Shadows Out of Time

Eventually it came to him that Atlantis and the life he longed to recapture lay far in the future, perhaps a billion years. He had escaped the amber sphere by taking over the Yithian’s body in the past, but now he must escape the Age of Yith by re-taking his own body in the future. So he ignored the vast collection of wonders on display in the tower and found the chamber where time-displacement was the primary function of the glass-andmetal machines. The memories of the Yithian were his now, so he knew how to operate one of the time-shifting contraptions, even with clumsy claws and quivering tendrils.

What Malygris did not know was the extent of damage both to his own mind and that of the creature he had absorbed. His understanding of the time-displacement mechanism was incomplete, and it launched his intelligence into the future without a fixed goal or destination. Bodiless and helpless, his hybrid mind floated in the empty dimensions between time and space. An endless vista of astral realms called him farther and farther from earthly concerns. For ages he drifted in the timeless domain without form or matter of his own, a shadow out of time, tossed like a bottle on the waves of a dark ocean.

Surely Malygris was mad by now.

Or perhaps he had gone far beyond madness.

Like a ghost he drifted in a realm beyond reality. There is no way to measure the passing of time where time does not exist. Yet eventually the spark of Malygris’ intellect returned, and he dragged himself across infinity toward the earth that he remembered. He orbited the planet on high, existing without substance, unable to reach it. He crawled or drifted through the aether for another period without measure, until he discovered a tiny crack in time.

So Malygris slipped back into the living world. This time his body was human, or nearly so. The primitive mind that his consciousness had shattered and replaced drifted on the wind like fading smoke. The brutish body was his alone now. He shivered with cold, a sensation he had nearly forgotten, along with most others. His limbs were thick and hairy, and he lay upon a ledge of stone while thunder and lightning ruled the sky above. He examined his face with human hands that were dirty and calloused, crisscrossed with scars. He found a thick and matted beard, and a long mane thick with thorns and leaves. Above his eyes he fingered a thick ridge of bone. Now he opened his nostrils wide and smelled the wet forest and the rain. He breathed in the scents of the great ferns and the rich soil, the dung of reptiles and tigers among the trees, and the animal stench of his own body.

He was a lone Neanderthal, trying to survive the journey back to his village. This much Malygris knew right away, but beyond that he could not say. At least he was back in the world again. This was not Poseidonis, but he might use this strong and primal body to build an empire here. His powers could easily make him the god of a primitive people. He summoned a magical fire beneath an overhanging rock and warmed himself while the storm rolled across the world.

“My name is Malygris,” he reminded himself. “The Terror of Atlantis…” He told himself stories, sometimes blending together the memories of his human and Yithian lives. When the dawn rose, he would hunt for food, then find some primitives to conquer and dominate. There would be no Nylissa for him in this place, but surely there would be females. His new body responded to that thought with a rush of blood, and rising lust made him howl at the moon.

The tiger-stench filled his nostrils too late, as the beast leaped from a high rock and slashed his crude body to shreds. Malygris felt the horrible pain of this death, but his mind did not perish with his stolen body. Instead, he was flung outside the currents of time once again, pulled by a strange gravity, like a bubble rising from the depths to the surface of a dark ocean. Again he was marooned in the formless realms outside time.

Once more he crawled across the void by using the remnants of his sorcery and the wisdom of Yithian time-travel. His second re-entry to the living world found him in the body of a long-suffering slave girl of ancient Egypt. Such an existence held no appeal for him, and he could not break the physical bondage of her chains. Suicide was the only way to exit before his cruel masters intervened. The girl sliced her wrists using the shard of a broken clay pot, and as she bled to death Malygris fell out of the world once again.