and intellectually courageous than you really are,” the man had commented as he’d shaken his head.  He had then taken the opportunity to reach down into a fat, leather attorney’s valise he’d been carrying.  “It’s amazing how you guys close ranks even when you know you’re wrong, just so you can still maintain that air of invincible, doctoral superiority over us non-credentialed ‘lay-people’.”

 “What are you doing?” Veneralli had asked, despite his better instincts.

 Wettinger hadn’t answered aloud.  Instead he’d simply removed a clear, cylindrical, acrylic container, as big around as an office telephone’s receiver, holding some kind of mineral sample.  It looked like a ragged chip of gray rock.  The container-tube had been emblazoned with a decal, some sort of an official seal that looked vaguely military, but Veneralli couldn’t quite make it out.  There’d been a vacuum lock lid on the cylinder and Wettinger had expertly lifted the tiny lever breaking the vacuum seal and had then twisted the cap open.  He’d then held the open container out towards Veneralli and jiggled the clear cylinder with a quick flick of his wrist.

 The sample of rock, an elongated oval roughly the diameter of a silver dollar, had risen slowly from out the cylinder and into the open air, floating.  It had spun slowly, rotating on an unidentified axis.

 Wettinger had then lowered his arm and the cylinder and stepped away from the free-floating sample. 

 It had remained airborn on its own volition.

 “Wonderful.  Magic tricks.  What is this?”  Veneralli had demanded.

 “It’s not a trick and you know that,” Wettinger had countered coolly, aware that he had seized the moment and was now in control of the conversation.  “Go ahead.  Touch it.  You know you want to…”

 Hesitantly, Veneralli had stretched out his left arm, index finger extended, to touch the floating rock.  As his hand had drawn near the mysterious mineral sample, an orange electrical spark noisily leapt the gap between he and it –

 And the rock had pulsed with sudden life, swelling, as if it were taking in a deep, nourishing breath of air, and then a craggy tendril had swiftly grown from its core and lashed out to wrap around the tip of Veneralli’s trembling finger.  At its touch, the seasoned scientist had gasped as his mind abruptly flooded with strange and alien imagery…

 He’d seen an arid, gloomy landscape pouring out from under a wide, storm—lashed horizon where the massive silvery orb of what had appeared to be an alien sun dominated the foreground.  A second sun, more distant and glowing a pale metallic green, had sat high atop a rapidly moving cloudbank.

 He’d instinctively known he wasn’t visualizing any landscape on this earth, nor any landscape seen from anywhere in this solar system.

 Unnerved, Veneralli had quickly yanked his hand away from the languid touch of that stony tendril.   Alarmed, he’d pulled away from the floating stone object, suspicious that it was not some mere sample of unknown mineral and more than a little convinced it was actually sentient in a manner he’d never before experienced.

 It had remained slowly spinning at chest-height in the space between he and Crofton Wettinger, spinning, waiting, somehow expectant.   It was eerie.

 “Do I have your attention now?” Wettinger had asked, his manner sardonic and, to Veneralli’s mind at that moment, more than a little sinister.

 Veneralli had nodded, blinking rapidly and fixated on the object as Wettinger casually returned it to its place inside the acrylic container.

 “Amazing,” he’d managed to sputter.

 Wettinger had smiled like a shark just before predation.   “Amazing?  No, not so much.  What really makes it fantastic is the fact that, just before you experienced what you did, the object put you into a narcoleptic trance state.   You were essentially asleep on your feet.  Dreaming, yet not.  Conscious, yet not.”

 “Narcoleptic trance?  The… object… put me into that state?”

 Wettinger had cleared his throat and dropped his well-crafted façade of scientific ignorance.   Veneralli had seen a sharp light shining in the man’s eyes and he’d seemed to stand taller, his voice taking on more authority as he’d spoken with educated confidence on matters far beyond his apparent station.

 “The way it has been explained to me, the … rock …  has automorphic qualities, specifically in the projection of an endomorphic ring, and its multiplicative identity is inversely symmetrical, minus a factor of one, where ‘one’ is, of all things, itself.”

 “What?   That would make the thing a physical manifestation of a theoretical abstraction.   That makes no sense.”

 The man had shrugged and Veneralli suddenly had the sense that he was being sized up, evaluated, as if he were at a job interview.  When next Wettinger spoke, Veneralli had listened more carefully than before.

 “It’s a physical manifestation of an unexpected subset of a Fischer-Griess Monster, if you refer to mathematical Group Theory.  The thing is both self-contained and situationally symbiotic, a regenerating mirror-replica of whatever acts against it.”

 Veneralli had known he was being baited.  “So what’s acting against it?”

 Wettinger had smiled coldly.  “You.  Or more precisely, your relative place in collective spatial reality.”

 “You’re saying it knows I’m here and it’s using my own spatial-energy, to project itself into my time-space zone.  Like I’m an organic construct of a gravity well and that thing is my polar opposite-mirror, existing in a pocket gravity well?  Jesus…!”

   Wettinger had looked uncomfortable with that deduction and had bunched his shoulders as he’d searched for a way to break the concept down for Veneralli to understand.

 “No.  I mean ‘relative’ like all the many ‘Yous’ there are reflected in your personal gravitic spatial field, which is tied to the fabric of the moebius strip infinity of Reality we occupy.   I’m talking about every possible permutation of ‘You’.  The object is linked to the Meta-universe, the cosmic Monster Group of mathematic theory, all rolled into one.”

 “I don’t get it.  That’s crazy.”

 “Precisely.”

 “It’s a key or, at least, part of a key…” Veneralli had concluded.  

 Wettinger had nodded.  “It touched your mind, opening doors you didn’t even know were there.  It ain’t just a floating rock, my friend.”

 “Is there a name for this element?”

 “Ikarenium.”

 “I have to know more about this…!”  Veneralli had blurted.

 “Good, then I have what I think is a mutually beneficial proposition for you…”

 And that was how it had begun.  It was the moment Benjamin Veneralli knew he had become just a tiny bit insane.

                   *           *           *