Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

Part 7, "Behold, This Wolf of Infinite Dread..."

Anarchy was a maelstrom of lawlessness and upheaval, an unrelenting force of pandemonium and havoc happily released from its cage... Entropy, a universal mandate primarily considered to be impartial and dispassionate, was known by those who were wise to secretly favor Anarchy over Order.

Order meant constancy, control, sovereignty, and predictability. Some would say "stagnation". Anarchy meant turmoil, unpredictability, nihilism, and chaos. Some would say "evolution".

Chaos had been unleashed in the least likely place in the Ventriculum and the impact of that event unleashed pandemonium throughout the intradimensional void.

Kahlyndaar, the Paranescience's dread Angel of Cataclysm, had imperiously forced his way past the mammoth Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge to violently invade the sanctity of the Authoritarch's Prismatic Faction. The Magistorial Ring of the Rift Bridge was a randomized parametrical wall that separated the domain of the Authoritarchs from the rest of the general Flow, making it a floating-point island in vector space unassailable by any organic creature possessing the same vibrational algorithmic frequency as the main oceanic body of the Ventriculum. The Prismatic Faction existed as a wedge between different Planes of Reality. To try mounting the Rift Bridge and then attacking the Prismatic Faction was supposed to be a quantum impossibility. And yet Erraforda the Major, one of the Authoritarch's eldest, most dominant and formidable governing Judgmentors, had been killed during the breach.

Killed.

If everyone weren't already attuned to it before, then they were aware of it now. The Multiverse was broken. Reality was failing.

No one in among any of the MetaFlow's primary sentient organic civilizations had ever supposed that any of the Authoritarchs could die. No one could find exiting record or anecdotally recall that such an event had ever before occurred. The conventional wisdom was that Authoritarchs, immensely powerful, seemingly omniscient quasi-deities, were not prey to the weaknesses, the corruption and the decomposition that affected those fragile, mortal creatures made of flesh. The various governments of the MetaFlow's cultivated and humanized territories were shocked and horrified. Such an event was evidence that not only could the millenia-old fortress at the haven that housed the Prismatic Faction be breached, but its demi-god inhabitants were now revealed to be vulnerable to assault from one of Queen Infernyya Rebekkon's mutated ultrahuman void-assassins. The discovery that a Black Sun Angel could be powerful enough to physically challenge and defeat any one of the Authoritarchs in single battle was stupefyingly implausible and yet it had actually happened. This concept courted far more than mere heresy, it was an atrocity of nightmarish proportions.

Worse, it was undeniably apocalyptic.

Because while the dumbstruck and astonished Authoritarchs engaged Kahlyndaar in pitched battle, the Colonial Expeditionists of the Nebulancer Fleet and the Feral Armada of the Devolutioner Protectorate eagerly waited for their opportunity to launch a lethal strike at the heart of the ruling dominion at the first sign of collapse. The two naval invasion militias waited masked, voidships invisible to detection, just beyond the edges of the Rift Bridge.

The fractious and fragile Balance of Power within the civilized MetaFlow was teetering on the edge of sudden disintegration.

Tegryimm Xolak, the Paladin Prime of the Authoritarchs, leader of the small army of parahuman guardians called "the Sentry Protective", had dispatched the cosmic Ronin named Ryujonin Worr.  Returning from her travels Outside in the Known Universe, emerging through the Nexxion Jump Gate at the Superposed Manifold Wall's Portal Deformation, she had been summoned into the August Presence of Wenshalla Hax, the steely and intimidating Authoritarch known as the "Speaker of Judgments".