Omen's Release (Part One)

(The following music selection was chosen for the beginning segments of this story. If you choose to listen to it while you read, it may enhance your reading enjoyment.)

    The speed of light was a thing most incredible - yet light could neither move nor be seen without the darkness to hold it. That was how she moved now; soaring upon streams of galactic shadow as she raced ever onward to the final piece of the puzzle she had endeavored to assemble. She would not stop. She could not stop. Such was her desire to a last free the fractured daughter she had lost so long ago from the misery of the mortal world which threatened each day to consume her innocent heart and mind. They had stolen her godhood. They would not steal what was left of her.

    Upon the furthest reaches of an unnamed galaxy, within the heart of an unnamed level of the Multiverse, light and shadow suddenly rippled like oil as Kala'Triel slowly stepped forth from the dark and strode forth onto the cratered and lifeless surface of Krortha, the Voidpier. A jagged and ancient asteroid nearly as large as a moon, it was whispered by the eldest of beings that Krortha had existed before the first stars had burned to life within the galaxy. This rumor might have been true, for the immense mass of stone rested on the very fringe of the great spiral of stars - so far removed from the galaxy, itself, that the expanse of space surrounding it was almost completely black save for the faintest dots of a few distant stars. The darkness was near-total - it drank light - and that is why it had been chosen to hide the Multiverse's most dreaded of secrets.

    Walking forward elegantly as the liquid shadow flowed and dripped from her pale skin, the Last Mother gazed out across the broken and utterly dead landscape of the Voidpier - her ice-blue eyes seeing through the permeating darkness with ease. It was there, not 300ft distant. The very reason for her having come to this lonely and light-shunned place. Rising up for more than three miles, the hideous fortress-like tower was immense - and ancient beyond the count of years. Fashioned from an amalgam of plates and beams of metals whose names no longer existed, the great structure bore the deep red and brown of countless thousands of years of rust and corrosion. Abandoned long before the galaxy had completed its first revolution, the vast edifice which towered before Kala' once possessed a name now lost to the eons. However, she remembered it well - for she had aided in its construction. "The Well of Night..." she softly said as she allowed her eyes to pass over the monolithic and terrible structure.

    They were there, winged things in the dark - the gaurdians of the ancient place. What they were, no one could say, but they had stood watch over that dark place since the very beginning. Alive only enough to attack should they sense intrusion, they circled the vast tower on wings of nameless metal. Forgotten to all and unrelenting in the single purpose which drove them. Yet, these things concerned the Last Mother not. It was that which rested within the vast and mighty bastion which weighed heavily upon her mind, for the Well of Night was - and had always been - a prison. A hall of incarceration for the Multiverse's most nightmarish of criminal life-forms.

(The following music selection was chosen for this segment of the story. If you choose to listen to it while you read, it may enhance your reading enjoyment.)

    In the far past, the Well of Night had been guarded by many a stalwart soldier - the finest of the Infinite 'Verse. Now, however, only the shadows and nameless beasts upon the air watched over it - and it was for this reason Kala' knew what resided therein. Only those beings who could be sustained by their sheer malace and wicked energies now survived within that forgotten place. All others locked away within those light-starved halls had perished long ago and withered to bare traces of dust. A merciful end; for even the immortal beings held within the Well of Night were still confined to their cells - including the one for whom she had come.

    Sighing softly, Kala'Triel slowly looked down upon her hands and the sections of dark carapace covering her pale skin - her claw-like wings and twin tails shifting ently. "I pity you...". The words came unbidden to her mind, echoed from the furtherst reaches of her thoughts and haunted her - and she understood why they had been uttered. There, upon the very edge of a nameless galaxy, Kala' felt doubt begin to gnaw at her. She felt guilt cloud her resolve. She remembered the expressions of shock and anger upon the faces of the men she had attempted to seduce. Her mind railed at the thought of the horror she had come to unleash upon the unsuspecting Multiverse. She could clearly remember the look of pain she had evoked from the young scientist - and the emotions were more than her mind could bear at that moment. There in the near-perfect dark, Kala'Triel placed her arms and claw-like wings around herself and lowered her head as she trembled slightly - not for fear of what lay ahead in the Well of Night, but for the disgust she felt for herself. "I belong here...in the dark with the rest of the monsters the stars have forgotten..." she softly said as tears welled in her ice-blue eyes - her words vanishing away into the dark.