The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Forty-Eight

There had been a time, long ago, when she had wept. Her sobbing moans and the soft hiss of her falling tears were captured by the thirsty, parasitic winds that swept down the invisible, winding corridors between the Lucid Reality of Now and the trance-like Dreamscapes of When.

Why she cried didn't matter. All that was of any importance was that she did.

They needed that to happen. They valued her tears, each and every one. Better than diamonds, rubies, platinum or gold, the hot salty fall of misery that poured from her eyes were things over which alliances would be broken, over which murder would be committed, over which wars would be fought. It was the currency of Damnation Itself...

The anti-pious demigods who counted themselves as leaders of the Mokaeren Host saw such woeful torment as the most precious of treasures. It was beautiful. They desired it in abundance. Craved it. They needed it.

And to insure her everlasting anguish, to keep her bitter tears flowing, they remade her in their own image.

She was god-like, but nothing even close to being a deity. She was neither an angel nor a devil. There was nothing supernatural about her. She was not a monster. She was not truly an abomination of evolution, though she was, indeed, a mutated organic horror. And she was not a mistake. She was a necessary and important component in an ageless and brutal equation.

Existence was agony. No matter through what perspective she viewed her situation, her fractured multi-chronal presence spread across the continuum interfaces of the Macrocosm was painful to a near unbearable degree. The fact that she did not truly belong to any of the continuums into which she had inserted herself amplified her mental and physical distress. She had been made strong, altered and enhanced, freakishly so, made to be stronger than any living organic being had any right to be, and yet she could only barely contain the traumatizing anguish that flayed her flesh and set fire to her nervous system. And the torturous purgatory of her unrelieved suffering was what fueled her extraordinary power over both Space and Time. That power was intoxicating. That power was addictive. The strength and energy imbued her as the Master Arbiter, her mutant force of might, was gloriously exhilarating and that dark euphoria bonded her to all the many portals to the vast Macrocosm's different Realities with the assured density of an anchor. She was an intrinsic part of everything that suffered under the dread territorial domination of The Decreers of the Mokaeren Host. Her existence, though heinous and torturesome, should have been rousing and vitalizing, a miracle of biogenetic manipulative engineering.

But it wasn't. She had long ago been driven and was incapable of feeling the turbulent emotions that shredded what little remained of her individual consciousness. Every time she used her power a little more of her Self, her identity, was erased. It left scars on her mind, scars that did not heal. Fianaxis could not stop the bleeding... But the only thing she was sure of was that was exactly how the The Decreers wanted it.

It no doubt amused them.

In the presence of Quhr, the First Decreer of the Mokaeren Host, she knelt upon one bent knee in his fortress' courtyard, and stared down onto the surface of the arid plane on which the fortress was built. There was no planetary geography, no actual rocky asteroid surface with physical longitude or latitude relating to the location. The quantum isthmus on which the castle-fortress had been erected was more than merely a slip of solid land set atop a projection of dark matter around which the river-like temporal stream flowed. That isthmus was a concrete materialization, an actualization, of a universal mathematical concept called a "complex topological monodromy group", the "monodromy" being an object running around an algebraic or differential singularity. The fortress and the land on which it sat were a strange manifestation of a set of points in space, along with a set of neighborhoods for each point, satisfying a set of axioms associating those points and neighborhoods.