The Void Lords

Extradimensional beings examine humanity.

THE

VOID LORDS

"Your evident emotion for these creatures is palpable."


A large figure stood, its hands clasped behind its back. It was tall. Exotically tall. Twenty feet it would measure. Clad in armour hewn from black bone, a material unknown to man but what is called a: 'Panoply of Void' to the masterful creatures who wrought it for wear. Theirs is without facial gifts, featureless, lost inside a hood or helm, unable to be awed by lesser beings. A side effect of their transmogrification into a form able to traverse the strangeness of the local reality.


Though it, and its kind, opted to utilise a certain structural likeness to humans, there was no denying that this was done with distaste and contempt. A body derived from nativity within the new reality these beings had found themselves, only hastily constructed to enable their continuity in a varyingly diverse, obscure, and exotic universe compared with their own.
These bodies they require, far too restrictive, limiting, impotent when laid astride the infinity of portent in their native expanse.


The Void. Home to these monstrously deific beings, a place which richly transcends any knowing held by Mankind. They swerve, saunter, and stimulate the burning interior of the Void, each one, a presence in it that has no body. Physicality, truly: Existence is not adequate description for what inhabits the intermediate dimensional wilderness these beings call home.


They are however, masters of it in all conceivable ways. Bending, stretching, carving, knitting, or melding it to their will. Be it mindful distraction, or wanton conviction. They have become lords to their own realm of unmade things, while extremely potent threats to a fragile, anaemic - spacetime continuum.


"Nach t anud chiar... Quanticar..."
A challenging brogue laden with throaty roars, gnashing rasps, and the thin spring of hisses effused from nearby. The giant turned slowly to face the judging member of its kin. Enormous hands still clasped behind it.
"I do not express with speech my contempt of what passes for lifeforms in this universe Aevor. I study them. And reveal more to despatch with every experiment. It is enough that this place is made of what it is, primitivity, and freshness... Erog tcho ggvuln."


Quanticar, made an almost imperceptible gesture with its head. Rearing up to flex its massive chest outward, the giant being began to step toward the other.


Aevor, kin to Quanticar, stood resolute and blankly regarded his opposite with a hidden sense of glee. The gravity in this cosmos had bound them to a floor of cold crystalline stone. A cavernous chamber in which they communed extended outward and upward in proportions gigantic to accommodate their hated forms.


Though these lords of realms alien to human ken, could on a whim; levitate - drifting carefully through space, the Panoply of Void encasing each one of their kind afforded this luxury for limited durations. Much to their collective disgust.


Quanticar halted facing Aevor, each giant extended their right hand, palms out, six fingers flared from each. A low hum built between the magnificent entities as they slowly began to lift off the floor of the chamber. They remained hovering in position a few inches above a gleeming polished black marblite extent, within it all, from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, a dull blue light pulsed.


Energy excited sub-atomic particles all throughout the chamber. Originating with the shared proto-physical connection of Void-borne consciousness between the two beings.


A blue aura stood proud of their shoulders and crown, before empty space began to gradually open between them. Once the two giants were sufficiently apart, hands still raised, four prongs of glittering lightning yawned open into a diamond shape. The square traced by this electrical surging - held within it, a turning, swirling membrane of ultra-density.


The two beings held the portal open with ease, the disruption to reality rolled and pulsated between them. Remaining aloft, and while concentrating - Quanticar began again:
"This will begin the spillage of yet more hatred into this insufferable reality. The more of us there are to burn away its incarcerating confines, pollute its vexing substrate, and serve its life-things a profound judgment... The more likely an efficient conquest is rendered. "


The roiling hole emitted scintillating waves of energy at its edges, the darkness within it began to bubble or flex in places, as though it were a thin, almost liquid-like film. Soon, larger bulges appeared in its black tar-like surface. These bulges looked as though something was pushing against the eldritch fabric suspended in the portal from the other side.


The bulges began to reveal more detail and more features of the hands pressing through from wherever the other relativistic edge was connected.
Six fingered hands stretched the oily curtain until it finally let go, slithering back down the digits and wrists of the entity trying to come through.


The bony fingers lead hands, hands lead arms, and arms opened out while the black veil sublimated across a colossal chest, torso, and head. Grey skinless musculature, ligaments, vascular tissues, and heavily blemished understructures resembling fractured sandstone emerged from within the portal centre.


As the last few millimetres of giant stepped through onto the glossed floor, it trailed with it a monumental quantity of ichor, thick globules of black ink floated through into the space behind the arrived giant. The clouds hovered in place at its flanks, oscillating or churning with unknowable purpose, shapelessness defying local cosmological restriction.


The two giants hovering aside the portal slowly lowered their hands, arcing energy began to sizzle and die. Shrinking around the bubbling essence contained inside before eventually closing around a single infinitely small point, light no longer ablaze, the blue aura of everything subsiding.


They drifted down softly onto their feet, standing firm upon the great rock-derived space. There, they waited. Acknowledging the other of their kind in silent anticipative gesticulation.
No eyes seeing, no faces expressing, only the unregistered rustling or settling of attire.


The new arrival was hunched, its spine curved over above its head, long arms dangling low, it finally let out a cough-like sigh that reverberated. It sank slowly onto one knee before extending both arms out perpendicular to its body. Its head a round globe, eyeless and without visible means to vocalise still expelled sonorous agonised groans.


Like the condemned in a pillory, it remained still, until beginning to drone out a low frequency gurgle, its head shifted lightly left and right. The shaking blobs of black ink began to surround the giants body, limbs and all - before languidly evaporating. Once all the ink had dissipated, the giant materialised again in its new panoply. Dropping its arms and rising to its feet, at which time its low rumble had quieted.


Eudex turned to face Aevor and Quanticar.


"This place... It hurts. And it... It tastes of dirt."


For a moment, the other giants remained still, when suddenly Aevor effused a low rumble as like Eudex had:


"It will do more than hurt, sheshigwa nirpror anuntul beorior olomglop... And it will always be flavoured with the rot of time."


Eudex' head rotated on his neck. He glanced upward without eyes to admire the ceiling, able to perceive it by means only known to them. He extended a hand and waved away the distant charcoal coloured rock to reveal an overfiltered background stained with tiny inconsistent pockmarks of light. A minute segment of a universe permeating their every direction. If
Eudex had a mouth and saliva, he would have spat vitriol.


Waving his hand back, Eudex closed the metaphorical window into space. Relishing some deeply usurped notion of self captivating isolation alongside his kin.


"Our bodies... Why?!" Eudex did not turn this time.


Quanticar answered swiftly, wanting to extol some measure of platitude best becoming of his long experience trapped in this muck-cosmos:


"Jist oglop merren othop. Nen cogwiar shenisharanoon... We must have shape. And only this shape offers ambulation."
Quanticar held up two fingers to express that two reasons were unsustainably merciless for such creatures as themselves.


Eudex swung around before planting a foot down with force enough to rupture air. Rage seemed to fill a reservoir with every revelation about this uniquely vile universe.


"It is revolting! It is derived from something alive, it is a diseased collection of cells that reformed my essence in this place, unrefined biological material! This is not sufficient for our extrusion into Voidal condensate - It is-"


Quanticar halted Eudex's tirade:


"It is the only template available for use. The creatures we are shaped after, are the only sentients, and their proliferation is insignificant. No other animal has risen beyond the complexity of worms here. Our choice of form is unfortunate, but form it is Eudex. Abominable. Yet navigable. "


Eudex snarled, but did not challenge the facts confronting him. His bitterness tempered his wrath. The natural order of this existential plain left him with a caustic need to destroy. He clawed a hand, and into it materialised from a tiny, electrically bordered fissure in reality - a long spear-like object. The electric field rapidly subsided around the weapon. Its upper haft
adorned in cracked, moving decorations that never stilled, while its point chipped a chunk of obsidian floor aside. Eudex dug the point in some to steady his frame, ignoring the damage he did to the sanctuary.


Quanticar began to move away from the group. He gestured for his companions to follow. They walked astride, all the time a regular snap sounded where Eudex chiseled many divets out of the floor with his speartip. His new body seemed to have aged, or at least, felt to him burdened with a finite weakness that he couldn't tolerate, forcing him for now to lean on the spear and have it support his movement until more of his essence coalesced.


The giants had traversed the sanctum for minutes before Quanticar rounded a corner into a passage leading away from the extreme chamber. Narrower now, the walls were interrupted every few steps with high angular arches, crested at the ceiling and floor with an alien sconce, each clasping a strange jar of luminescent liquid.


By this light, the way ahead would to human eyes appear to be in utter darkness, nothing to be seen. But to the three giants, their perception of this light is not as eyes would see. Blind to photons, their uninhibited sensory consciousness made the halls to them - glow with fickle blue concentrates to offer distinction, while other violet and green shades accentuated depth.
The lordly beings trapsed further along, their unwanted physiology causing untold agony to their chained essences, yearning for non-corporeal existence in the Void. They soon arrived at a destination which evidenced their claimant virtuosity in matters un-material.


A room carved in all directions providing a spherical interior. The chamber had only the high casket-shaped entrance and a thin sliver of platform extending into its centre. Around its internal surface, perforating everywhere, were thousands of skull-sized spheres recessed into the obsidian stone. Each multispectral glass ball a dramatic elucidation adjusted to furnish the giant being's prehensile perception of reality in ordered segments.


Once more, Quanticar defaulted to a pose where hands returned behind himself. He stood central in the platform and was joined by his kin. The platform, by unknowable means; faded behind them from a long outcropping of floor, to be re-ordered around them into a disc with space aplenty for movement among such towering entities.


A glottal shrug effused from Quanticar, followed by a short, harsh quintet of piped honks at extremely low frequency. A linguistic flux, forced out through his disfigured oratory complex. Unintelligible to human ears. Though translated:


"Behold! Here have I constructed a miasma of functionaries depicting many extents to our plight. Most are bound to observations of this... Cosmos... As it is called by the simple organics that dwell here..."


The other two lords gazed about themselves at the new room, the glassy reflections of a thousand-thousand eyes stared without fixation.


Aevor droned lowly, the language feeble to the task of description, let alone communication:


"Artem nho ree-. Serpesh ol tol nu-oh? This is a playground. You call it a laboratory?"


Quanticar did not move. His panoply did not shift. He merely snorted.


"Dus nu-oh ol tol drecum.... I call it... An OBSERVATORY..."


A wave of energy collected in a pool around the verge of the isolated platform, blinding blue arcs sizzled between invisible connections, remaining solid, a dangerously exposed short-circuit it would seem. But such a risk can never be posed to them who are extraneous to physical matter, and the energies which restrain it.


Quanticar selected a globe, lifting it out of place from afar without so much as a gesture. The object floated - untouched - through emptiness down toward him. It halted close enough Quanticar could reach it, he did not take it however. Instead he formed a flat blade of five fingers and an in-curled thumb, pressing his fingertips against the sphere's face.


It stayed motionless. Beside him, Eudex grunted impatiently. Ignoring the freshness of his companions arrival, Quanticar waited while the sphere cracked, lightning travelling slowly over its entirety before each branch coalesced, finding themselves interconnected. At this, the sphere shattered, sending out each of its crystalline fragments in a small radius, while remaining completely suspended in mid air.


The hovering, turning pieces remained tethered to each other by an aggravated arc of blue lightning. In the centre of this contained explosion lay a metal circlet. The head-ring emitted a sheen of mirror, so silver as to refract light in all directions.


Quanticar took the alien crown between massive
hands, offering the circlet to Aevor. The giant extended his reach to accept the shining ring, slipping it over his dome, the ring sat clear of his head, never binding to his panoply. It's purpose was not egotistic fashion, nor a badge denoting status. The crown was used to see as the eyes of humans do.


Aevor sighed. The colossal noise attenuated only by sheer restraint.
Quanticar left the shattered sphere listing and apart while he prepared an opening before himself. The giants stepped closer to peer into the hole he rent in the continuum proper.


"Observe Aevor, the chagrin you fear I am victim of, is not so. You are soon to witness creatures whose form is revolting, their minds slovenly, amidst a vexing existence that resembles only raw squalor... Humanity."


Aevor percolated. His extrinsic armour shifted with him. His speech wrote obscenities in the air, as though the gases in the room threatened him, he taunted the reality around them, yearning it to
evolve into something he might abuse still worse.


While Aevor stood preparing himself in odium, the crown about his head let go a loud chime ringing out across the chasm interior. Aevor was struck by an incredible pain, the agony coursed through his reviled body, cutting at every unwanted nerve, burning through his distorted frame, an experience he had no notion of, fueling ire against the incarcerating facsimile that becomes an entity made of borrowed biology.


Aevor pitched backwards but floated upward off the floor, the being contorted and spasmed, writhing in a static flight that kept him from the mercy of gravity. The noise he made was terrifying. The energy expended to keep from tearing his scalded body apart was almost untenable, Aevor desperately sought to purge himself of this paroxysm, enduring too much.


Ripping the circlet from atop his head while crashing to the floor with a septic scream - Aevor hurled the ring back at the electrically charged sphere fragments, the sphere closed around it. Returning to its default state. An inert glass orb hovering patiently.


For moments Aevor lay propped up on an elbow while the rest of him was drawn along the floor. He released a heavy rumble before he flopped onto his back, his chest heaved, though he breathed nothing without functioning lungs.
All the agony channelled into his senses had flooded directly from the circlet.


Finally Aevor questioned: "Tok nuwern tuoh?! - What... ... Are they?!" The prone giant raised himself to a knee, while stretching his free hand out. Quanticar assisted his kin to his feet before answering.


"They are soft, crawling things. Like a miasma of flesh, thought, and dysmorphosis. But what yet is worse, is their ambition..."
Quanticar turned his head in several directions. Without a face, none could view any sign of contemplation from him.
Aevor sulked. Eudex droned harshly. Quanticar returned the orb to its nest in the wall. He then levitated another down from a higher row, stopping it in front of him.
Quanticar enquired this time,
"What did the Eye show you?"


Aevor shook, partially with incandescent fury, but also lingering reflection. The pain troubled his form, he couldn't explain why. Until he chided miserably at Quanticar.


"It revealed a civilisation made of these obtuse, ghastly organics. It fed me a portion cut from their sight. Their blightful toil. Then it blinded me - the Eye, it made seeing conditionally uncomfortable, aswell as verifiably excruciating. If humans experience in that way... It's any wonder their polluted evolution traps them. Confines them in a sickly reality. Dependent on nothing but what their own hands make, what their own thoughts produce.


Their worst affliction is a lifespan. Within it, the limitations they suffer are permanent and everpresent. "


Quanticar stiffened. He was glad some perspective could bestow on Aevor, a levelling of truth. That his kin could now recognise futile conjecture, satisfied him.


Eudex had remained quiet for the exchange. His panoply was still knitting him new organs, sensory collections, and perspectivism. All beholden to a strangely inefficient, decrepit, and neurotic creature serving to make marks on a new dimensional plain.


At this, Quanticar turned to face Eudex. The orb floating between them.
"In here, is something you will need before you are able to safely venture beyond the confines of this sanctuary with us." Said Quanticar.
Eudex straightened, rising to full height holding his staff out before forcing it down into the floor. It stood fast. As did Eudex. His perplexed notions could not be physically expressed, though the shared interconsciousness among
the lords dispensed with primitive methods of communication.


Eventually, the sphere opened. Like its earlier copy, lightning assigned, gravity defied, separation contiguous. The contents screamed.


From inside the fragmented sphere, terror and pain erupted in violent fits. Loud blubbering was interspersed with overpitched shrieking that only a mutilated lifeform could conjure while simultaneously remaining alive.


A human being held in suspension materialised from the containment dimension. A male. Hairless, scarred from head to foot. Deep gashes were opened in his body, blood flooding the space around him. The crimson liquid swam up and away. The man had no lower half, viscera floated beneath the severed torso. In place of arms, were only stumps showing they had been lopped off at the shoulder. Bloody scabs capped either side where once they'd been.


The fresh lacerations weeped or oozed, then the containment field forced blood back into them. The man's cries proportionally titanic. His hemicorporectomy found an everlasting preservation inside the sphere.


Only his agony and torment existed without end. In the sphere, this man could never die of his injuries. The stasis eternally renewing the horror. Even when his vocal chords pulped after hours spent screaming, the technology of stasis rejuvenated them, and all the injuries to the state he had arrived in - halved, carved, and thoroughly alive, but never healed or restored to bodily whole. Never dying either.


Eudex enquired at the noise and what it meant. He soon discovered that this was similar in nature to that which Aevor had felt while seeing with the circlet. The giants each stood silently, enthralled with the victim's chorus of pained screams.


Eudex offered Quanticar his newest theoretical:
"Oyoroph amigrash tooleoh taranash kopmo. Such frailty in form and in fortitude do they all endure this way? What use is a body like theirs if it cannot be kept whole without being stored?"


Over the man's pleading whimpers Quanticar answered Eudex carefully; "Naydeen frar rogom rogonoon leiptshis nuoh hactrem tarar dadanesh. This specimen I found alone and in an extreme state of disrepair. It suffered catastrophic damage attempting to perform some kind of task that frequently recurs amongst their kind. What use? That is why I opened the container for you...


It is the only one of its kind I was able to intercept and capture for study. From this sample may we yet learn their purposes, their propensities, and from where their vitality begins and ends. Such as our weakling forms are mustered here in the dark, so shall a broken, eviscerated shell serve us in understanding. We cannot subsist on Voidal Condensate. We must adapt our energy needs natively. Repulsive though it is to even contemplate... "


Eudex closed in on the cacophany emitting from the open container, stooping to examine the captive. His eyeless dome angled over then around as if trying to see the thing from better angles or to gauge detail in depth. Eudex muttered a seemingly obvious question to Quanticar.


"Adapt...? How?" Eudex recoiled in disgust as the human torso unleashed an air-splitting barrage of screams, his hurt, or his fright rescinding all sane semblance.


Quanticar returned Eudex' ask:
"You must empty the essence within this creature upon yourself. Your panoply will with shift to accommodate the influx of new power and material. I fear you must act with swiftness Eudex, outside of stasis, the human will expire - exacting what you asked before about bodies and their uses... "

Eudex remained silent for a moment. The thoughts exchanged between the lords had the likeness of a fencing duel. Modest facts overlaid with tact thrust out and parried. It wasn't long before Eudex braced himself before the opened containment sphere, grasping the hilt of his spear embedded in the floor - he extended his empty hand forwards. Ponds of energy collected in the palm of Eudex' hand, redshifting from pink to orange, to crimson.

The human torso writhed, the shrieks becoming more anguished, but lessening in volume, the victim's vocal chords were failing. Eudex chastised the being for its dismal ruckus. He then began draining the life from the pathetic remnants. Raw red light tapered, washed, then travelled out of the victim's blood, collecting in Eudex' palm-light.


The blood itself never left the container, nor actually the man's body. Only the warm, reanimating properties derived from bodily functions were removed, by inexplicable means carried, coalesced, then absorbed by the 'ailing' giant. Eudex caught a signal from Quanticar to continue, but the gesture also told him to pay attention and acknowledge it again when came time to stop. Soon the energy siphon began to burn, the deepening red indicating saturation and potency. At this Eudex halted the siphon, respecting his kin's request. Even if his desire to retain this 'pet' confounded him, Eudex nonetheless followed Quanticar's instruction.

The torso had slowly fallen unconscious with most of what metabolism remaining to keep organs functioning extracted, the man was very near the bliss of death. But Quanticar did not wish to lose the one useable source of essence they could each draw from in controlled amounts when necessary.



Eudex held the energy scaffold palm side up. His panoply glowed a brutal red hue reflecting the emissions of the scaffold.
He stood immobile, concentrating on the pulsating liquid light.


"It is not an optimal substitute. But it is nourishing." Declared Quanticar intransigently.
Eudex closed his fist, shattering the scaffold, the energy freed to extrude across his form and armour Eudex shivered with a mix of vitality and revulsion, his body language reactive to a strange new experience. Although, he retained a demeanour like that of someone who had knowingly just poisoned themselves.


Quanticar closed the torso away inside the sphere before returning it to storage. The three giants dwelled in respite for some moments.
Eudex bound himself to his spear. Having shunted the human to the edge of death, he tried to savour the necrotic aftertaste. The energy was rich, but it seemed residual. Eudex was now grateful for Quanticar's experiments.


With the Void unable to provide their nourishment needs in its native form of anti-molecular clouds churning with entropic stranglets - Condensate - the dim, weak pulse of near-death would have to suffice while the giants lurked in this universe.


"What more do you understand of these creatures?"


Came Eudex. Turning to face away from the others. Slicing out a divet of floor again.
He knew Quanticar held deeper knowledge.


"Regrettably, I have demonstrably few facts to furnish you with. I have yet fewer useable samples from which to extract any useful information. It is why I requested your presence. There is need for more information than I alone can compile. Certainly, diverse specimens will be needed to provide a clearer insight to these things. Enabling our dominance of them."


Quanticar lectured further:


"What is also needed, is an advantage exclusive to ourselves. In the Void, we are nought but filtering consciousness emanating through its vast eternity. In this place, we are forced to maintain a coherence of form that defaults to a bodily existence. Our consciousness has been distilled into a network of impulses coursing along a fractal array in the panoply. It is obscenely fragile, and is a weakness which may be exploited."

Eudex and Aevor turned, striding away while Quanticar followed. He muttered a churning rumble, lowered syllables without inflection. The three giants marched slowly out of the Observatory, navigating passageways to arrive back at the main chamber of the sanctuary.


Eudex cut in bruskly; "Enrep nolo vgglun, send ruoh lomb arashniogor?"
He leant less on his spear. The absorption of energy had instilled him with a vigour which also yielded a clearer pattern of thought to share among the trio.


"Exploitable weaknesses in the shape of we as we stand, with what misery we are able to conjure, how can a being that itself cannot protect its own body from destruction hope to render damage on us?"


While Eudex spoke, Aevor manifested a heaving chorus of due process, helping Eudex to cross-examine Quanticar's claims.


"Recalling what the Eye bestowed on my senses - these beings are susceptible to pain and sensory distention to the point of extremity. A fault of their design, that they should always experience it is first amongst their flaws..."


Quanticar waited. Measuring the interrogators need for education now overdue. His words silenced them both into a frozen air of well paid attention, minds melding. Quanticar began:


"To answer the paradigms of strength versus weakness afforded to us and them, humans in a state of catastrophic damage offer no harm to us. As we may offer no harm to them in a similar state, were we to break and become sundered, our cortical essence diffuses out from within panoply. While we cannot die, if we cannot assume or resume a solid form (a body) we simply drift through this aether as sentient gel, unable to interact with this reality until such time as we can return to the Void, or discover its Condensate in the confines of this cosmos. A discovery impossible to make."


He continued, at certain stages of the delivery, Quanticar roared or rumbled with alien caws and deep drones.


"To dispel what only appears as arrogance in your testimony within the Eye, humans are not in a state of perpetual physical agony. They are in actuality an organism who's bodies and brains are a symbiosis glutting on the internal experience they refer to as 'life'. While they are healthy, whole, and catering to their destitute needs - humans are capable of a range of vastly intelligent, coherent activities. An intelligence that if prolonged in its survival endeavour, poses severe risk to our perpetuity in their environment."


The other two giants straightened, Quanticar knew he had stirred a certain resentment from his kin, but he knew better still their need for better information than the vague postulation he meekly offered.


"I can only share this much as I have borne witness to it from a safe distance. Every struggle a human makes is against itself, but also FOR itself. Even killing each other. That they may survive. Or uniting to face an exogenic hostile threat. These counterintuitive, inefficient, and confounding actions are little more than an expression of an otherwise infinite human capacity to exploit an opportunity... We MUST be far in excess with our exploitation... "


Quanticar allowed his words to console the adversarial wants embedded in his kindred.
Before he began to articulate to them a plan:


"Vgguln ghirigh, mesh mesh tolulorum gglunuch harroon forem deacteryor jick warrish."


"We three, have to abduct new specimens. We will need to venture into human realms, removing testable subjects. We need to alter them in captivity, first - for intrusive discoveries about them, second - that we might better harvest essence to keep ourselves tethered to this obfuscating existence. Perhaps long enough to see its membranes stretched across the unmaking claws of Void."


At the conclusion of this, Quanticar's final lecture - the three beings collected into a triangle. The lords stood as the points of the shape before extending their arms obliquely towards each other as though bridging some unseen gap without making physical contact.


As earlier, the area inside the sanctuary whirred with a detached, covalent effervescence amongst its molecules. A neutralising radiance enamouring their upper panoplies. With an alteration in their communal frequency, and by subliminal exertion, their rupturing of the spacetime continuum was dutifully affected.


This new tear in reality was unmistakable, however it bore no resemblance to that which had admitted Eudex from the Void. This new pathway held a shimmering edge, within it a still image of a landscape, trees, fencing, windswept grasses and shrubs, a small segment suggestive of open sky and cloud cover. The image sat inside what made it almost indistinct. As though a visual distortion was further being disrupted by the alien forces which held it open against its will.


Aevor, Eudex, and Quanticar raised their hands upward, expanding the portal's border to an area able to allow their passage without interruption.
The portal now obviated a spherical dimensionality which simultaneously reflected its destination point in both a convex and concave wavelength of scattering light. To the giants, it exuded all the wonder and complexity of a doorway. A simple hole through which an entity may circumvent a wall.


Each member stepped through the portal onto solid ground, surrounded by the environment's freshness and proclivity for life support. Eudex was last to enter this bright, shining enclosure, clicking his spear, Quanticar moved his right hand in a sluggish closing motion the portal shrank into nothing instantly behind them. Quanticar stepped past his companions in a slow heavy stride that seemed to make reverberations in the ground.


He signalled for the other two to follow. He approached a tree line in short order, his kin close to him. The giants effortlessly bent or broke the obstructing trees out of their path. Their energies such that they need not touch the trees themselves. Gesturing the bark-shrouded boughs away with proto-physical exertion alone.


In the fields which rolled onward, the pasture lay here and there flecked with colour. Colour that if these lords could perceive it, would force their wrath to spill early onto this disgusting carpet of biological matter. Yet each now knew that it would be destroyed in due course. Their objective lay ahead. Still oblivious to they who had arrived. From afar Quanticar halted their approach.


The three giants stood motionless. Waiting. Observing through what perception they possessed - eyeless, though seeing into spectrums unviewable by the languid, inert globules used by humans. A breeze collected about them, fluttering the iridescent fabric of their robes, the Voidal Condensate undulating in the presence of sickly sunlight. Eudex threw his cloak behind his shoulders in an angry display.


Quanticar extended an arm, then pointed. The other giants shifted their 'gaze' to inspect what he proposed. It was a structure. A small dwelling. Constructed from particulate mined in the surroundings. A homestead. Enclosed by electrified fencing. The gleaming metal refracting much of the ambient light. The walls were drab and fixed up and down, over the roof, and in some corners with mossy growths.

Eudex bellowed; "Fluoctchk! ...Hideous! Vile!"


Quanticar dropped his aim, and lifted off the ground, the others mimicked his movement into the air. The three flew toward the dwelling, a figure had pushed open the front door from the inside, stepping out onto a path leading away from the building. The man carried across his forearm a quad-barreled brake-action shotgun. A farmer's home defence or hunting tool. He had just finished loading shells into the breech of each barrel when he became accutely aware of some shadows, large shadows creeping across from the eastern fenceline.

The man tried to look up, but was dazzled by sunlight. Within a second the shadows on the ground and in the air had formed a triangle around him. As his blindness cleared, the man could see with harrowing clarity. Three massive silhouettes hovered around him in cautious proximity. The human felt his heart palpitations delay, confusion spreading over his sensibilities. And then adrenal fear. He turned or wound around in dismay, glancing at each of the giants slowy drifting around him, maintaining their ternion. He stammered like a whimpering dog, what he looked upon made him drop the firearm and urinate. Soaked, he could only cower. Feeble. Reduced to a prey item.

The lords expanded their routes. Each spread their arms wide, the sizzling, sparking electrical perimeter increased between them, disconnected from them now, it lowered over the man, his body faded under the boiling film at the portal's centre.