Forynnuhr and Harqwenne had left Abbot-Commander Qazeem Nei'Wrenh and his Honor Guard behind them, suspended in mid-air, paralyzed, insensate and entranced, floating weightlessly. The Ashen Brood soldier-monks hovered high above the cool floor of the Bleeding Lodge enwrapped within an ever-shifting cocoon of liquid, black-violet light.

"Madman, what have you DONE?" Harqwenne had bellowed at the Pilgrim after the Upworld mage had killed the captive Wenkrang war-chief, Mymkkari.

"Oh please, stop being so dramatic."

The Scribe pointed to the group of men floating in the air in an envelope of light.

"What do you intend to do with them?" he asked.

"So long as they do not constitute a threat, nothing," Forynnuhr answered. "Let Fate or Fortune or whatever it is you people believe in determine their outcome."

"They can't stay that way, trapped between awareness and mindless coma, suspended between Life and Death..."

The Pilgrim fixed Harqwenne with a hard, unpleasant stare, the façade of dispassionate urbanity momentarily abandoned as the dark malice and villainous corruption behind the Upworlder's eyes was allowed momentary ascendency.

"Yes, actually they can stay that way," Forynnuhr said. He then turned away and resumed his way out from the Bleeding Lodge and down the external corridor.

"They'll die."

"Of course, they will. It's what humans do best," the Pilgrim growled.

Stumbling as he followed the man, Harqwenne brought both his fists high into the air, emphasizing his shock and horror as he ranted at Forynnuhr.

"Do you have no concept of honor whatsoever? You lie and you kill without rhyme or reason, with no thought of the consequences. The Guild of Black Gauntlets did not conscript you to do such things and they certainly did not give you authority to betray any treaties they had with the Ashen Brood! How do you think they are going to react to this? You've killed us, you murderous fool, you've killed us!"

"Nonsense. You know, they call this place a 'necropolis', but, strictly speaking, it was never that. Shi'draih-Hakaba was always a nerve-center for a larger creation, a planetary creation that never rested, never slept, never doubted its purpose. Shi'draih-Hakaba was and is far too active and busy, over-stuffed with arcane data of all varieties. The place is almost alive. There are so many active mysteries at work in this city. For instance, did you know that the Duskhelm Priory was once, long ago, a top secret technical facility housing the core of a planetary computer network?" Forynnuhr said in a pre-occupied, distracted way, ignoring his traveling companion's feverish distress.

"I think you mentioned this in passing once before...," Harqwenne stuttered.

"Etherfrost Stormfallen," Forynnuhr said cryptically as he led the Scribe down a narrow, dimly-lit hallway running perpendicular to the main traffic artery leaving the rear of the Bleeding Lodge.

"And what is that and why is it even remotely important now?" The Scribe demanded.

"Etherfrost Stormfallen is inscribed on the paper within that parcel you brought me. It's both an acrostic and an acronym, a verbal reasoning shortcut describing an algorithmic logic insertion into a source-command for an A.I., an artificial intelligence. It is behavioral-based, heuristic coding for subsumption architecture. The variable program is defined as 'ETFRST-STRM-FLN', where the first collection of letters describes the type of command-algorithm it is, the central set of letters tells you where it is to be inserted, and the last set provides the A.I. authorized permission to rewrite and recompile the logic script and then activate and re-run the algorithm using the new parameters. It sounds silly, but it's really quite elegant," the Pilgrim said.

"I don't understand. A planetary artificial intelligence? Does such a thing even exist anymore? This is Tekk-ware? Where did the Guild of Black Gauntlets get this? And why would they voluntarily give it to an alien being like you?" Harqwenne said a bit breathlessly as the duo ran deeper into the labyrinthine Priory's murky and clandestine interior.

"I told them to give it to me," Forynnuhr said. "Well, not me, exactly, but someone very much like me, someone who is me, but a Me on a grander scale existing on another Plane of Reality. A reflection, if you will, a Me from another Time and Place who could not exist here."

Harqwenne could not fathom the Pilgrim's explanation. "You're insane!"

"Yes, I am," the Upworld mage admitted with a chortle. "Utterly. And that's the fun of it all."Exasperated, Harqwenne gave up trying to figure out what the Pilgrim meant.

"So what is it we're doing now?" he asked.

"I thought it was obvious. We're off to wake The Devil," Forynnuhr replied.

                                                                                                             * * *

The sky, now darkened with the arrival of night, retained a threatening, angry appearance. The stars beyond, deeper in the heavens, were cold and uncaring, staring down at the Withered Land impassively.

Dre'Zaresch Spaceport, which was, time-wise, nearly a full lunar spin behind them, was still burning. Rescue and Recovery Response Crews from Annet Galjeshir had descended on the wreckage and horror left at the decimated transport hub after the passage of the microburst storm. Full emergency medical support teams from Koombari City had been dispatched to deal with the more serious and extreme injuries that were beyond the triage capabilities of the R&R Crews. Grim-faced Safety Constabulary Officers joined in the rescue response efforts.

The Knight had decided to travel with Mune'stahr and Pylott via a beat-up dune-crawler appropriated from a vehicle garage a block outside the perimeter of the vast disaster zone. The dune-crawler was a caterpillar-tread vehicle with enormous turbine engines and its gyroscopic stability-riders barely kept the combined pilot and passenger carriage from bouncing and jerking uncontrollably as the machine plowed forward across the uneven terrain. The dune-crawler was an armed transport, fitted with projectile-launching multi-cannons and a small particle beam pulse sub-gun. Dune-crawlers were often fitted with weaponry because they were vehicles of choice for expeditionary excursions and were frequently driven through untamed and hostile non-Emperium territory. The vehicle moved at roughly twice the running pace of a fast predatory hunting cat. The trio were racing towards Shi'draih-Hakaba and expected to reach the edge of the necropolis in a relatively short time.

When Pylott had asked him who he was, the Knight, who was sitting at the pilot's console for the dune-crawler, had reluctantly responded with his full name, "Draekasen Se'nurqille Predayas frae'Bluhd."

"What? You're joking, right?" she'd said. "Is that Old Speech? Numerian Continental Auditration from the time of the Primocracy? I don't recognize the syntax..."

"It is Ausvargian Mountain Tongue," he'd said. "It is a territory-specific dialect from a familial bloodline version of Old Speech. It is a dialect that has fallen out of common usage."

"What do your comrades call you?" Mune'stahr had interjected, looking to keep his curious shipmate from following her natural curiosity and needlessly exploring a tangent regarding planetary linguistics. Pylott was, despite her curt and occasionally brusque, militarily regimental persona, a dedicated scholar of Teshiwahurian tribal history. If presented with new information, she could sometimes become more than a little distracted.

"D'Spayr. Mostly they call me D'Spayr."

"I notice you haven't yet asked for our names," Mune'stahr had said.

D'Spayr had then turned his head from staring at the monitors on the pilot's nav-console, fixing the Star Legion pair with an expressionless stare and said, "No, I haven't."

Pylott had frowned at the response and said, "You have a problem with us?"

"Let's just say that there are those who harbor the opinion that the Extraplanetary High Frontier's Territorial Expanse SpecOps Corp are a bit detached from the life of their fellow citizens under the Emperium. You high-flying heroes rarely get your hands dirty down here amongst the sweat and the blood and the filth. The Emperium feeds you, clothes you, gives you free medical care, and wipes your slates clean of past crimes and wrong-doings. You have free access to computerized Tekk whereas the common folk do not. The Star Legion gets a pass on feeling the common man and woman's pain."

"Some may say that," Mune'stahr had said. "But not you, right? You're a more open-minded kind of a fellow."

D'Spayr didn't directly answer and instead chose to say, "I am a Knight. That makes me a professional skeptic. I don't judge. And, yes, by default that makes me a bit more open-minded than most."

"I always thought you Knights were supermen, that you were the Elite of the Elite," Mune'stahr had remarked. "Many of us in the Legion look up to you lot."

It had taken a minute before D'Spayr had answered. "You look up to us Knights? You should not. What we Knights are is a violent brotherhood of specialized garbage handlers. Nothing more."

There had followed a long and uncomfortable silence in the dune-crawler until Mune'stahr had at last said, "I knew that appearance of the spatial anomaly, what the general public calls 'The Wound', in our solar system had probably created a significant impact on Teshiwahur, but I always thought it was more cultural or socio-political than physical. I never imagined it produced effects anything like what we saw today."

"This today? In and of itself, this was nothing," Draekasen said, his manner less confrontational than before. "It was an isolated incident. You should have been here for all the gravity-geysers and the ion cyclones and the plague of the Vertigo Virus after the Long Death first began. Those were horrid, death-filled days. The order of things had broken down pretty quickly after that. There were multiple political assassinations, then came open rebellion against the Emperium, entire cities rioting and subject to widespread looting, municipal power black outs, food riots, and the ascendancy of fanatical doomsday cults."

"How many?" Pylott had asked. This man, this soldier, was grim and hardened far beyond his years. She could see he was younger than both her and Mune'stahr. She wondered what it was that had happened, and what role he had played in that dire event, to instill so much cold steel in his soul.

D'Spayr had sighed and shook his head sadly. "Tens of thousands," he had answered. "And most of them not understanding why. But the worst had been yet to come. Inside of a single seasonal solar cycle, the monsters, like those we saw today, began randomly appearing, popping in and out from anomalous event-portals. And, like today, we had no real defense against them."

"We didn't know," Mune'stahr had said dejectedly.

"No, you didn't. And that was the point," D'Spayr had explained. "The Emperium's off-planet forces couldn't be told any of that was going on. Can you imagine what would have happened if they had been informed? There would have been mutiny all across the space fleet. How could they be expected to spend their time and energy policing far away worlds when their homes were being destroyed and their people, their families, were dying?"

"How do you know all this?"

"I have made it my business to know," D'Spayr had said, turning back to the nav-console screens. "I make it a point to ask the questions to which others dread hearing the answers."

"So what do we do now?" Pylott inquired, an edge to her voice.

"Do? Set right the wrongs, hunt the wicked, avenge the dead, survive," the Knight intoned.

Mune'stahr and Pylott had looked to one another and locked eyes. Their stares were bleak and haunted, but resolute. Yes, they had decided wordlessly, this now was the way of things.

Aloud, Mune'stahr had said, "Whatever it is you're doing, count us in."

"Good to hear," the Knight had said. "But very, very soon you might regret having said that."

"Why do you say that?" Pylott asked.

"Because some fool or other is trying to raise a hibernating HyperLord from its eons-old slumber."

"A HyperLord? I can't believe you just said that. Impossible. They don't exist. They're a myth," Mune'stahr said.

"Believe what you want. I have neither the time nor the inclination to convince you," D'Spayr answered. "But you might want to think of it this way, what did you just experience in the city behind us, outside the Spaceport? How would you describe that in a report to your superiors? Wouldn't you say THAT was impossible, too?"

Neither of the Star Legion soldiers had an answer for that.

The dune-crawler had raced onwards, its blazing headlights illuminating the deepening darkness, towards the crumbling towers and minarets of dusty Shi'draih-Hakaba.

That was then.

Now...

Teshiwahur's Central Analytics Inquisitive Data Reactor, the Autonomous Administrative Command Node, far below the debris-strewn sands of a dead fortress-city where the monumental monastic edifice known as the Duskhelm Priory sprawled in shadow...

A signal, a prearranged electro-neuromimetic cue generated by a remote command, catalyzed a computer A.I. subroutine. A long dormant embedded program initiated and began to execute.

Something unhuman reacted to the stimuli created via that program. It began to awaken from its previous dreaming comatose state. Conscious awareness engaged as it sensed its physical surroundings and, becoming mindful of the passage of time, interfaced with the Command Node. Something colossal stirred...

It had waited for over a hundred generations. It waited no longer.