There is NO SUCH THING as a "tear" in the fabric of Time and Space.

Spacetime is not, despite popular conception, an actual physical object. It is a 4th-dimensional mathematical construct, a "Manifold", that being a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each definable termination point. The topology to which the idea refers is a set of points, along with a set of neighborhoods for each point, satisfying a set of mathematical axioms relating points and "neighborhoods". So the term "Spacetime" is an analogous metaphor, and thusly a simplification, used to describe something very vast and complex. It, Spacetime, is not something that can rend, split or cleave in the way you'd imagine ripping through a sheet of parchment, a finely-woven strip of cloth or a gossamer veil. And it cannot be severed, leaving jagged edges.

But it can be modified, renegotiated with, transgressed upon and devolved. All of which serves to present those who examine the nature of Spacetime with a near-endless supply of paradoxes.

To intelligent, conceptually flexible and knowledgeable minds, Paradoxes are more than merely confounding or maddening, more even than that which is often labeled as "dangerous", no indeed, to be accurate, Paradoxes are the very heart of the true cosmic insanity of the Universe and they are inevitable.

The Wound, that anomalous two-thirds of a Light Year-long dysmorphic ulcer in the outer rim of Teshiwahur's solar system, just outside the orbit of the planet Ombrusthylax beyond the lethally irradiated Makkaryenne Elasticity, was just such a paradox. The Wound was not a tear or a rip in Space.

It was indeed that which it had always been commonly called. It was the source of The Long Death.

The Wound was an exposed porous filter, an elastic sifter, through which a veritable, nearly endless waterfall of Anti-Time flowed. Anti-Time was a very unique, highly-specific brand of unmodulated fluidic energy that was a moving field representing the inverse of normal chronal photonic degradation. Chronal energy, popularly referred to as "Time", was more than merely a concept encompassing the linear measurement of passing events -- it was an actual force, like magnetism or gravity, capable of acting upon and exerting influence over the physical world. So, as such, it possessed a chiral identity, an opposite, and this was"Anti-Time" wherein, despite the terminology, did NOT mean that the passage of event s wound backwards from ending to beginning. Instead, the elemental properties of Anti-Time were such that they captured and degraded the dynamic quantum atomic particles that became exposed to it. Nuclear bonds broke, energetic fields decayed, the relational momentum and symmetry of physical objects were wrest awry and Probability Itself shattered like disintegrating shards of glass. The Wound was a leaking dam through which Anti-Time poured into this universe, displacing, devouring and demolishing the pre-existing volume of Normal Time it supplanted. Only the most highly-advanced technology of an alien culture could take advantage of that.  It was through The Wound that non-human slaves serving the conquest-hungry Rayth'kine marched to war. This was the sieve through which the marauding armies of the Gorgahnun Coalition had poured into an unprepared, unsuspecting solar system that cradled The Withered Land...

On one side of the mammoth, electromagnetic gravitational mesh was Teshiwahur and the few remaining space bases and outposts of the dying Hegemonic Emperium. And on the other was the unmoored, traveling, superplanet-sized cosmic wanderer the Gorgahnuns called "Vyt'Atourak".  The giant rogue planet was not home for the Gorgahnuns, their autogenetic kind, exemplars of strict sequential disposition and codification, couldn't ever have been comfortable headquartered on a volcanically-active, tectonically-malleable globe like the cosmic-rover. 

A smouldering, vegetatively near-barren TrojanOrphan world, Vyt'Atourak was a huge volcanic spheroid barycentrically-ringedby the mountainous remains of a pair of shattered moons that melded together toform a disc ring-system. But instead ofan accretion-disc of pulverized stone and ancient, hardened ice in particulateform, the ring around Vyt'Atourak was like a wall, made up of rectangular slabsof high-density iron, chromium and magmatic pyrrhotite. The massive ring surrounded Vyt'Atourak perpendicularto its horizontal equator. Incrediblydense, and mostly metallic, Vyt'Atourak's gravitational pull locked in thering-wall as it rotated in a rapid counter clockwise spin around what was acelestial body roughly the size of Uranus, if compared to planets in the fardistant Terran solar system. 

Vyt'Atourak was the latest in a long line of celestial bodies the mysterious Rayth'kine claimed as their homeworld.  It also served as the Anti-Time reservoir's astro-hydrogravitic sluicegate command center.

The Rayth'kine, their arrogance towards mammalian humans and their federations making them impatient, gradually increased the volume of Anti-Time they allowed to pass through the sluicegate. The Gorgahnuns were not being aggressive enough to suit them. They were anxious for their invasive military campaign to gain speed. It flowed from one side of The Wound to the other, rushing generously in an outspread wave of quicksilvery luminescence across the quantum floodplains of Teshiwahur's solar system. The distances covered through normal Einsteinian Space were vast, even in a localized star system, so, though the great rolling wave moved at a mind-numbing velocity, it would still be over a dozen heliars before the wave entered the inner solar system to reach Pex'Insava and Teshiwahur.

And during that time its destructive force would double, treble, and even quadruple. The bellicose, warmongering forces of the Emperium would be unaware of its approach until it was far too late for any defensive measures to be effective, if there were actually such a thing as a defense against Anti-Time. Ultimately, they wouldn't know what had hit them until it brought their combative regime to its proverbial knees.

The dark interregnum of the Long Death was about to break into unrestrained Chaos ... spectacularly.

                                                                                             * * *

The solemn, resonant tolling of the Bells of Ushmer-Pendazent pierced the rushing rumble from the early afternoon's stormgale, a daily event that wildly tossed kilometer-high clouds of sepia-hued dust in a lasso around the city. A subtle glare from light raining down from the dual distant suns rained an emerald sheen past the dirty windows of the buttress' master alcove.

The Bells of Ushmer-Pendazent... their ring foretold the arrival of each heliar's Augur of Presumption, the Interval of Forecasting, the Visionary's Divination, that time in each day when the thoughts of those gifted with wisdom allowed their thoughts to briefly turn inward and reflectively review the upcoming schedule of the last of the day's deeds. Work was still yet to be done, but what gifts would the effort bring each man, each woman, each scholar or sage, each town or city... would those efforts produce worthy gifts, worthy rewards? Or was it all just busy work, mindless labor, something to do until the suns fell below the horizon and a feral night set upon the world? Was it all little more than just a way for humans with tragically brief lives to kill Time?

Only mythical Ushmer-Pendazent, the wizened Mute Oracle of the Haggard People, knew for certain... and He would not talk --- the eternal winter of Infinity had stolen his tongue.

This was how each heliar passed, how it was measured, on a half-dead moon that was home to a city like Abyssium.

He was in Abyssium and yet he wasn't...

Time had passed, it had moved on, and yet it remained, spawned anew, living on deep inside the scars cut into his mind and soul, needing only something as ephemeral as a scent on the air, a trick of light teasing the eye, a carelessly spoken phrase, or a hint of shadow across a face wrinkled in sudden and abject agony to bring that old and faded moment back to life...

He looked down at the bodies and he could again see THEM. They haunted him still. An invisible claw twisted its talons in his guts and he felt it all again, in an instant, like the flaring of a spark of flame, as he looked down on them. The blood, the terror, the shame, the guilt ---

He'd thought he had moved on. It was the Past. It couldn't touch him anymore... But that was a lie. He could hear, see and taste his failures, His SINS, as fresh as if it was the very day that it all had happened.

Time didn't pass at all for Those-Who-Were-Eternally-Damned.

"You've killed us," the voices cried out, eclipsing the cacophony of war raging all around him that day, "You've killed us all... How could you have done this to us? HOW?"

And his only answer that day had been to scream like a beast as he'd butchered them in the name of a Holy Cause in which he'd had utterly no belief...

Then as Now.

It moved on, Time did, and yet it still remained, a splash of forever-fresh blood painted across his mind's eye.

The cooling bodies of Lephrail and Vanjhie were still twitching, the ganglions of their fried nervous systems still tortured by the lingering effects of the lethal power blast that had ended their lives.  The ferocity of the tension that sight inspired, simply looking at them, made him grind his fanged and pointed teeth.

"You've killed them," she said, her manner accusatory, but not in any moral sense, but accusatory in a professorial way, in a disapproving way. "Murdered them by your own hand. The threat they presented, if by even a single percentage their interactions could be classified as a 'threat', was minimal at very best. I'm not at all sure that killing was the best way to handle something so minor..."

"Watch your tone and remember to whom you speak," he said, his voice thick with the emotions he struggled to repress.

"By killing them, you wasted any opportunity, any advantage, there may have been in taking an effort to turn them," she said. "They were a potential resource."

"What I would do, I will do. I need not seek your approval or your understanding."

She sighed, clearly disagreeing but remembering her rank. It was not her place to challenge him.

'She' was Claeryssa Koylrayzur. 'He' was Dhoumhaunt the Anguisher. Though they were members of the same nation, and veritable biological cousins belonging to parallel tribes, they did not like one another --- not at all. And each took an oddly twisted pleasure in acknowledging the malevolence of their bad blood.

Perhaps it was because they were more alike, despite their mutational disparities and their sexual identities, than either of them cared to admit.

Or perhaps it was because each knew that, in the end, there could only be one who would dominate as Master.

The trio of conspirators had rendezvoused at a palatial manor on a terraced hillside just beyond the city's boundaries, an historic, upper-class three-story suburban manor-estate. The former home of Abyssium's last mayor, though not the legal and officially designated mayoral homestead, it was rumored the manor had once, long ago, belonged to a noble family that had birthed and nurtured the greatest, most vicious warlord Pex'Insava had ever known. The suburban compound still retained its own ancestral security force, a grizzled coterie of armed anti-Emperium loyalists drafted from assorted local ethnic tribal clans. Abyssium was like that: a bustling bee's hive of political and social extremes, where the gracious and the grisly often went hand-in-hand, different sides of the same cursed coin. The large, ornately furnished and decorated room they were in was tri-leveled, with the bottom level holding a relaxed and informal living area for social gatherings and with the second level being a library-den with, of all things, a well-stocked wet bar and a huge cartographer's table with associated cabinetry holding rare and aged paper medium. The topmost level of the room was a conference chamber with electronic apparatuses and implements capable of accessing Abyssium's highly restricted computerized governance network, also known as the Administrative Command Urban Management & Reconnaissance Watchworks.  But such technology was not nearly as reliableas it once was. Since the advent of TheLong Death, after The Wound had appeared at the edges of the solar system, theWatchworks network had experienced many unanticipated mechanical and softwaresystem failures as electron valences and magnetic fields underwent massive matrix-devolutionsand atomic fluxes. Something about TheWound created mysterious phase-effects that negatively impacted computernetwork technologies.

Access to the manor and grounds came courtesy of a telepathically-enthralled crime lord whom Orakun Maadregul had puppeteered at Dhoumhaunt's request.

"Adhering to divisive social denominations do us no favors. This is not a time to rehash old animosities. We have actual, active enemies enough to occupy our attention, so perhaps we should avoid arguing among ourselves," Orakun Maadregul interjected. As usual, the Psyonikant's calmly logical mindset served to re-establish the conversation's focus. "We are all of us Qrypfathenne, spawned by the last vestiges of the ruling class of the Has'Zyndamaggi Dominion. We predate the genetically-divergent, polluted bloodlines of the Omniperator Cosmoterius' Emperium, and are not of the Cid'Ammar, the Qa'Sarkoon or the Ran'Jaddath lineages dominating the World-Father's extraplanetary nation. Qrypfathenne are ALL, each of us, a brick, beautifully formed and eternal, in the mightiest of bulwarks against the onset of species devolution."

The look Dhoumhaunt the Anguisher gave the Psyonikant was one of brutally cold antipathy. "Is that so? And here I thought we were all nothing more than a collective of Alterhuman freaks who'd lost our ancestral home to a tyrannical, conquering warlord and his army of cloned killers... I thank you for clearing up my confusion, Lady Maadregul. I do so enjoy it when you prattle on like a demented fanatic. Our noble Qrypfathenne heritage notwithstanding, we are outlaw conspirators plotting violent revolt against an ruthless oppressor's nearly totalitarian governance. But that does not make us heroes in any sense..."

"I never meant to imply we were heroes," Orakun Maadregul said. "I meant only that we should appreciate we each are not alone in this endeavor, to remember we are comrades, and bound to one another by much more than mere Fate."

"Well said, m'lady, well said," Commissioner Koylrayzur said approvingly. "Our Greater Cause comes before our individual ambitions."

"Eaufidyann viper," Dhoumhaunt commented in a baritone rasp. He regretted that he allowed the Koylrayzur woman to trigger his temper so easily.   

"Undead Demon-god," she countered. The tone of her voice disturbed him; there was something almost flirtatious about the way she casually hurled the insult at him. Much to his chagrin, he realized that she harbored no fear of him at all and considered herself every bit his equal even though, upon any examination of the facts comparing the two of them, she was not.

Dhoumhaunt was secure in the realization that her arrogance, that insolent familiarity, would be her undoing. And that it would happen sooner rather than later.

Two hundred and nineteen orbital solar heliars in age, (which was some two hundred and sixty two years as Terran Humans measured time), Duke-Elder Dhoumhaunt Parysek Tuhr'caslem Haaksurnah, ex-Major General in the defunct Qrypfathenne Xenos-Nekkrotyr Space Command, stood half a meter taller than even the tallest Teshiwahurian human, putting him at a towering 2.6 meters tall or eight and a half feet. His beefy, hulking appearance implied his bodyweight to conservatively be somewhere north of six hundred pounds. He was a mesomorph in build, bulky and muscular, and his smooth, glossy flesh was colored a rich shade of burgundy mixed with a dark rose hue.  Other than that, there wasn't much more physically that hinted at any further biogenetic deviation from the extremes of hyper-human warrior evolution in The Withered Land. 

But 'different' he very much was...

He wore an exoskeletal frame over his form-fitting kevlar-alloy jump-suit. It was a gear and motor-augmented, highly-articulated skeletal rig embedded with molded, modular trauma armor covering his pectorals and abdomen, with exaggerated pauldrons covering his shoulders and trapezius that then ran in linked-panel, V-shaped sections down the center of his back. Armored cuisses sat over the breathable fabric of his high-waisted trousers to protect his thighs. There were shin-guards below the knee braces. Metal-toed, heavy black boots with multiple buckles completed the basics of the  ensemble. The jump-suit was colored a non-reflective, purplish-black matte and the exo-frame was a murky hue of orange-yellow brass. All the large surfaces of the exo-frame's metal plates were inscribed with intricate, stylized carvings of fanged ape-skulls, mouths open in a scream, bracketed by angular bat's wings. In his gauntleted, spike-knuckled fists he held a very thick, long-handled axe that had a multi-faceted, ruby-colored triangular stone centered behind the razor-sharp blade edge. The staff of that axe was inscribed with the design of a coiled serpent.

A thick chain-link belt wound several times around his waist and there were fetishized metal replicas of body parts hanging from it on small hooks... at least, that is what most people who saw the belt wanted to think, that the body parts were replicas, molded metal castings. They knew in their hearts that this was a fantasy. They weren't castings. They were real.

Dhoumhaunt was, after all, an Anguisher.

He did terrible things to his fellow sentient beings on a regular basis. And he kept trophies.      

"I just don't see the point of personally executing a low-level Emperium counter-terrorism analyst and his paid criminal informant," Commissioner Koylrayzur said, making a show of muttering under her breath, but at a volume that Dhoumhanut could clearly hear. "They were nothing more than pawns. If there was any concern that the World-Father's forces here in Abyssium were in any danger of discovering our plans through the pair's mercenary greed and dishonesty, it would have been better to carefully feed the pair of them false, but tantalizing, misinformation with just enough nuggets of truth to make it believable to the Emperium and that they'd then have acted upon."

Dhoumhaunt let loose a long, slow growl as a preamble to his reluctant explanation. "Lephrail and Vanjhie had to be maximally demoted because they'd somehow managed to obtain digital video of your supposedly covert meeting, my dear Commissioner, with a representative of the Gorgahnun Coalition when you rendezvoused with the Aelvysh Gorgahnun Hive-Duke named Bitterslarn... I do not know, nor care, whether or not they intended to blackmail you with that video, or whether they were going to sell it to ranking operatives of the Hegemonic Emperium's Ministry of Internal Counter-Insurgency. What mattered was that Urban Crisis Agent Lephrail and local crime-lord Koggen Vanjhie knew that Duke Bitterslarn was here, on Pex'Insava, and that you were apparently conspiring with him, and also, by implication, with that idiot Korhng'Nathi maniac Haq'Ja-Rashaei. No one can know this, not any of it. Such a risk could not be tolerated."

"No mere security breach would be able to produce a blunder of that magnitude. No electronics were allowed anywhere near that assemblage. The only way they could have known enough to be able to actually record evidence of that meeting would be if one of the participants, there, in that damn Dryfte-Town, were working undercover for the Emperium," the Eaufidyann political official protested stubbornly. "And that would mean that Haq'Ja-Rashaei's organization is irreversibly compromised." 

"So we cut them loose. We sever all ties with them and cease interacting with them," Orakun Maadregul said, quickly interjecting to cut off any further opportunity for argument and recrimination between her fellow conspirators. "Haq'Ja-Rashaei and his riffraff were always intended to be little more than a distraction. And, as a turncoat insurrectionist from an invading alien force, Hive-Duke Bitterslarn doesn't have enough of a powerbase on Pex'Insava to challenge us lest he risk exposing himself to the World-Father's hostile military. No, we have far larger and far more dire and dangerous complications with which we should be concerned..."

"What? How so? What 'dire' complications?" Claeryssa Koylrayzur's aggravation was momentarily distracted from her confrontation with Dhoumhaunt as she focused on the Psyonikant's observations.

"Two things. Lord Hehlgrummyte has enlisted the participation of Syrrus Drehdfynitor and the Riders of Dreidax Tarathi. And I've uncovered the involvement of a pair of Outland Marshals, Knights, assigned by the Emperium's Central Homefront Security," Maadregul said ominously. "Drehdfynitor and The Wannyshe bring actual Relativistic String Sequence Chaos with them wherever they go. However, if expected, Chaos can be managed and made to work in our favor. But the Knights, their presence, and their likely involvement in our affairs, has now shifted the vibrational frequency of Time's Upflow Progressional Spectrum. Knights are sentient Quantum Foci for String-Sequence counter-concatenation..."

"And what in the Nine Hells does that mean?" Koylrayzur demanded irritably.

"It means that the very fact they're here has wrested control over the upcoming flow of progressive dynamic outcomes away from us," Dhoumhaunt said. "What happened in the recent Past, whatever it is we have built on for our ongoing future actions, has just been checkmated. It's the abrupt introduction of Asymmetrical Group Theory. Bluntly put, they just hijacked the Future from us. We're not in control anymore. We've been put in a position where we can only be RE-active, NOT proactive. We can only hope to maybe redirect the impact and consequences of their actions around us, as if we were stones caught in the flow of a rushing stream."

"What? That's insanity! How is that even possible? I mean, seriously, how much can they know? And regarding whatever it is they DO know, what makes you think they can effectively do anything about it?"

"There's much, much more to being a Knight than wearing power armor, having enhanced musculature and knowing how to swing a sword, you dull reptile," Dhoumhaunt sneered.

"Oh enough of this pseudo-mathematical mystical jibberish..., what are you saying? Are we just supposed to abandon the plan?" Koylrayzur hissed, her voice verging on the shrill.

Maadregul answered with a calmness that was polar cold. "No, we plot them a new course. We leave them clues that lead ... elsewhere. Instead of risking them directly confronting us, we exert influence enough to get them to directly confront Drehdfynitor and the Wannyshe."

"In other words, we sacrifice Lord Hehlgrummyte," Dhoumhaunt said, his response tinged with the music of dark approval.

"You sound incredibly optimistic about the likely results from that confrontation," Koylrayzur remarked. "You think they can win against Hehlgrummyte and The Wannyshe?"

Dhoumhaunt gave her a stare that radiated disgust. She raised an eyebrow and shrugged.

"You really should stop speaking now. Any further commentary threatens to put your ignorance on full display," he said. 

And, somewhat unexpectedly, the tolling of the Bells of Ushmer-Pendazent terminated climactically, stopping ahead of their usual scheduled ending.

Outside the walls of the conspiratorial conference room, on the city's streets, only a few of the most devoted and pious citizens who followed the Old Ways noticed.

                                                                                              * * *     

It had fallen, collapsed onto the ground in a ruined and crumpled mass of screeching metal, pulverizing several smaller buildings as it surrendered to gravity's hungry grasp. Hehlgrummyte's Whyrligaegem was no more. The compound and its grounds had been reduced to a rubble-strewn landscape littered with ash and cinders, shattered masonry and glass, and signs of slaughter encapsulated in scattered mounds of shredded flesh.

The fact that they had survived and even conquered the assault of the monstrous cyborg predators who had destroyed the Whyrligaegem was a thing that did not fill them with any sense of triumph. People, innocents, had died. Horribly.

They'd been surprised, caught unprepared like rank amateurs and they had not been able to protect those who had counted on them.

And that was something that didn't set well with the brothers...

Even though he was sitting quietly by himself behind the pilothouse bridge section of the Cloudripper-Class fanjet cruiser, D'Spayr's overall mood was intense and tangible enough to be felt by the others in the aerial craft's control cabin. 

He sat on a padded bench opposite that of the one on which his brother sat, glaring at him. Qrystatos sat imprisoned, wrapped in a tensileweb of magneto-photonic phasic chains. Anthus Rhoggym had positioned himself between them in the smooth-edged, trapezoidal fuselage of the relatively narrow sky-craft, an older model turbofan jet with VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) capabilities. Lord Hehlgrummyte's gene'bot Major Domo, Charryvane V'Rell, piloted the craft with Kazzime Joxx taking on the role of co-pilot. Rhoggym eyed the pair of Knights suspiciously, unsatisfied and mistrustful of what he'd experienced of their professional and personal conduct.

One brother, possessed of fantastic physical strength and durability, was evidently a remorseless violent criminal, entirely self-serving, with megalomaniacal ambitions.

The other brother, incredibly skilled as a combatant and possessed of enhanced superhuman senses, was an introverted, bitter, morally-conflicted and traumatized trooper who no longer trusted his command infrastructure.

Rhoggym exchanged an exasperated, antagonistic glare with Kazzime Joxx that communicated his thoughts far better than mere words. The Fae-Spawn sentinel shook his helmeted head as he considered that those paper-pushing bookish idiots at Swordphont 107 had somehow decided sending the spitefully quarreling brothers to Hehlgrummyte's compound was an effective strategy to help stave off a possible Gorgahnun attack.

Idiots. All of them.

"What are the damages?" D'Spayr asked softly as he unhurriedly used a low-level las-file to hone the blades of his sword.

Charryvane V'Rell answered, her words free of any emotional inflection, but her comportment condemnatory and disparaging. "Fourteen dead, nineteen seriously wounded, eight still missing, and another twenty-five homeless. The infirmary and dispensary are in ruins, but some medical supplies may yet be salvaged. The computer network hub facility is destroyed, but there's still some electrical power. The water supply is mostly uncompromised. But the warehouses and the master storage repository were burned to the ground --- that means there's no food for the survivors."

D'Spayr brought his gaze up from his sword and, looking past Anthus Rhoggym, he fixed Qrystatos with a withering stare.

"Bastard," he growled. "Miserable, greedy, power-mongering bastard."

Qrystatos shook his head, rejecting his brother's apparent guilelessness and naivety. "Realist," he said tersely. "Those people were already destined to be casualties in the war. Their fates were already sealed. Not greedy. Not evil. Just a Realist."

"What happened to you, Qrystatos?" Joxx asked, his tone flat, sounding weary, from his forward command chair. "In past times, you were always a bit of a rogue, always an opportunist, sometimes more than a little dishonest even, but there was a line back then that you never appeared to cross... How are you like this now?"

There was a long, uncomfortable moment before the older of the two brothers spoke and when he at last did, his low-pitched voice was coldly harsh and rough.

"You all know that this, what we just survived, wasn't the work of the Gorgahnuns, right? They are predictably direct. Ruthless, cruel even, but predictable. Machines. They don't commit murder by proxy."

"So?" Charryvane V'Rell said.

"So have you ever actually been to Abyssium? Do you know its history, how it was founded and by whom? Can you even conceive of the secret history of what happened there, between the humans who first explored Pex'Insava in its antiquity and the monstrous race of malevolent, demonic, alien demi-gods from outside our solar system who were, unbeknownst to the Hegemonic Emperium, the Star Legion, and the World-Father, living there FIRST... only the tribes of the Shachtferadi'im, who were then slaves to the Qrypfathenne Sovereignty, knew the truth. "

"What does any of that have to do with your treachery?" D'Spayr demanded.

Qrystatos kept silent. He turned his face away as best he could, considering his magneto-photonic phase-bonds, and no longer deigned to look upon his brother.

"There will be judgment and punishment rendered for what you've done, brother. Count on it," D'Spayr said.

"Judgment and punishment," Qrystatos muttered to no one inparticular. "Yes. There will be indeed. There will be more than enough for us all."

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