But belief mattered not, for there, beneath the burning sands of the Empty Quarter they slept, dreamers of a common dream, a nightmare given form and flesh by the one Dreamer whose loathsome evil thoughts gave them substance, recursive physical shadows brought to life by the id of something beyond the bounds of this plenum.
And as dreams of the Dreamer they dreamed as well, their dreams leaking into the collective unconscious, beckoning, calling, luring those whose minds were bent far enough from the mundanities of the World Outside to hear their siren's call.
The song itself was a low rumble against the blackness of the spiritus mundi, a perverse moan of dark intent that beat to a constant rhythm, never-changing, eternal. But to the minds of men, its call was always different.
Power, might, immortality...
Whatever particular vice held sway in the corrupted corners of the human soul, its name was reflected in the drum-beat summons which cast itself across the night. Whatever desire burned brightest lit the path across the midnight desert, leading the hapless children of flesh to their doom, like moths to flame.
Power had been her vice. In life, death, and life again, she had sought its embrace as one would that of a lover. Now, once more, she had been drawn to it, helplessly, utterly.
Barely had she drawn her first breath than had the call seared itself into her wide-open mind. Before, her instinct for self-preservation had shielded her; protected her body, which had been suffused with Darkness, from giving in to the rapturous touch. But now, with only a nascent mind, and barely a soul, she was little more than a puppet of skin and bone, willing and ready to submit to whatever grotesque fate the Dreamers might envision.
But she was not alone. Two others had followed her across the sands, in a race against time. Neither of them could be considered "good" men, yet they knew that were she allowed to reach her goal-- to cross over into the murky world of the Beyond and receive whatever dispensation the Old Ones saw fit to instill within her ironically still-innocent frame, that the world itself would be forfeit in an instant, a mere ball of dust to be blown aside at her whim.
But as they fell through the sand at the base of the Great Gate, crashing down into the black caverns of endless night deep within the bowels of the Earth, they knew with great certainty that it was too late.
Standing there before them, she stood, a pale-blue skinned demoness with fire in her eyes, her long, talon-like fingers whose claws clack clack clacked against one another in a slow, deadly rhythm as she slowly turned her face to meet their gaze.
One of the two men stood entranced by her bizarre alien beauty. His spectacles flashing in the darkness, lit by some unknown light, his crimson grin grew. He was the Professor, Souichi Tomoe, who had brought this woman-- or what had been this woman-- back to life. To him, every sinew of her mottled, disgusting form was a work of devilish art, both for the science and the sorcery of it. She was the ultimate synthesis of man's science and the ancient dark workings of the majestic powers behind creation itself.
The other man paled in terror and disgust. In another life he had served her, serviced her, and faced her wrathful retribution. As black as his soul was, he knew hers was darker, and he hated her, resented her. Resented that she might have caught hold of that which he himself had been the first to touch, to taste-- the black stench of corrupt chaos fermented over the course of ten billion years.
Jedite sneered, his eyes clouding over black-on-black, first clenched. He would not allow this abomination to live! Queen Beryl would never command him again!
As Jedite narrowed his eyes, he summoned that which had been buried deep within his soul, a terrible dark force whose wellspring he himself feared at times. Breathing deeply, he let the power bubble forth, exploding into every cell of his body and outwards, cloaking him in a plume of great black flame.
As the professor raised a finger to hold his spectacles in place, a tremendous outrush of power billowed forth from Jedite, ripping into the air with thunderous crash. The ground buckled and shook, the ancient cavern of the Dreamers trembling ever so slightly.
Such disturbances were rare, but they had occurred before, and did not concern the Dreamers, who continued to create their song, untroubled.
Elsewhere, sandaled feet pressed into the soft golden grains of sand that marked the boundary between the Burning Sands and the Empty Quarter.
To mortal eyes, the boundary was nonexistent. Sand bled into sand, one dune to another, in a seamless undulation, an unbroken chain as ancient as the sky itself. But to those who could see, the boundary was as palatable a shift as that between night and day. The chilled heat, the leaden oppressiveness, the groans of the wind-- they were unmistakable.
A lone figure in the sand, she stood, straddling the edge of two worlds for a moment, glancing back to see her footsteps, the one tangible proof of her long, arduous journey here, being erased by the howling winds even as she looked.
No one, she reflected, would ever know she had walked this path. She was but a momentary disturbance in the fabric of an ever-changing tapestry. Invisible, insignificant.
She paused, mulling this most human of thoughts. If she stopped here, now, and turned back... the pain could be avoided. The misery, the suffering.
But if she did not... they would surely die here, alone, forgotten.
One misery for another. One future or another. A choice. A decision.
"If you go," the girl with the brown eyes had said, "You will begin something that has its logical end in a conflagration that will consume the Galaxy".
"and if i stay?" she had asked, ostensibly, already knowing the answer from her dreams.
"The future remains open."
To empty the pages of future history, to drain them of sorrow and pain... at the cost of ending two other stories, here and now...
She stepped forward again, brightly-colored robes a stark contrast with the dreary sands as she crossed into the black lands of the Empty Quarter. The path was set, destiny assured.
Bones cracked and ichor burst forth as Jedite slumped against the wall, sliding down, a slimy trail of his lifeblood clinging to the wall in his wake. The imprint of a taloned hand was seared into his uniform jacket, which was stuck to his skin in several places. His legs had been broken the moment he had attempted a kick, and now his left arm was similarly indisposed. This was not the same Beryl he had known, and the tactical underestimation had cost him dearly.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga!" The Professor screamed, casting aside his white jacket, his starched blue-and-white shirt exploding off his upper body as it grew in mass and bulk, dark powers of his own coming to the fore.
Beryl looked down upon the insect and stabbed her taloned hand downwards to strike--- but the Professor stopped her in mid-blow, tracing an eldritch symbol in the air, binding her.
Beryl unleashed a feral scream, the piercing shrill rebounding off the massive spires of the cavern, noise upon noise upon NOISE UPON NOISE, her frustration taking almost palpable form.
And somewhere, beneath even that deepest of caverns, a Dream was interrupted.
The lone figure stopped, taken aback as she stood atop the sands before the Great Gate. It was not the shrill cry of desperate rage that chilled her-- that was barely a whisper in the night at this height-- rather, it was the cold, creeping chill of something deeper, older-- so utterly unlike that she could not even begin to understand it.
Wisely, she did not try. To her, understanding was not required. The maleficent touch of its spirit, the tendril of darkness that reached out on a more subtle, fundamental level, was enough to inform her of what she was dealing with. To try and comprehend the incomprehensible-- indeed, to even ponder the ramifications of That Which Was, was an invitation to madness, or more properly the bending of the mind to the point where, once it was able to understand the mystery, it was unable to relate to the mundane world any longer, the lens having been distorted beyond all utility. Some had managed to recover partway, existing in a netherland of crazed visions and frequent descents into hysteria-- but no one had ever returned fully.
So wisely, she became as ignorant as children, closing her eyes and stepping into the Abyss with no preconceptions or suppositions about what she was to meet below.
The Professor lay dashed on the ground beside Jedite, every bone in his body shattered. his spectacles cast aside in the violence of his impact.
Eyes blurred, he could barely make out the huge, monstrously-shapen thing that had risen up out of the ground, propelling the body of Queen Beryl into the air like a hand-puppet being flailed about on the edge of a translucent, hairy tentacle.
The light itself had gone out of Beryl's eyes, her body melting away into a dripping ooze that splattered on the ground in great blotchy drabs, the Dream of her existence, her power, over now.
The mammoth hulk dropped something akin to a proboscis or trunk onto the ground with a magnificent crash, as it slurped up the ooze, drinking it slowly, a fur-covered tongue darting in and out rapidly as it supped on the remains.
The Professor could not move to retrieve his spectacles-- and for this he was glad-- as the hideous uncontrollable, unrelenting screams from Jedite, who was experiencing not so much fear as the madness of having seen That Which Should Not Be Seen, blasted his ears and threatened to tip even his unbalanced mind deeper into a chasm of raw terror.
With a low moaning sound, the creature raised its proboscis off the ground and twisted it into something akin to an S shape, sniffing at the air, the tongue darting in and out as it tasted the air.
No, not the air. The fear. The terror from Jedite. It was homing in on it, savouring it, enjoying it. the Professor knew enough about these creatures to realize that much. He controlled his breathing and tried to become still, in mind and body. It would keep him alive, even just a little longer. Not that he had a plan for those few extra seconds of life.
The creature shuffled fowards, ripping the cavern ground up in front of it as it half-burrowed, 65 million years of sleep having left it famished, hungry to feed on more than the darkness of man's mind. Its furred tongue reached out to touch Jedite's face, to lick it, to let the barbed hooks in its surface tear off the first layer of skin, muscle and fat.
The next second, it screamed.
A shrieking, high pitched "thweee" filled the air for several seconds as the creature directed its multifaceted gaze down to the flopping remnants of its tongue, which had been shorn off by the impact of something moving incredibly fast.
Several thousand of its three million eyes darted to the side, seeing the ruddy, fading embers of a long, slender projectile evaporating into the ether.
Instinctively, a fat, thick arm-tentacle from the back of the Creature struck in the direction opposite from whence the projectile had issued forth, smashing a small, relatively tiny, man-sized object into the firm, unyielding surface of the ebonite cavern walls with a deep, resonant thud.
Satisfied, the Creature forced a new tongue to extrude from the bloodied stump of its old one, and prepared to feed once again.
Then, suddenly, the massive arm-tentacle that had been pressed against the cavern wall exploded, boulder-sized chunks of putrescent necrotic flesh lashing out into the cavern, peppering the ground like hail, phosphorescent ichor splashed everywhere, providing light to the place that had never known its shine.
The Creature froze, trying to understand, to comprehend. When it had lost its tongue, its cry had been one of shock and surprise. But now, as a very substantial part of its being had been shorn from it, it had experienced something else. A sensation, a concept that had been unknown to it in the 10 billion years of its life, from its hatching in the silky seas of Home, to the time when it drifted across the Void, to when it came to rest on Rock and Dreamed.
It had no way to express, to voice what it felt. But it knew it did not like the sensation, if such a Thing could be said to Like or Dislike.
The Creature had experienced Pain.
Standing firm against the cavern wall, her body having pressed an imprint into the ebon stone, was rei.bot, her bright electric-blue eyes cutting into the murky-green darkness.
The Creature cast its gaze towards her, all three million of its eyes focusing singularly on her being, seeing her across the myriad dimensions and plenums, understanding her form in a way and shape that even she herself could not. This one was strange.
This one did not have the sweet scent of fear around it. It was sterile and antiseptic, like the wall. No, more than that, it stank. Its Soul smelled of the Holy. The Holy was big. Bigger than it's body. Not a mere spark like that in the dots that walked the surface of Rock.
This was a thing to be crushed.
As it moved forwards, the Dream undulated, this ripple in its ocean slowly propagating out to the other Dreamers. They experienced a vague unsettling, but let it pass. Ironically, at their unsettling, the minds of men momentarily found ease and a calm swept the Earth, even if but for a moment's breath.
rei.bot dropped to the ground and then leapt up into the air, the sleeves of her hakama flapping in the wind, pulling her arms into her sleeves, dozens upon dozens of glowing red arrows emerging in their place. Letting them fly, she struck at over three hundred of the Creature's eyes simultaneously.
The Creature did not even react as its vision was dimmed only in the slightest. Lashing forth with its massive, trunk-like tentacles, it swatted at the creature, which initially dodged the first few, but was slammed aside by a rapidly writhing one, exploding through an ebonite wall.
rei.bot shot out of the hole in the cavern wall at full speed, pulling her arms to her side and shooting through the wall of tentacles like a bullet. Optimal strategy was to simply detonate a massive surge of energy, but that would bring down the cavern and crush those she was attempting to protect.
Jedite, for his part, raised his one good arm, and began to pull at the dark power that suffused the Creature. Even the slightest whiff of it was potent enough to corrupt a mortal man, but to Jedite, it was a soothing, healing balm he could pervert to his own ends. Slowly, surely, sinew reattached, and bones knitted...
rei.bot jumped on the Creature's back and bent down, punching the back of its carapace with tremendous force, enough to rend a mountain in two. A slight crack appeared on the shell.
Raising an eyebrow, rei.bot leapt upwards and clear of the mass of tentacles as they stabbed down on the spot where she had stood, pounding into the shell instead, which cracked with a sick snapping sound.
As the Creature retracted its tentacles in shock, and momentarily froze, rei.bot simply stopped levitating and dropped down like a lead weight, smashing through the already healing crack, which had been simply covered over by a flimsy membranous skin.
rei.bot was surrounded by thick walls of massive black flesh, pulsing and beating to the beat of ichor rushing though the veins and capillaries of something older than the solar system itself.
Striding forward purposefully, she shaped her forearms into massive gleaming scythes and simply slashed her way through the interior of the Creature, the metallic swish of her blades cutting into flesh resonating almost in time with the roars of the Creature and its intensifying heartbeat.
Suddenly, the insides of the creature began to press and swell, growing towards rei.bot in an attempt to crush her, massive walls of throbbing flesh crushing against her.
The cybernetic miko allowed her shape to go "loose", flowing into a more liquid metal form, and tried to push past the meaty walls. But the crush was impossibly tight, and she found herself pinned. In liquid form, she was incapable of exerting leverage or using weaponry.
The Creature's pulse began to settle, as it healed over, prepared to keep the insect pinned in its body for an eternity, like a splinter locked in a wound long since repaired.
rei.bot was neither uncomfortable, nor frustrated. The shape of the battlefield had simply changed. She could remain here indefinitely, but her objective would be compromised if she did not effect escape. Further, she found that she enjoyed the sun, and breeze, and simply walking. She would miss those things greatly, not to mention her pet, Sakura. This position was unacceptable.
Jedite staggered to his feet slowly. rei.bot's interjection into the battle had given him a chance to calm down and remember what he was dealing with here. He had seen their ilk before, after all. Granted, this one seemed to be *different* somehow, more *primal* and intrinsically unsettling.
Doing his best not to gaze at the creature, Jedite scrambled to Professor Tomoe, his footfalls squishing in the remnant flesh of the Creature's damaged tentacle.
Pressing his gloved hand to the Professor's head, he began channeling the excess energy from the Creature's Aura-- until the Professor himself held up a hand and pushed him off.
"HEALING FACTOR..." Tomoe said, laughing darkly as he slowly rose from the ground, a bent-over hulk, filled with a devilish glee that chilled the Shitennou to the bone.
Jedite stared at the Professor in blank shock. What unspeakable things had Souichi Tomoe done to himself in the quest to reforge his human genome into that of that which went beyond human-- to the Super Human?
rei.bot, meantime, had shifted her own mass even more, becoming more porous so that the flesh of the creature pressed through her like cheese through a grater. Yes, it was formidable. It was beyond anything she had ever faced, with a capacity to heal and recover that she had never seen. Even now, the mimetic capabilities of her Validium metal body were analyzing the capacities and deeming whether they were worthy of inclusion. Conclusion? They were not.
To one who sought to understand the creature as a product of the history of creation, to feel the weight of its age, the primal forces it represented, to try and contextualize it in the frame of reference of a universe to which it did not belong, it was the ultimate terror, a distorted incomprehensible horror that did not fit square with the four corners of reality.
But to rei.bot, who, for all her humanity was also a superbly excellent machine, these considerations were magnificently irrelevant, even philosophically. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, it was a large lifeform operating pan-dimensionally, the edge of something larger which did not even exist Here, like a finger pressed into the surface of a lake as seen by a passing fish.
Its rapid healing was nothing she could not already do. The speed of it was simply due to its vast power. rei.bot was sure she had just as much power, just not as efficient means of deploying it. Her body was not built to channel all that energy safely at once. Thus, she was slower to recover than this Creature. She could achieve such efficiency by assuming a form like that of the Creature's, but it would lose her the self-identity she had come to prize. Besides, she noted, this very ability to harness power would be its undoing.
rei.bot channeled a great deal of power to her outer surface, which was now stretched thinly, like a thin sheen of metal betwixt the creature's flesh. Quickly, she raised her temperature to 5770 degrees Kelvin, that of the Sun.
Instantly, the flesh of the creature jerked back, burning and searing-- but also healing.
Quickly, rei.bot flash-vaporized herself into a steam-like state, her tiny metal particles slipping in through the burn wounds, held together under her control by force of will. This was a dangerous state. If she let her concentration slip, she could quickly lose control and become inert, nothing more than drops of metal. Usually detaching one large limb was no problem, but this was her entire mass, every particle operating independently yet as one.
Pushing into a severed vein, rei.bot quickly let her body "clump" into larger, more easily manageable spheres of metal, which were being ballistically shot through the Creature's circulatory system at over 1000 miles per hour. It would be fractions of a second before she made her way to its heart, which was located deep within its body, in an otherwise impenetrable fortress of bone and shell.
As she approached, rei.bot began to reform into a thin stream of liquid metal, exploding outwards in an ever expanding spiked sphere, akin to the head of a mace, as soon as she entered the ventricles.
The Creature screamed and howled as its heart exploded within its body, and ichor, unmanaged, flooded like a tidal wave across its body.
The next second, its back exploded in a glowing bloody green cloud as rei.bot shot outwards, firing wave after wave of ki bolts back downwards into the heart chamber, preventing it from healing over.
As Jedite and the Professor watched slackjawed, the Cybernetic Miko screamed and poured even more power into the heart in a focused blast of ethereal blue light, charring and vaporizing the meat faster than it could repair.
Denied of ichor, the creature began to shudder and convulse, its tentacles spasming in rivulets, smashing and cracking the earth in a massive earthshock.
Jedite grabbed the Professor and flew out of the cavern. He did not bother to call out to the Miko. Even if the caverns fell in on her now, it would not make a whit of difference.
Slowly, the bits of the creature furthest from the heart began to die, dissolving into a black, charred mass, somewhat like burnt coals.
As rei.bot swung out with her left arm and lashed out with an ever-widening crescent of energy, utterly obliterating the heart for all time, the dying Creature took a last look at the shape, the form of That Which Had Brought Death.
This image, the form and shape of Man, it Dreamed as its last Dream, sending the thought up through the Plenums like a fading echo even as it finally grew still and ceased to Be.
On the surface of the Desert, Jedite and the Professor jumped as the ground convulsed, a gigantic temblor roaring beneath the surface of the sands. They looked at one another as slowly, but surely, rei.bot rose through the surface of the golden sand, like Excalibur from the Lake.
"Is it over?" Jedite asked.
"Yes," rei.bot lied. For, she knew all too well, that even though the Creature had died--
--its message had been sent.
And deep in the Tau Ceti system, a long abandoned Dream was given shape once more...