The Riddle of the Labyrinth 46 - Deep into the Imp

Deep into the Impossible

The vision meeting them on the other side of the Orb's permeable wall could well be Labyrinth hundreds of millennia in the future. A city of tumbled ruins, residues of almost indistinguishable structures which rubble laid spread over what might once have been streets and open squares, ropy and withered weed growing in cracks and between stones, calcified remnants of larger vegetation sticking like stumps out of the ground, every object jagged and irregular. As they cautiously advanced, Atrey, Cleanthia and Chervin held close to the security of the shadows, senses alert.

They passed through the endless empty streets, paths that went on forever, infinitely turning into long narrow passages that curved interminably back upon countless other avenues. Nothing remained of what could have been streetlights or traffic signs or anything remotely indicating an understanding of written words. Just bare stones towering upward to the open, space less sky. Cresting the walls and high out of reach clouds plumed, moved and phased through the colours of agony and oblivion, purple tinged or rimmed with fire, rose and xanthine or sterling when the rains come. The senescent sun cast down broken, hardly warming rays that shifted the perspectives and distorted the shadows, confusing the eye and bringing the heart unto despair. Everything seemed constructed in illusion, disarrangement and obscurity and yet at the same time, as if to pointedly confound the senses, it appeared definite, ancient and very, very real. Once trapped within there seemed to be no escape. Only fools would dare wander here, fools or heroes, and to be a hero one must surely be a fool.

A horrible green lizard-like creature trailed the ground, seemingly the spawn of a foul and hideous copulation, a fearful monster from which the trio knew by instinct they must hide. They didn't know what it was – all that mattered was the mind-numbing sensation that one must flee and never be caught, flee for one's prized life. Just as with roaches - where there was one there were always more of the same ilk lurking nearby, there could be one just around that close bend. The dreadful thing seemed possessed of but half a wit but it was the kind of fiend that never tired of the chase.

From a low, dark niche up on a narrow parapet they crouched and watched the strange beast in alarm. Below them the world was grey and pallid brown and reeking of death and terror. Atrey felt as if she was speared with tension, watching from the turmoil of the nightmare, seeing the very whites of the others widened eyes, seeing their limbs trembling, knowing that her own composed face and body language was nothing but a charade of controlled cybernetic body parts.
"The Alien?" Chervin turned to Atrey in horror.
"Or at least one of them?" the Cyborg answered silently. "Or a part of it, I really don't know which is more correct to assume."
"I believe this was the one Saphira beheld," Cleanthia added. "I'd prefer her fowl friend to be true."

The monster could be heard thundering in the heart of the maze, anticipating the delirious taste of flesh, seeking for the quarry that had eluded it so far. These three, the man and the women, they quivered in the shadows, hid like trapped mice in a loft. The beast had long craved their flesh, anticipated to eat of their hearts, to rip out their guts, suck their intestines clean and chew their bones. Some primal instinct told it that this flesh would be sweeter to the taste because it had been seasoned with dread. Another perception also had told it that the older woman should be left untouched though, as she wasn't born from a female's womb. The beings who lived in these extraneous realms had tinkered with the nature of obscenity and madness, used their wizardry to fashion an electronic caricature of life, a most vile and unnatural birth.

It felt the man close at hand, and it dreamed of his succulent fat, his juicy muscles in its jaws, lacerated and destroyed. Why it obsessed so it did not understand, it barely understood the dreams that provoked it into being, where it existed at the point of instinct, yet it would have hated, stalked, murdered and eaten him anyway. Predisposition and myth spoke a weird paradoxical gibberish inside its deformed and addled head, spoke to its primitive brain and gave it impetus. It lived to kill and to devour; it existed to destroy despite its captivity. Moreover, it was captive because it was like unto no other creature. Maybe gods whispered in its ear too, derisive taunts for amusement and entertainment. Had it not heard, perhaps when it slumbered, the great primordials suppressing a chortle at its expense? It was ugly, it was hideous, it stank and it was stupid.

What were all those whispers that it could not decipher and what did it mean to be gaoled in a twisting, endless maze of nameless streets that always went back to the same spot? A muse sang a dream to the creature that once upon a time the Elders had drawn up the plans of this prison, elicited the entity to be locked away, to never to go free. It had been lonely for so long, lonely and hungry and with a profound craving to eat what was out there.

Who were these three estranged intruders, trapped within the dark lines just as the creature was trapped? This bitter confusion angered it though it only partially understood the venom. It was incapable of calculating such desired vengeance, it was trapped and could not know liberty and it was confused because it didn't know what it really meant to be free. Nevertheless did it dream of freedom. It hadn't even occurred to it to try climbing those walls that seemed to reach to the very limits of heaven. Regardless if the beast could conceive the thought to scale the walls it would have been useless to put that thought into action. It had the strength all right, its fingers might be resilient, bony talons with opposing thumbs, but the walls were steep and relentless.

It was no use in attempting to escape via conquering the heights of forever. Whatever laid beyond these walls was not, in any case, within the beast's powers of comprehension. All it really knew were short term memories of turning another corner, mounting another sheaf of rubble, drinking water from puddles of rain or grabbing and ingesting the rodents which sometimes crossed its path. In spite the hunger never waned. No matter that the beast ate to repletion, gorged of the coveted flesh till it was bloated and could consume no more. It would be the very same fate for the man and the younger woman, the strangers who scurried like rats among the debris. They would not escape; the beast would find them eventually and they would pay with their lives.

"Cleanthia? Cleanthia?" The Voidwalker was ripped out of her seizure by someone shaking her. That someone was the dark-skinned mage from Taronda, Chervin. "What happened, Cleanthia, you seemed to faint and then you started to waver, beginning to fade out of this reality. Where you trying to go somewhere? Reach something?"
"I..." her eyes appeared glazed over with a luminous film, her lips thick, wet and violently trembling as she felt the sickly coil of fear in her belly tighten.
"We must stay together, Cleanthia," Atrey's voice behind her. "Or we'll be in trouble. No one might know what can happen here deep in the impossible."

"That being down there," Cleanthia craned her head slightly in the direction of the horrid green thing they had just discovered. "I was able to tune in. Read its mind. Or at least sense something remotely like a mind. Concentrated on roaming around here and feeding on something similar to rats or guineapigs which seem to have infested this place. It has perceived us."
"Are there no more than one?" Atrey asked and shot her a speculative look.
"No, just this one."
"Can it really be the Alien?" Chervin took her trembling hands between his, warming them, sending comfort transmitted thought neurons, numbing her anxiety. "It seems..."
"Preposterous, I know," Cleanthia dared a meek smile at him, distress still shown in her aquamarine eyes, yet it was soon variegated with a more relaxed sheen as Chervin worked her nerves. "No, that thing down there is not the Alien. Not even a part of it. Just some poor thing which has ended up in here, perhaps the Alien caught it somewhere and put it here so that it might study it."

"Did you encounter it yesterday also?" Chervin asked.
"No," Cleanthia shook her head. "I only heard Saphira tell about seeing it. But this place is enormous. Without endings. She and I might've been somewhere entirely else."
"Yes, you were right about it too," Atrey said. "I've been taking measures, as far as it's possible to do. It's even larger here on the inside than on the outside. Some kind of folded world inside, no doubt. Running in supplementary, dissimilar dimensions than the world outside. That's how this Orb managed to rupture through the Labyrinthian neighbourhood and appear enormous at an ocular glance, however really measuring it in other spectra it's recognizable that it's not taking up any space at all. Only here could that happen, here in this young bustling universe of Infraheim where the natural laws are still immature and unsettled, not yet ready to conform to infinitude like in older realms."

"So how were we..." Chervin made an almost pained face as he was striving for an understanding which felt way too inexplicable. He had a vague recollection of having once grasped things like this in a dream back home in Alozzia, but now it laid forgotten, beyond his reach.
"Somewhat like portalling," Atrey responded. "And yet not. I know how you feel, nothing of this makes very much sense now."

The pale sun blended with the roiling clouds. A pall of grey was stretched across the sky, a heavy and gravid cloud, unmoving, darkling, expanding in the great tenebrous chromium dome. From this roiling cumuli a blade of frenzied lightning cut a jagged dance to the world below, flashed over the desolate land strobing it in unforgiving, discordant highlights. In silence the trio watched the spectacle intently and just a heartbeat later the fortitude of the thunderclap assaulted them, almost hurling them to the uneven ground.

Through the discontinuous light they beheld wavering images, dark things unfurling from the shadows. From its centre erupted something else, a silvered object spinning in a drop from the gathered clouds above. They saw it clear the escarpment, cut between the endlessly stretching parapets, a light-refracting spindle tumbling through the atmospheres. Down and down it swirled, a circle of etiolated sparks pitched before the death mask of a failing sun. It wheeled a vertiginous revolution, striking steepled crags with lightning flashes, falling to the ground, there to become embedded in the white sands, catching the light and throwing chaos among the writhing shadows.

Ashes settled and coloured the sands black and smoke drifted and threaded itself into the lifting air. The fumes dissolved. Then there was nothing but marasmus of atrophied sunshine and groping shadow, smoke boiling up from the crashed vessel, a faint gush of brimstone and burnt plastic reaching the nostrils of the observers.

In the ringing silence afterwards, they saw orange flames slithering up, licking at the hull of the object for a fragment of a moment before dying down again. Then a lid opened up and there were two figures stepping out, blackened, confused and steadying each other they walked out in the harsh sunlight, one of them only able to take a few steps before it slumped down in the sand, the other one kneeling and doing its best to lift its fallen comrade. But that one was apparently dead – or at least incapacitated.

The next horrid moment the observers spotted the lizard beast bolting forwards from its hiding place, mowing unexpectedly quick for its figureless bulk and with the newly arrived creatures as its obvious object. But the hulking stranger refused to become a target, it pulled something from its armpit and aimed it, a flashing light was seen and the lizardian hit the dirt. The death wasn't immediate though, it cramped and twinged, writhed and contorted, wriggling as if it were a huge, bisected worm - a perverted dance of eerily soundless death struggle. It seemed to take an eternity until the convulsions ceased and meanwhile the still living being walked over to it and stared at it, its hunchbacked stance disconcertingly, patiently still until the lizardian finally stopped jerking. Then the black thing bent down and began pulling its kill toward the silver disk, it didn't take long until it had disappeared within or behind the same with its finding. The other being, which was evidently dead by now, was left out in the sun.  

The three disinclined spectators turned to look at each other, repugnance mixing with fear and vain tries to apprehend the nauseating and appalling vignette they had just witnessed.
"We should leave this place," Chervin finally said.
"You sense it too?" Cleanthia whispered, her upper lip twitched as another slice of panic cut.  
"Yes, danger lurks in the air," the diplomat went on, his eyes smarting. "This place is not meant for us. It's meant for those immanences we saw, those prisoners. Like the creatures yonder. It will drive us mad if we linger. Even you, Atrey!" he insisted as he read the hesitant doubt in the ever-calculating eyes of the Cyborg.

***

A nonsensical monosyllable of disbelief fell over her indigo lips as she took her eye off the microscope and straightened up her pose. No, it couldn't be... It wasn't possible. Orora rubbed her eyes and then she bent down to take another look. True, she was seeing the same thing the second time around, and it couldn't be somnolent eyes or a trick of the light. She had asked her assistant Eidrain earlier, and the younger man had confirmed her discovery.

Indeed, this obviously organic matter was without any trace of DNA – or anything remotely alike the very building stones of life. DNA – the trace of the creators – could be found all over the universes, from the simplest single-cellular life form to the immeasurably complicated humanoid species. This common denominator, this spiralling marvel, was the ultimate proof that it had been the same group of gods who once used the same group of substances all over the known multiverse. Those gods who had made them – or at least kick-started the evolutionary process which ultimately had formed the humanoids.

But this matter? The physician held no doubt that what she was seeing was something organic, King Jareth had also confirmed it. What Orora was examining were fragments of feathers from an alien being which Saphira had encountered inside of this mysterious Orb which had manifested right in their city. Strangely enough these remains had no DNA, its composition was built by something entirely different, knob-like molecules reminding Orora of knitted textile, looping and unlooping inside and outside of each other in an eternally 3-dimensional gitter – and something with the composition gave away that this structure extended into the fifth and sixth dimensions too. She shook her head – the only possible conclusion was that the origin of this thing was from somewhere entirely else, far far away from the known realm. Brought forwards by other entities than the gods they attributed for their origin.