The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Seventeen

*** He could barely make out the outline of the skyline through the blur caused by the towering protective maelstrom that caged the aged metropolis. There were miracles there, in that place, strange and beautiful mysteries and, too, eerie ominous enigmas that teased the intellect and challenged one's belief systems. None of it mattered. Inevitably, the city would fall. It was the Way of Things: he intended no malice, he had no vendetta to satisfy, and he had long since retired from being a soldier, a weapon, in the service to some greater power hellbent on waging war, but the ends had come, the social experiment had reached its inevitable conclusion. Its time had come. The city would fall. In the end they all did. The physical works of Humankind, the buildings and the monuments and the institutions inimitable to such human anthills were, much like Humanity Itself, doomed to be tragically impermanent, but he had never thought that he, himself, would be the cause of that fall.

In the end, it seemed that he was forever doomed to play the role of destroyer. He used to fight that idea. Used to...

Now he had learned to be accepting of that fact and, in a way, he embraced it. He no longer had the strength to fight against the tide of time and circumstance. If that was the role in Life that he had to play, then so be it.

He doubted he'd ever be forgiven for that which he was about to do, but Destiny would not be denied.

He looked over that the monster by his side, a creature who'd once been a man, like himself, and who also had been forced by Fate to accept the facts of an unpleasant and damnable new reality, and he knew that he was looking at, in many ways, his own future.

It was the Way of Things.

Abyssium would fall, its people and its history relentlessly ground to crimson-stained dust beneath his feet and he, as insurgent, as conqueror and as executioner, was forced to remain unmoved by such a tragedy. Because it wasn't tragedy. Tragedy was a human concept, a human conceit, a judgment that Nature and the Cosmos would never deign to make. It was evolution.

Nature, the natural Order of the cosmos, had need of monsters... ***

The Dread Rider was loudly barking a warning to The Wannyshe as the first wave of hulking, twisted, ape-like silhouettes crested a hillside near their right wing. The vehement frenzy in their approach was heralded by the growing thunder of their feet upon the arid ground.

A charging throng of man-like beasts approached, running, moving at a surprisingly swift clip for such inelegant, ungainly creatures overladen as they were with extreme musculoskeletal bulk and coarse, wart-ridden, dense flesh. On cursory observation, their innate strangeness made them nearly impossible to identify, but in a few heartbeats memory and recent folklore distinguished who and what they were...

The Cold Ones. At first, the Dread Rider's mind wanted to reject what it was he saw, but he trusted his powerfully acute senses.

Although completely unaware of the How and the Why presaging their sudden appearance at the perimeter of Abyssium's stormy, swirling gates, the Dread Rider instinctually knew enough to sound an urgent warning to his Wannyshe brethren.

The Cold Ones were allies to no one. They were brutish, voraciously raptorial enemies of other products of sentient evolution, hating all variety of mutants and humans alike. Their presence guaranteed there would be a battle.

<They were a Horde, for they were Many... and to them, the World was wide and vast and pulsed with the psychic thunder from the passage of an Age of agony and fear, it was like a narcotic to them, an insistent siren-call stirring in them resentment and rage at the injustice of missing so much while locked in the prison of enforced torpor... They were a Horde, a living, roaring, hungering tide of evolutionarily deviant fury. Time had spun relentlessly onward towards Infinity without them, leaving them behind, abandoning them, leaving them with the shameful knowledge that they were little more than a celestial mistake, an experiment gone bad... Haunt, hunt, maim and kill, this was their biogenetic imperative, the drive that poured hot acid into the frigid ice of their collective bloodstream, and what was once their World was a polluted place grown fat with the propagation of their insolent Prey. They would bring back the Fear, they would replenish this World with the music of Agony. Legendary, they were Those-Who-Were-Born-Cold. And they were a Horde, for they were Many...>