Chapter 4: The Shadow in the Star-Glass
The Mylar vessels of impossible tech were fast approaching and the nearest had almost reached my perched. As it got closer I could see it hover with the arrogant, weightless grace of a dragonfly – its translucent hull of Star-Glass shimmering with the iridescence of oil on water. The craft wasn’t merely a machine; it was a symphony of geometry and light – if I’m being honest it was a terrifying display of physics under command and I couldn’t help but be impressed. Shaped like a teardrop of frozen mercury, through the translucent Star-Glass hull, I could see the internal mechanisms—not gears or wires, but rotating rings of liquid gold that spun in silent, frictionless alignment.
As it descended toward the edge of the Lemurian Barrier where I was hiding, the ship emitted what I took to be a scan tone—a low, oscillating hum that turned the air itself into a thumping pressure. It wasn’t just a sound; it was a physical intrusion. It felt like a thousand invisible needles pricking at the marrow of my bones, vibrating at a frequency designed to harmonize everything in its path. They were searching for the source of the discordance and they were coming straight for me.
By now the lead ship was close enough for me see to Inside the cockpit – there bathed in a soft, peach-colored luminescence, were the two Mylars. They weren’t sitting in chairs; they remained standing, their feet seemingly magnetically locked to the glowing floor. I found myself fascinated by them – there was no frantic clicking of buttons or shouting of orders, instead they moved with a kind of meditative calm. One of them held its long, four-jointed fingers over a floating crystalline sphere, “playing” the ship’s controls like a musical instrument.
I was also struck by how much their appearance had changed over the milennia. When they were first birthed [as a result of the union I encouraged between Pan and Lilith during the time of the Hidden Histories], the Mylars were initially creatures of the earth and spirit. They had fur, tails, and large eyes that were adaptations for a world of shadows, deep forests, and primal magic. They were “radiant” even back then, but it was a warm, organic radiance.
After they retreated behind the Barrier into Lemuria, they’d clearly evolved. When last I was here I’d already noticed that they’d shed their fur and tails – after all those marks of their ancestors were tools for survival in a tactile, physical world. But as the Mylar mastered technology, they’d begun to move away from the “animal” nature of their father, Pan. My assumption at the time was that their old fur probably trapped “static,” which interfered with the high-frequency resonance of the new cities they’d been constructing and to live in a world of pure harmonics, they ditched the fur for the alabaster, translucent skin they had now. As for their tails, clearly they’d become vestigial and eventually vanished as the Mylars learned to manipulate gravity itself.
Their eyes too had changed – gone were those big ‘lemur-like’ eyes from ages past – orbs once designed to capture the dim light of the First World. As they moved into The Land Beyond, where the Dark Sn always shined and the radiance of the Great Pyramid of Mu made darkness obsolete, those large eyes became a liability. Their eyes had since evolved into the multi-faceted, dragonfly-like structures I saw now. I surmised that they no longer just “saw” light; they likely perceived vibrational spectrums.
[As the pre-eminent geneticist of ALL of history, this was all incredibly fascinating to me. Yes I was in grave danger, but the scientist in me couldn’t help keep observing – thankfully for me I am a god and could process all this in the merest fraction of time].
The last physical feature I noted which had changed over time was their size. Once the Mylars were shockingly tiny —a mere one or two feet tall. Ye the modern Mylars were taller than most humans. This was the most dramatic physical change, and I assumed it was likely caused by the Low-Gravity Resonance of Lemuria. The Vril-fields that powered their cities effectively “lifted” the weight of existence off their bones. Again it was quite fascinating. Over thousands of years, their “radiant nature” literally pulled their physical forms upward. They stretched out like glass being blown, becoming the tall, willow-thin sentinels who surely now looked down upon the other “stubby” creatures of the Flat Earth with a mix of pity and disgust.
I could see them looking at me with the same pompous air. Their expressions were not of anger or hunt-lust, but of a cold, clinical curiosity. To them, I wasn’t an enemy to be fought; I was a smudge on a lens that needed to be wiped clean.
Clearly they didn’t recognize me. They’re luck I’m so weak, I lamented. But rest assured, my pretties, I’ll return to settle the score.
But now the lead ship’s gravitic engines began to vent, sending a wake of displaced air crashing against my perch. It was a cold, ozone-scented gale that tasted of high altitudes and sterilized light. It whipped my robes with such violence that the tattered silk threatened to strip itself from my frame.
I looked into the eyes of the lead pilot through the Star-Glass. Its eyes were multi-faceted, like those of a dragonfly, reminding me of the purple glow of the Shard of Varysha. I saw the Mylar’s hand pause over the control sphere – clearly it had found the “stain.”
I still have time! I assured myself as I stood upon the ledge, even as my Vril-infected veins screamed in the presence of such concentrated purity from the Mylar vessels. Worse yet the Atlantean Sentinel’s voice returned at the most inopportune time to terrorize me – it was like frantic itch in the back of my skull: “They will find you, Scavenger. They will bleach the marrow from your bones and turn your shadow into a hum.”
“Not today, ghost,” I wheezed, though my voice sounded thin even to my own ears. “I’ve got a plan!”
I ripped open my robes and looked down at my skeletal torso. Within my chest cavern swirled the pitiful few souls I’d ingested since my last return from Illusia – they gave me scant meager satisfaction and an ever so slight lifeforce to draw upon to offset my fast dwindling hellfire, but that was not important now. Instead, on my left side, there was that jagged, ancient gap—the “Holy Wound” as I sometimes called it – where eons ago, Lucifer himself had stolen my rib to forge Dagaal – the Bone Dagger – my doom. That gaping wound was a mark of my service, perhaps a mark of my fall, and one of the main reasons I felt forever hollow. But that wound could now play a useful part for me.
Quickly then I reached into my belt and pulled out the Shard of Varysha. The violet crystal felt cold, pulsing with a frequency that was attempting to move in time with the “Order” of the Mylar ship. With a grunt of focused, teeth-grinding pain, I forced the Shard into the gap in my ribs!
It was a perfect, agonizing fit. The Shard bit into my vertebrae, locking into the empty socket of the missing rib like a key into a rusted lock. A jolt of purple lightning flared behind my empty sockets, and for a second, I felt a sickening parody of wholeness—a broken god holding himself together with a stolen fragment of reality.
The Mylar ships were now upon me, but I wasn’t about to give up just yet. I’d come too far and so I was even willing to endure — humiliation.
As the first ship began to descend upon me, I tore off my beloved robes – those ancient, heavy silks that had been soaked in the blood of empires and the smoke of a thousand burning cities— and cast them down to the crystal summit I was standing upon. I was left a naked, spindly skeleton of ash-colored bone, shivering as a Mylar scan tone passed through my ribs like a cold, vibrating comb.
“I look like a plucked crow,” I hissed to the empty air as I kicked the robes into a dark, geometric crevice of the wall, burying them beneath a loose slab of crystal. “Record this, Scribe, but if you ever speak of this ‘divine striptease’ to Lilith, I will find a way to make your afterlife very… creative.”
At this point the The cargo hatch of the lead vessel—the Lumina-7—slid open with a sound like a crystal flute. From its shimmering belly, a small, golden seeker-drone drifted out, chirping in a series of mathematical harmonies that felt like cold needles against my spirit. It began to weave a pattern in the air, a grid of light designed to map every atom on the ledge I was on.
But I didn’t wait for it to find my scent. Instead I channeled the final, sputtering embers of my Hellfire into the Shard of Varysha wedged in my ribs. The violet crystal pulsed once, a defiant heartbeat that countered the ship’s rhythm. My reality began to “thin.” The three-dimensional world became a mere suggestion; I felt myself flattening, stretching, and losing my depth until I was nothing but a smear of dark ink against the white stone, perfectly camouflaged within the shadows of the Great Alignment carvings that were a part of The Great Barrier. Once in this form I conveniently ‘tucked’ myself into the deep, geometric relief-carvings of a nearby section of the barrier’s wall. These were massive stone depictions of the “Great Alignment,” showing the Mylar ancestors ascending on ladders of light [which was of course a complete lie], but they served their purpose to hide me.
Safely camouflaged, I observed the flummoxed Mylars trying to figure out what happened to their now-gone prey. “He who laughs last, laughs best, friends.” I chuckled.
As the ship drifted closer trying to relocate it, it passed mere feet from my hiding spot, and its proximity triggered a violent reaction – the ship’s “pure” Vril-radiation washed over me, and even my flattened Vril-infected veins began to burn with a white-hot intensity. But it wasn’t just heat; it was the sensation of my very essence being “corrected” by a force that found my existence to be an error.
“A God of the First Fall I snarled internally, the thought bitter as bile, hiding in a crack in the wall like a cockroach. How the mighty have been stepped upon. But I’m not done yet!
I looked down. Below the ledge lay the dizzying descent into the Lemurian valley. Since I had very little hellfire left I wasn’t able to teleport myself like the last time I was here, so I had a choice: I could leap, fading into the mists and making my own way toward the capital island by land and sea through hostile terrain. Or, I could do the unthinkable.
“Why walk,” I whispered through the on-going pain, “when my would-be captors can provide a carriage?”
As the Lumina-7 paused to retrieve its drone, it was near the very stone where I lay flat. Using the Shard as a gravitational anchor, I creatively “slid” on board. I didn’t jump, mind you, instead I flowed like floating oil, defying physics as my two-dimensional self transitioned from the stone wall onto the Star-Glass hull of the vessel, and then moved through the molecules to the interior of the vessel.
I was no longer a vagrant within the side of the mountain mountain; I was now a parasitic smudge on the enemy’s pride.
“Serves them right,” I silently laughed, the sound more of a dry rattle in the back of my shadow-throat as I further infiltrated that lead vessel. “Perhaps when they reach their destination, they’ll realize exactly who they’ve been toying with.”
Some time later, as the Mylar were communing together trying to evaluate what had happened to the cause of the dissonance, I was safely secured within the confines of the Lumina-7 as it headed back towards its base. Through the transparent floor, I watched the Ice Barrier recede. I was inside the enemy’s belly, a dark, vibrating secret traveling at unnatural speeds toward the heart of the Gilded Land. I was naked, I was flat, and I was furious. But I was safely on my way to my destination – or so I hoped.
Having turned myself into a two-dimensional shadow, I felt confident in my obscurity. Once again I fell back into my habits of scientific observer. The interior of the advanced technology that was the flying vessel I was in was a nightmare of aesthetic perfection – the walls were made of polished Star-Glass, showing the dizzying drop to the Lemurian valley below. Everything was illuminated by “Eternal Glow-Spheres” that hung in the air like miniature, unblinking suns.
I’d fashioned myself as a flat black stain on the floor, yet every time I moved, the physical weight of the Shard in my rib-cage caused a faint, metallic tink against the glass floor.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
I’d moved one time too many – one of the Mylars walked back towards my hiding spot – its robes of woven fiber humming a soft, peaceful chord. It stopped, looking down at the floor exactly where I lay flattened. It tilted its head, its multi-faceted eyes reflecting the “stain” that shouldn’t be there. I held my breath—or the memory of a breath – and tried to look like a harmless scuff mark, a momentary lapse in Mylar maintenance. Unfortunately for me, the Mu Man was a bit of a clean freak and he reached into his tunic and pulled out a crystal tool as he bent down towards me.
“Oh, by the Abyss,” I thought, my flattened shadow-self tensing. “I am a God of the First Fall, and I am about to be deleted by a janitor?”
But even as the Mylar leaned down to scrape the “dirt” from its floor, the ship suddenly lurched – immediately my would be nemesis straightened, stowing his tool, and gliding back to the cockpit.
I was saved – for now.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 