Shadows Out of Time

Yet stories are written by the hands of men, and men are fallible, inconstant, and often oblivious to truth. It is the quest for truth that drives sages and wizards. I have pursued it beyond the written words of unreliable men. I found it in the spirits who roam the lost and remote places. I pursued it into realms beyond our own, where immortal devils laugh at humanity’s folly. Thus I learned the great secret that haunts me to this day. I have it from the lips of seven infernal spirits and a host of nameless ghosts. Here is the substance of that terrible truth:

Malygris never died.

The Terror of Old Atlantis, the sorcerer whose dried bones never gave up his throne, the greatest wizard of the ancient world, lives on. Like a parasite invading a host, the spirit of Malygris infects and corrupts the living world. The whole of the wide earth suffers for it. Yes, Malygris lives, and his eternal bitterness, his festering malevolence, taints space and time like a poison.

In order to explain I must return again to Malygris’ deep and abiding loneliness. His attempt to conjure the spirit of Nylissa, long-dead sweetheart of his youth, left him defeated and disheartened. Upon conversing with the shade of his dead lover, Malygris realized that he could no longer see the depth of her beauty or feel the passion that had inflamed his youth. It came to him from the lips of a demonic servant that he could never recapture such lost love by conjuring Nylissa’s spirit because the wizard himself had changed over the years and grown old. The passion of youth no longer inhabited his frame, for he was truly not the same man as when he had loved her. So her ghost failed to excite him or alleviate his loneliness.

The experiment in necromantic romance was a failure, so the wizard’s loneliness persisted until it grew into a raging lust. No living concubine could satisfy him, not even those sent by decree from the Lords of Poseidonis. He could not love a slave, nor would any slave love such a terrifying master. Old and wretched, consumed by carnal guilt, Malygris spurned the living and turned once more to harassing the dead. He searched the underworld for roaming spirits of wisdom and doom. His third eye searched the stars for cosmic entities to snare and bottle in a web of spells. In his laboratory among the delicate contraptions of glass and bone, he managed to capture a disembodied intelligence drifting through the currents of time.

Imprisoning this transtemporal intelligence in a globe of enchanted amber, Malygris interrogated it with spells uniquely devised to torment noncorporeal entities. He learned that his trap had snared the consciousness of an advanced being in the progress of traveling from earth’s primordial past to a host body somewhere in the remote future. The purpose of its migration through time Malygris could only surmise. Yet he refused to release the bodiless entity from the mystical bonds that had interrupted its journey.

His thoughts turned once again to Nylissa. If he could pry the secrets of mental time travel from the alien in the globe, he might send his aged mind back to inhabit his younger body. To be young again and still possess all the knowledge and powers of his older self — to lay with Nylissa in the flesh, to know the splendors of youth again. Only this would satisfy his lust. His all-powerful mature mind would completely replace his vulnerable young one by scattering it to the four winds with his advanced sorcery. In this way he could inhabit his youthful body again for as long as he willed it.

This plan offered more than mere physical gratification. Not only would he regain the carnal glory of his younger self, but he could then re-live most of his life. All the mistakes he might correct; all the betrayals he might avoid or avenge; he might reshape the entire world in his own image. But first he would know again the heat of Nylissa’s bed, as he had known it so many years ago.

Through psychic interrogation he pried open the thoughts of the captured alien. He came to understand it was one of an ancient race that populated the earth many epochs before the birth of mankind. They were known as the Great Race of Yith, and they ruled an empire in the primordial swamps of antiquity. The captured Yithian was pursuing a mental pilgrimage through time, something common to certain members of its society. These creatures often sent their raw consciousness across the gulfs of time to swap the bodies of beings living in future times. Meanwhile, the minds of these stolen bodies were sent back along the timeline to be trapped in the hideous bodies of time-traveling Yithians.