Shadows Out of Time

Malygris was greatly enthused to learn of this custom. It convinced him that a transtemporal mind transfer into his younger self was indeed possible. He would annihilate his younger mind, replacing it with his mature consciousness. Such a conquest did not amount to murder — it was more akin to suicide, except that he would not truly die. His older self would simply replace his younger self and regain his own strong and vital body.

He demanded with spells of torment that the Yithian prisoner reveal to him its method of time-displacement. The creature in the globe resisted, but eventually it relented under the pain of the ordeal. It invited Malygris into the core of its mind-self, and Malygris did not see the trap awaiting him in this invitation. Perhaps his ambition blinded him, or perhaps it was the raging lust that made him think only of Nylissa’s bed. Therefore, he linked his sentience with that of his prisoner and found himself entombed in a web of alien thoughts.

For days he sat in his throne-like chair, staring into the amber globe, waging a silent mental conflict with the thing inside it. In a final act of rebellion, the imprisoned Yith-mind attempted to destroy itself, yet Malygris used his iron will to prevent this escape. In doing so he accidentally melded his mind to that of the creature, imprisoning his own consciousness within the globe sitting in the lap of his mindless body.

A firestorm of memories and data and concepts seethed inside the globe, melting the mind of Malygris and the mind of the alien into a single intelligence. Malygris’ understanding of the Yithians was complete, and it was this understanding that threatened to obliterate his human mind. Only his mastery of sorcery prevented the death of his essential self, but that self was changed to a radical degree. Now he, too, was a disembodied intelligence, a blended consciousness, and a captive of his own spherical prison.

Perhaps it was at this point that Malygris lost whatever remained of his sanity.

There was one way to escape the amber globe. Using the powers of his newly acquired memories, calling upon Yithian wisdom as a drowning man clings to a shard of driftwood, Malygris sent his altered consciousness back in time. He saw in the depths of the timeless void a point of light that was the Yithian’s original point of departure, and he swam toward it. Or, rather, he let the roaring currents of time wash him toward it, a piece of time-tossed flotsam.

The crystal sitting in the lap of his kingly corpse cracked open and fell to dust.

Somewhere in the remote past, while earth’s crust was still cooling, he awakened in the body of a Yithian. It was the physical self of the time-traveler he had captured and mentally consumed. If Malygris was not already a madman at this point, surely inhabiting such a grotesque physical form would have driven him to madness. Examining himself with three new eyes set atop a long prehensile neck, Malygris discovered his three greater tendrils, his twin claws resembling those of giant crayfish, and his four flute-like mouths. Slug-like flanges rimmed the bottom of his tall, conical body. A beard of lesser tendrils hung writhing from his pumpkin-shaped head.

The telepathy of a Yithian he had also stolen, and he felt the multitudes of Yithian minds all around him. A tower full of bizarre alchemical equipment also held hundreds of his fellow creatures. Beyond the sacred tower’s walls of pale green stone, his hybrid mind sensed thousands of them, like candles burning in darkness. They shambled through a city of indescribable beauty and unthinkable horror, an entire nation of vegetable behemoths with their own magics, technologies, languages, and architectures. Beyond the city’s edge he sensed more cities like this one. The Yithians at this time inhabited every climate across the volcanic earth. Now Malygris cringed inside his vegetable flesh as his telepathic senses detected the dull vibration of ancient black towers that stood in the forbidden places between cities. An aura of ancient evil and a premonition of doom came to him then.

Overcome with alien sensations, Malygris wandered among his inhuman peers. Many were engaged in scribing narratives of their own time-journeys, while others constructed eldritch machinery or experimented with the molding of primeval flesh. None of the Yithians sensed Malygris’ human mind inside the body of their contemporary, or perhaps they did not care. Exchanging minds with subjects from other epochs was fairly common among the Yith of the sacred tower. They were explorers, scholars, and historians. As long as Malygris did not interfere with their course of studies, he wandered through their domain without restriction.