Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

All of them come and gone, in the long dark surrounding what would one day become Humanity’s homeworld. Some so big, so impossibly alien that Owen couldn’t cope with them, others so small and fleeting that he couldn’t be sure they’d actually existed. And, on the very edge of his perception, vast entities that walked other paths, between or around the usual dimensions of space, traveling from unknowable places on unguessable missions. Owen turned his senses in this new direction, and detected . . . an anomaly.
    Halfway between the planet and its moon, there was a break in the space-time continuum, a tear forced open and then raggedly sewn together again. As though something had forced its way out of reality into somewhere else, and then pulled the hole in behind it. Owen considered the breach thoughtfully. Lewis had told him that the Terror came from a place that was not a place, and existed there in between its attacks on populated worlds. Hazel couldn’t go any further back in time, so she’d gone . . . somewhere else.
    This was the way in. And it felt . . . strangely familiar.
    Since the breach in space and time wasn’t, strictly speaking, real; how he viewed it depended on him. So Owen made a conscious effort to visualize the rift as a gateway. There was a sense of resistance, a slow sluggish inertia, and then the gateway appeared before him. At first Owen wasn’t sure what it was he was seeing. Great ivory pillars towering up before him, crowded together. But size was only relevant, after all, so Owen looked at it again, as from a great distance, and finally recognized the ivory pillars for what they were. A huge pair of gleaming white jaws, the teeth clenched and ground together to prevent entry.
    Nice symbolism, Owen thought, wondering vaguely whether it came from Hazel or him. He turned the full force of his power upon the jaws, commanding them to open, but they didn’t stir. His strength of will, that had brought him so far in space and time, was useless here, presented with another equally strong will. Owen hung before the closed gate for a long time, thinking hard, and finally broadcast a simple message with his mind.
    Hazel, it’s Owen. Open up.
    The jaws gaped slowly open, like the gateway to Hell. Owen passed within them, and the gateway swallowed him up.

    He was standing in a stone corridor, in a place he knew. He’d been here before. He reached out with his expanded senses, and could feel Hazel all around him. This was her place, sprung fully born from her forehead. He could feel the stone corridors radiating away in all directions, reaching away forever, endlessly branching and rejoining in a complex maze. There was a dim gray light that came from everywhere at once, and cast no shadows at all. An artificial place, brought into being outside or inside space and time, a construct produced and maintained by a monstrous effort of will.
    The details of the place made no sense, as though they’d been added afterwards, as an afterthought; or perhaps they had just seeped in, the products of an increasingly insane mind. The air smelt of dead roses and a woman’s sweat. Beads of sweat ran slowly, continuously, down the stone walls. Far away, Owen thought he could hear someone crying, sobbing and howling as though their heart had been broken. And beyond and beneath that mourning, a slow sullen grinding, like an engine that ran on hate. The whole place felt . . . unhealthy. Like the endless corridors we pace in fever dreams, going nowhere, for forever and a day. Owen chose a direction, and started walking.
    Ghosts came to meet him, walking the empty stone corridors, passing around and even through him as though he was the one who wasn’t there. They all looked like Owen. Visions of himself, from various times in his past: sometimes young and uncertain, sometimes brave and heroic, and sometimes battered and bloody. The images were often unclear, distorted and eroded, like the faces of statues worn away by long passages of time. Or perhaps . . . by fading memories.
    Did I ever really look that heroic, that certain? Owen thought. Or is that just how she saw me? I never knew.
    Owen knew what this place was, or would be. He had walked these corridors before, in his past but this place’s future. This was where the Blood Runners had brought Hazel d’Ark after they abducted her from Lachrymae Christi. They had trapped and kidnapped her, when she and Owen were both weakened after the defense of St.