The sounds of people screaming and the clashing din of catastrophic impacts from metal hammering on metal were deafening. Xemyazzus could barely hear his own voice above the clamor as he bellowed orders to the few Wenkrang warriors remaining alive.

The arcane Tekk-weaponry of the Ashen Brood sentries had exacted a terrible toll on the first wave of eighteen Xsieh'Potheth Vindicators. "Vindicator" was the term by which the Tribe referred to their fearless sectarian soldiers. During the assault, the Wenkrang infantry unit's rabid zealousness quickly overcame the Brood's rigid and passionless militarism, breaching their defensive line in minutes. But the unprecedented arrival of the gargantuan xenomorph, Dessimathiah, had thrown the battle plans of both sides of combatants into disarray. Xemyazzus had not expected the electronic beacon given to him by Atu'ihma to resurrect such a monstrosity. the creature was uncontrollable, killing any and all who crossed its path. Dessimathiah was not at all what Xemyazzus had expected the HyperLord to be; instead of a sophisticated, alien philosopher-warrior of very human-like scale and bio-type, the beacon had awakened a bloodthirsty alien beast that turned on those who had worshipped it. It had become very obvious in a very short time that Dessimathiah had no use for the comparatively tiny, humanoid bio-lifeforms scurrying around the ancient, collapsing remains of the necropolis that had entombed him. Wenkrang warriors and Ashen Brood soldiers alike, died by the dozens...

And it was entirely his fault. He had naively believed the Celestial Empyrean's lies. He had imagined Dessimathiah would be the savior of his Tribe, that the god-beast would help him to drive the hated Ashen Brood from the Wenkrang's territorial domain. He'd believed that the HyperLord would bring pious righteousness to his flesh-eating, cannibalistic people, that they would be forgiven the sin of their awful appetites and be made clean and pure again. But that had been a fool's folly, a madman's fantasy. The creature was an alien, an estranged Otherworlder, and it felt no kinship to the Xsieh'Potheth. In turn, there was no cosmic forgiveness for the Wenkrang. They were tainted and unsanctified. They were Damned. And the Xherim'efarr demi-god certainly had no interest in the historic enmities between the Wenkrang and their former slave masters. Xemyazzus had led his people to ruin.

Now, the brutish, behemoth devil was locked in a lethal confrontation with the fabled Sons of the Bur'heddam, who had at last returned to Shi'draih-Hakaba to settle accounts with those of the Brood who had betrayed them so many long heliars ago. The prophesized day of Judgment had arrived for them all. It was not a thing of metaphor. It was not an event born of myth or legend. It was the dread, dire culmination of many generations of lies, betrayal and murder.

The world had gone mad and a storm of blood had descended upon it.

There was yet one thing Xemyazzus could do before he met his ultimate end. He could reap his revenge against the being he now saw as his own personal devil, his deceiver.

He would kill Dessimathiah.

                                                                                                             * * *

Her right leg was smashed, broken, the flesh split open in a ragged wound. Her face mask had been ripped away by the concussive wave from that last strike against the city's shattered chassis yet, even while the last remaining cannons thundered, pounding a barrage of deadly artillery into the enormous alien's near-invulnerable body, she had quickly crab-crawled over a mound of debris back to the city-scarab's intra-bridge command console. Out the corners of her bleary eyes, she could see the bloodied remains of Qeskan Wa'entrud, Ambassador Jhonwin Czuek and the Magistrate.

The gruesome remains of Aff'Zeqabbah and his escorting retinue of Synthabot Guildsmen, Kos'viggat-Ordinous, Chyremdi-Ordinous and Lal'Pleing-Numinous, were scattered throughout the wreckage of the battlescene.

She had arrived at a solemn conclusion. There was no way she was getting out of this alive.

Without her mask's filtration grillwork, Tanzamia Cleriq was slowly suffocating, her malformed and largely unadapted gills unable to properly process enough oxygen from the air around her to keep her conscious and functioning.

The last damage updates she had received some moments ago had verified that nearly two thousand of Bur'heddam's inhabitants had managed to flee the mobile city, despite Dessimathiah's destructive spree of frenzied aggression. The reports had, though, been less celebratory in their final assessment of the mobile's city final disposition.

All its legs were broken, the drive engines burnt out. The protective containment carapace had been shattered from one end to the other. The defensive force fields had burned out, never to be restarted. The city's main communication towers had been pulverized, the science center had collapsed in on itself, the internal life-support systems were irreparably damaged, water and electric light were unavailable, and the computerized multisystem knowledge network was offline.

But Bur'heddam would live on, despite the final fate of the city itself. Two thousand had escaped. Its people would still be able to lay claim their proud lineage to the miraculous renegade city.

Glimpsed through the dark smoke billowing above her, eclipsing the light from the moon in the night sky, she could see the looming shape of the alien giant's nightmarish face.

"You may think you have won. You may think your power too great and terrible to withstand, but we of Bur'heddam still yet breathe and while we live, we fight," she said, muttering breathlessly in a harsh, phlegmy voice through her agony. With a wet gasp as she drew in what little air she could, she shouted one last command into the console's intercom.

"Tap the weapons systems directly into the central power plant. All power to offensive weaponry. All cannons, keep firing!" It was all she could ask. It was all that mattered.

Tanzamia looked up into the distant face of the colossus and managed a thin smile.

"I'll see you dead yet," she said.

                                                                                                       * * *

The Moment at last arrived.

The "moment" was the dynamic interplay of a sequence of events where sentient, passionate individuals steer the course of those events to their inevitable resolution regardless of the influences of historical and societal forces. It was the Endgame. Fate unleashed. Justice delivered.

The final Fall of the Hammer...

Forynnuhr had clambered down into the server management chamber in which the Autonomous Administrative Command Node of the last remaining Managing Intercontinental Computer Network was housed. The Pilgrim from the Upworlds was a pragmatic, apolitical being, usually possessed of a calculating mind bolstered by a detached emotional state. However, the madness of the violent events transpiring around him at Shi'draih-Hakaba, events set into motion by an alternate-reality version of himself, pulled his attention away from its mathematical precision and drove it into an internal realm where the psychology of Darkness and Evil held sway. Forynnuhr unexpectedly found himself in a state of being where his inner demons were ascendent and where he felt unfocused, unable to fight his darker urges. And the darkest of those urges was centered around his obsessive curiosity about and psychic kinship with the monster, Dessimathiah. He wanted, needed, to participate in the chaos and destruction the alien creature would wreak upon the different factions within the necropolis. So as he lowered himself under the flooring from above and into the subterranean chamber of massive machinery, Forrynuhr had expected to see Harqwenne's dead body cooling on the grated floor, lying near a clustered tumble of fallen computer components where it had been blasted.

He had not expected to see Atu'ihma and certainly hadn't expected to see the Empyrean locked in desperate mortal combat with an Outland Marshal, an armored Knight of the Central Homefront Security Corps.

What were either of them doing in Shi'draih-Hakaba, inside the Duskhelm Priory? How in the Nine Transnucleonic Hells was something like this happening?

Why weren't they both already dead?

"Well, I guess if you want something done...," Forynnuhr mumbled to himself aggravatedly.

The Pilgrim raised one of his taloned metal fists and cybernetically selected the settings for a lethal, wide-angle power discharge, aiming at an area between the two combatants, anticipating their movement into the target zone. The photonic particle energy gathered within the burst-expulsion compartment and the gauntlet began a subtle vibration before projecting the destructive beam...

And that was when he felt his body give an involuntary jerk as the serrated toothed edge of the blade on a razor-staff erupted through his body armor, protruding from his chest. He suddenly spat blood as he exhaled a wracking cough. He'd been stabbed. Impaled. How? He fought back an immediate wave of nausea as cold agony spread icicles throughout his torso. Looking down, he noticed that his shadow had merged with that of another. Someone had appeared behind him. His eyes travelled over to where Harqwenne was to have lifelessly lain. But no one was there. No dead body was visible.

Damn.

"You underestimated me... and the integrity of the armor I wear," Forynnuhr heard the Scribe say, the man's voice near his ear. "Just because I'm not an assassin or a professional killer doesn't make me easy prey. I'm not going to lie down and die for you."

Harqwenne gave the razor-staff, an old-fashioned harpoon-like weapon with an internalized compartment containing a compressed propellant that, on activation, triggered a high-velocity extension of the haft behind the bladed end, an added muscular push. The saw-toothed blade ripped further through Forynnuhr's armored chest cavity. The Pilgrim stiffened and groaned past clenched teeth, his lungs struggling to work, as his vision began to dim.

A distance away, Atu'ihma and D'Spayr continued their brutal martial ballet, lunging, jabbing, kicking and slashing at one another, their hate making them oblivious to their surroundings...

... and to Time.

... tick, tick, tick... tick, tick, tick ...

Five hundred and thirty-nine Earth-minutes, a total of 32,340 seconds, had elapsed since The Glide had last synchronized with the sixth dimensional, anti-osmorphic void to which it was tethered, that transpatial arterial aqueduct known as The Ventriculum.

...tick, tick, tick...

The Moment arrived and engulfed everything in a monumentally vast, closed pocket of non-space, an invisible globe of Nothingness, that swallowed all of Shi'draih-Hakaba, its inhabitants and warring combatants, the mobile city-scarab of Bur'heddam, and even the surrounding geophysical region, including the spaceport of Dre'Zaresch, the militia outpost of Annet Galjeshir and the entirety of Koombari City. A gargantuan, hyper-gravitic, interdimensional quantum manifold of Space simply winked out of existence, rebooting itself and re-asserting its magneto-geometric position in Existence, in the span of a single nanosecond. Such an astoundingly brief amount of time...

Time enough to scar a planet. Forever.

The necropolis, Shidraih-Hakaba, was gone. Annet Galjeshir and Koombari City were gone. Bur'heddam was gone. The entire second tier-terrace around expansive Bre'Enqachuk Mesa was gone. These places were not blasted away or pulverized into dust as they would have been if they'd been bombarded with some conventional variety of explosive blast. Not at all. Instead, they'd been deleted from the planet's geophysical history. They, the cities and the spaceport and all their physical structures and all their inhabitants, had been completely erased from existence. Two hundred and eighty-six thousand human beings and all their accomplishments, lineages and family histories, since the dawn of civilization on Teshiwahur, had been obliterated from both physical record and conscious memory.

None of them, not their schemes nor their ambitions nor their loves nor their hates, nor the homes in which they had ever lived, had ever existed.

Time and Space righted itself, the Megacosm shifted the congruencies of the stacked planes of the Multiverse, and the omnidirectional fractal metaflow of Creation marched onward.

All that seemed left was the hollow song of the wind crossing a featureless plain as it wound through the dark of night.

Then, there was a sound, the single toll of a distant bell echoing down the corridors of Time, and The Miracle occurred.

From under three feet of packed, heat-blackened, arid soil, a lone human figure arose in what had been the physical center of the imploding, invisible quantum manifold. The figure rose wearily, as if every bone in its muscular body bore the weight of a tremendous mass. Bucketfuls of sand and grit cascaded from off the man as he slowly unfolded himself to stand fully erect. The scratched and abraded, pewter-gray and copper colored armor of a First Stage Honorman in the Outland Marshal Corps began to reflect the rain of pale light from the distant moon.

A Knight. In his fists he still held firm grip on his weapons.

He did not know why or how he still lived, but he knew it was not his first death. He did not know why or how he still remembered what had happened before the Universe Itself had blinked in and out of existence. He did not know whether or not The Withered Land remained the world he remembered it to be. All he knew, instinctively, was that he, alone, had survived. He still bore the physical and emotional scars and all the nightmares that had marked the great struggle of his life. Somehow, someway, he had remained unchanged. He knew this, to the very core of his being.

And that knowledge did not set at all well with the man named D'Spayr.

He looked up into the starry sky, isolating the constellations and major suns that shone in the inky ocean of space, and used celestial navigation to verify his location and then chart his path back towards civilization. He would cross the Forever Plain and report back to Central Homefront Security in the Emperium's Council of Free Territories.

If any of it was still there.

In the long, eventful heliars and solar cycles to come, The Knight would encounter many courageous allies and many ruthless enemies. And he would learn many dangerous, clandestine secrets of The Withered Land.

But one thing he would never know was that deep below his feet, the core of the planetary computer network, the Autonomous Administrative Command Node of the last remaining Managing Intercontinental Computer Network on Teshiwahur, was still activated, still running.

And next to that cold, mechanized chamber, a giant Xherim'efarr demi-god known as Dessimathiah, the Dreaming Executioner, again slumbered in eternal torpor.

The world was dangerous enough with the knowledge he had and D'Spayr was, in most ways, better off not knowing everything.

                                                                                                           * * *

In the semi-sentient chronal liquidity of a oceanic void between dimensional membranes, outside the Megacosm, Mune'stahr and Pylott awakened inside a damaged, spherical shiftcraft the size of a trio of earthly football stadiums. They were astonished they were still alive. The alien artificial intelligence resident within The Glide had condensed the vessel's tremendous mass to protect itself and its internal systems from further damage after synchronizing with the Ventriculum.

The Glide had adopted them as its new caretakers, adapting the internal physical environment to sustain and protect them, and instituted its strange neuro-psychic state of symbiosis with them, healing their grievous wounds and inserting part of the shiftcraft's mnemonic consciousness inside their minds.

Over the coming days and weeks, they would come to understand a fair amount about the huge vessel's technical inner workings, and even discover a little about its most recent history, up to and including the doomed stewardship of Uhzaysuhl.

But they would never understand the nature of the craft's origins or the secret of its overall mission.

It was simply how things had to be. It was the Order of Things.

                                                                                      T H E    E N D