* * *
A fetid stench filled Nanto’s nostrils.
Her eyes fluttered open to the sight of steaming mud. It seeped into her clothing. She lurched up into a half-crouch and touched a foot. Nanto toppled back as a long-tailed bipedal beast, shakes rippling down its body, crumpled to the ground and dissolved into a stream of energy. A series of images barraged all her senses; the sight, sound and smell of life trumped by the finality of death.
Nanto struggled to distinguish hallucination from truth when a new reality seized her. Now she was immersed in a metal-tasting slime that burned her eyes. She struck out in panic towards a dim light and burst out into clean air. Gasping, Nanto grabbed at some passing flotsam, but the rubbery mass flipped under her weight and she recoiled at the sight of several eyes running along a spine-like ridge. The creature died in her arms. Nanto thrust it away in horror and the life form sank without trace.
Her surroundings shifted.
Now she stood on solid ground and the landscape looked eerily familiar. Her mouth dropped open. This was her home world, Astereal. A bloody battle raged all around her and she recognized Sohan dealing the Morrígan Queen some heavy blows. The Queen fought back with a ferocious tenacity, the cut and thrust of her lethal blade parrying Sohan’s clashing sword without pause.
Nanto’s ears rang with the clamor of war cries and the clang of metal.
The sheer violence stole her breath away.
This was not the gentle Sohan she knew, the respected scholar she had worked beside in Astereal’s ancient College. In Sohan’s early years, he had played host to the mind of Niall’Kearey, a mind stretching across galaxies. Wearing the body of Sohan, Niall’Kearey had led the defense of the Astereans against their mortal foe, the Morrígan.
This was Niall’Kearey’s infamous battle with the Queen Nuada.
Nanto had studied the reports, listened to the hearsay. No words had done justice to the raw brutality she witnessed now.
She watched, transfixed, as Niall’Kearey pulled the sword in Sohan’s hand from Nuada’s gut. A man on planet Earth had killed a Morrígan Queen at the edge of the universe. Stunned by the mortal blow to their ruler, the Morrígan fell in droves as Asterean blades punished their distraction with a wild abandon. Bodies piled up around Nanto as she watched Niall’Kearey assess the battlefield.
Seizing the moment, the Queen staggered to her feet, blood gushing from her fileted belly.
Nanto raised a hand, but her warning cry stuck in her throat as Queen Nuada charged, eyes blazing, swinging her sword high to slice off Niall’Kearey’s head. A sixth sense must have warned him for he deflected her blow, but the force of her attack sent his sword flying. His hand flashed to his belt. Metal glittered between them. The Queen stopped short as Niall’Kearey twisted his knife in her gut, nose to nose with the Morrígan ruler in a gruesome dance of death.
Nanto could hardly breathe; shocked by the savage violence. When Niall’Kearey stepped back he held the bloody heart of a Queen speared on his knife. Ashen-faced, he threw the organ to the ground.
Nanto blinked in surprise as the scene faded.
Suddenly, she could no longer feel the ground beneath her feet. A fog smoked around her knees and she felt herself floating with a weightless sensation.
“What is this place?”
“It is how your mind interprets the memory stream,” a new voice replied.
The fog curled around her body and swept her along at high speed, an incredible rush that allowed glimpses of thousands, no millions, of images. Finally, she understood. The fog was the stream, and these vivid visions were the final memories of the dying.
Her panicked mind seized on the faceless voice. “Who are you?”
The same inner voice responded; its shape and tone different to the alien who had communicated with her on the ship. “I am Lugus, child of Balor. His children return to Him as He returns to the Formorri.”
Nanto clung to a threadbare strand of sanity. “Am I dead? Are my memories here?”
“Your body is in-between. Your mind experiences the stream.”
Confusion melded with fear. “What about my people? My fleet? Where are they?”
“Not here.”
Nanto fought to control a mind-numbing panic. Were her people alive? What did this Lugus want? Why show her Niall’Kearey’s battle with the Morrígan Queen?
“Yeess . . .” Lugus slithered through Nanto’s mind. “He is the one we seek. He is elusive.”
Nanto locked down her thoughts, the threat to Niall’Kearey helping her to reinforce her defenses.
“Where is he?” Lugus demanded, lashing out at her in frustration.
Nanto doubled over as pain strafed her mind. “Why? What do you want with him?”
A white blinding light arced through her consciousness with explosive force.
“You have seen his home world? This Earth?” Lugus demanded through the maelstrom punishing her defiance.
The agony spiked to an intolerable level from wave upon wave of razor-sharp needles. Nanto screamed.
Lugus finally broke through the storm lashing her. “We have found him.”
Nanto sensed triumph. Excitement. She glimpsed a galaxy-sweeping war, with Niall’Kearey standing at its epicenter. The pain lessened, enough to form words. “I told you nothing,” she gasped. “How have you found him?”
Lugus opened his mind and laughed, a cackle of poisonous satisfaction. “The memory stream never stops, and you are dismissed.”
Her world went black.