INTERLUDEA peal of thunder loomed over the vast, desert plain. The echo rolled with a burst of wind, kicking up spools of choking dust, writhing and twisting in an aerial dance of chaos and speed.
Clouds. Thick. Dark. Pulsating with something more than rain. Something more than weather.
Clouds. Blanketing the sun. Clouds, stretching over the nigh-endless desert of Cairo, Egypt.
Nature clawed at the planet Earth in unbridled agony.
She blocked the plume of sand from her eyes, a small scarf wrapped tightly over her mouth. Still, a line of grit etched between her clenched teeth, as she strode forward against the beating.
Each booted footstep sank ankle-deep. Each step, a chore against the turbulence.
Her ebony hair whipped along the back of her neck, caked with layers of entropy's signature.
Still, she pushed forward.
It had taken two hours of maxing-out the M-X's turbines. Two hours of cresting the atmospheric chaos at sub-sonic speeds, riding the waves of turbulence. Two hours, to make the sub-orbit position. Two hours to jump from her private New York airfield, to make a VTOL-drop in the middle of the Egyptian desert.
For anyone else, two hours was a short-hop of a trip.
For anyone else.
For Malvana, it was an eternity.
Not really being able to define when exactly the cramping pain had started, in her lower abdomen, she responded on impulse, knowing what it meant.
The deep lull in her stomach. In her chest. In her very heart. The pain wasn't the physical kind. More the meta-physical. The undefinable. The sense of paranoia-mixed-urgency that throttled her senses was something wholly unique to her as a being.
It was The X within her. Driving her. Forcing her physical being to understand that which her ulti-conscience already knew.
He was back.
Here. Somewhere. Calling to her with his imagination. Craving her presence with his daydreams. Reminding her that he would always need her.
He was here. In the desert.
Slowly, she made her way to a shadowed wall of stone that predated almost everything on the planet.
Almost everything.
The sand billowed against her squinted eyes, her lashs layered with dust. Her hand crept along the wall, searching for a vague, thousand-year-old memory.
A small chunk of stone quietly pressed inwards at her touch, accompanied by slow rumble. A small entrance exhausted a gust of air that had been trapped for nearly seventeen centuries. She quickly turned, refusing to breathe the toxic burst.
Then, slowly, the hissing air died away.
The crack of her boot heels became evident against the stone floor, as she left the chaos of nature to enter a long, dark tunnel.
Creeping down with purpose, feeling her way along the darkness of the tomb, she caught a pinprick of light coming into view.
An open chamber spread before her in luminous beauty. Sanscript carvings and gold figurines lines the room. Seven torches along the wall burned with an odd, unearthly white.
As if they had been burning forever....
Pulling the scarf from her face, she shook the dirt from her hair, eyeing the sarcophogus that sat still in the middle of the chamber.
She eyed the inscriptions briefly, noticing a few familiar symbols that spoke personally to her soul.
Then, with a sharp prick of opal-light hued within her iris, she spoke a few selected words in a language that had been ancient when the Old Gods where crawling from the celestial primordiance.
The tomb slowly slid open, the stone grinding against itself.
She looked down into the face of her eternal love.
Suddenly, his eyes shot open, as he lurched up into a sitting position, gasping for breath.
She cradled his shaking form in her arms softly, as he began to pull himself up and out.
Standing shakily for a moment, he held onto her for support. Then, with a burst of energy, suddenly jerked upright, folded his hands behind his back, and began pacing, almost oblivious to her presence.
"Right!" he announced, staring at the floor, as he paced. "That was a nice nap...now, down to business."
She stared at him with slight bemusement.
"There was a flicker in the Hyperline-1148....I must have Bibbo look into that......the S.A.T. probe in the third-lower orbit needs to be prepared and refit with luminal scopes......the 4th and 12th MAN can take care of that.....and, let's see....OH YES!....the end of the world is coming soon.....right. Okay. That all seems quite clear. Really, just three small problems: Where am I? Who am I? And...who are you?"
He suddenly shot his gaze up into Malvana's eyes for a fraction of a second, before they rolled into his sockets, as he crumpled onto the floor, unconscious.
Malvana merely shook her head with a sigh.
"<...oh, Pala...>"
[ 08-25-2001: Message edited by: Prometheus of The X ]
