The dust rose, driven by a restless wind. Huddled clumps of grass shuddered and bent before the roving air, the scraggly blades coated by flecks of dirt that had lost their grip with the soil. Trees crouched over their patches of ground, lone sentinels watching what passed around them, unspeaking beings of memory ever watching. The wastelands never rested, never felt a moment of peace, not after so much heat and force tortured them ages ago. They never forgot what happened to them, a swooning victim that sprawled over a gargantuan area. They had lain, gnarled and broken, scarred beyond recovery. Tiny motes of remaining life still crawled around upon them, struggling to survive. That fact didn't get any sympathy from the descendants of a fallen, once-proud race, that walked on two legs and had clever hands. The humans still scraped from it their livelihoods, always yet taking from the lands. The memories of two harsh and incendiary wars weighted upon the lands, but the lands still borne the weight of secrets yet unrevealed as well.

================================================================================================

*Crack* *THWOOOOSHHH*

The flames I funneled to my snarling target set off the spit it was gathering up in its maw, and the fang-filled skull exploded into roaring fire. The roar of pain flattened me to the ground. The brute of the desert steppes thrashed around, swiping at the ground with it's head, trying to put out the fire engulfing its huge head. I kept channeling fire to the massive brute, trying to burn it as much and as fast as possible before it got angry enough to focus on hurting me, because this close, it could easily trample me under the tree trunks that passed as its legs.

I hadn't planned to go hunting today, but the behemoth suprised me. Anybody would've been, a thirty-foot plus monster coming out of an unseen deep hollow in the grassy ground near where I was driving by. Plus, it had gone and rammed my car into a spindly tree and throwing me up onto the branches. The red paint on the car was scraped almost entirely off along with the tree's bark, but at least it looked drivable. Getting the irate and hungry brute off my back precluded my continuing to drive on, however. And it wasn't gonna be anything easy, considering the size and fury of the brute. Even though it towered over anything that existed in the steppes, the ribs protruding from the scaly chest plainly showed the harshness of its existence. It wouldn't be letting a potential meal get away, however small and hard-fighting it was. Long gouges in the ground, wilting tan grasses, blackening burn tracks, and piled mounds of crumbled earth all around the hill showed the fury of our battle. Flaming projectiles and blasts of crackling energy flew around, each tracking the other's opponent. I may have impressed myself by surviving this long, but I certainly didn't let that stop me appreciating being alive. I ran around the hill, trying to get behind some cover once the brute's head stopped burning from a fresh torching. My head felt so tired, expending huge amounts of mental energy fighting off the beast, but my legs felt sprightly with the gallons of adrenaline fuelling them.

*thwoom*

A fiery spitball exploded just behind me, slamming me up into the air, and I went down hard enough to raise a thick plume of dust. I rolled into a pile of clumped earth that was thrown up by one of the beast's running charges, and I spun around to send a bolt of PSI at the beast. The telekinetic punch slapped the brute's head around, steering its headlong rush into the car, and both hulks went tumbling. I pushed off from the dirt pile and ran down into the hollow, hoping that it wouldn't think I had the audacity to hide in its lair. I sidestepped some large stones and a fallen tree trunk in the hollow, and found a nice spot to watch the proceedings from. Angry sounds came above and beyond me in the grass, and I ducked down behind a tall clump of thin-stalked plants. My CityAdmin-issued citizen transponder fell down, flashing "Heavyporker" and a small list of data as it bounced, and I bent down to pick it up.

*Grrroooo*

My heart iced over into a lump of ice while my spine wriggled like a lynched sandcrawler at that sound. I peeked over my perch and knew at once it didn't come from the stalking behemoth over the hill in front of me, which meant... I clutched a rock in front of me as I rolled to my right, spinning around to chuck the stone at what made the growl. The piddly little pebble skittered off the thick skullbone of the creature that gazed at me with hunger. It looked quite similiar to the brute that had so rudely derailed me, but was much smaller 'If that was a good thing had yet to be decided,' a small voice in the back of my head said. It snarled, sending a wave of breath smelling of acrid rotten meat, the trademark carnivore's aroma and bespeaking of unsanitary dental habits. I skittered further to my right, trying to make for a smoother ramp further along to scramble up out of the hollow. A twin of the beast before me came out from behind another boulder, growling and hissing. A thick skull shattered under one of its clawed feet, the bone's long slender form bespoke its' former occupation as the brain-enveloping skeletal structure of a drom. The sun chose that moment to go out as well.

I looked upwards above me into black eyes larger than my head, and to notice a glistening drip of saliva fallng towards me. The drop plopped on the folds of my cloak's hood, and promptly burst into a spurt of flame. Real desperation set in at that moment, and I spun around to meet the closest of the small beasts. I gauged the distance, and as the beady-eyed little brat gingerly stepped up towards me, I jumped and rolled between its leg. That unexpected tactic only suprised them all for a second, and they shrieked in unison, a furious battlecry of death. The situation looked very bad, as all of them could most likely run faster and longer than I could, and if they ever got into reach, could bite off a limb as easily as blinking.

A deep breath of the dry and dusty air rolling around in my lungs, I raised my hands and eyes to the sky, focusing my thoughts. Sizzling and bubbling noises echoed from all the nooks and crannies of that hollow of horror, and greenish fumes gushed from the very soil of the ground. The novelty of the situation gave them pause, and they looked around in curiousity. One of the brute's children sniffed at a spurting geyser, and green clouds darted into its nostrils. Only a second passed before it yawled in suprise and pain, and the poor beast started screaming ever louder, drawing its family nearer to it. The large depression in the ground became filled to the brim with putrescent fumes, and I started choking myself, caught in the deeper end of the hollow. Even the brute got to biting and clawing at its bubbling skin and sneezing, trying to breathe.

I knew when I started corrupting the organic matter around me that there were a high chance I'd be stranding myself in the swath of destruction I would cause, but I took the chance that the creatures would die before I was seriously affected. As the hope of unscathed escape dwindled, I sought any sanctuary around me that would isolate me from the poison wind rushing about the hollow. I discounted the fallen log as it dissolved, its vastly accelerated decay feeding to the poison, and also discounted the boulders when they started melting imperceptibly at first but getting faster. Fear pumped through me as faint beeping came from my belt, my belt that had been specially constructed by a Tech Haven friend that owed me was starting to fail. It wasn't Tech Haven's finest but it certainly came close, with multiple ceramic nodes studding the webber beltstrap, containing antidote arrays to neutralize acids and poison and enyzme-mimic nanotech geared to disassemble complex venoms. The belt nodes' many tubules burrowing into my waist, feeding me the resistance against poison, was itself dissolving in the intense torrent of acid. When they got severed, the pharmacopteria already in me would peter out, nullified by reactions, and I myself would succumb. I couldn't run out past the beasts, because aside from the stronger poison down there, the beasts themselves weren't going down easy. The loud bellows and stomping told me they were raging around in fear and pain.

I jumped down further down and ran over the efferscent pool containing the fallen tree's remains, and only luck made me notice that the top of a deeply acid-etched boulder had crumbled, and I dodged the rock chunks dropping off it. Something was odd here. One look around and I stopped to look again. Something just didn't make sense to something deep within me, deeper than any mere sixth sense even though mine would be accounted highly honed. Geysers of fumes whistled all around me, almost drowned out by the pain-wracked beasts behind me. There. I had it, and I felt foolish for not noticing it. My eyes straight upon the deepest part of the hollow, saw the hole. It wasn't extraordinary, really, small and unobtrusive, except for one thing that mattered in this gas chamber. No fumes came out of it, nor did any sound or scent of rampant decay emanate from it. A surge of outrageous joy and hope shot through me at the sight of potential salvation. My left foot came up, and stopped. The emotional surge petered out.

The sudden silence in the hollow had quenched it, the sensory realization of a momentous brink tingling. The rapid forced decay and toxification around the area had stopped, along with something else. I turned around to see the blood-stained skull of the brute's head, shorn clean of skin by my potent acidic poison, rushing at me, naked muscles and sinews winching open a maw with a black core at its center. The columns of flesh and bone legs powered the brute towards me at incredible speed.

*Thhhuuuuuuudddd* *Thhhhhhuundddd*

As death flew towards me, the teeth grew and grew, until they were as sky-reaching spires of gouged ivory, and a wriggling river of pink flesh rippled. Thuds from stamping feet shook the ground, and the maw started to envelop me.

*Thhhuuuuuuudddd* *Creeeaaaaasshhhhh*

All went dark. Wind tousled my clothes and hair. Gravity felt as it both lost and increased its grip upon my body. I reached out, felt a flap of wet flesh, and I grasped at it. A yank of my arm pulled me out of the teeth-barred prison that was the brute's mouth, and I climbed further up its skull. The sensation of falling still persisted, and I looked around and up, wan streamers of light dancing along the dusty air. The walls of rock faintly showed themselves to my sight, the surfaces rippling in testament of my rapid descent. The light above me dwindled to a speck of light, and below me the darkness grew in intensity. Something in me became strongly uneasy. I crawled around again, moving myself to the brute's back. I put my finger on it, that was the sense of fast-approaching doom. Considering my situation, I thought it was rather obvious, but I braced for impact, hoping anyway, trying to survive the fall.

*THHUUUUUUUUUUUUUQQQQQQIIIIISSSSSSHhhhhh*

The gargantuan mound of flesh and bone beneath me shook and rippled like an apocalyptic earthquake at the impact. Everything in me flattened against the hulk, and searing pain awoke in my left leg. A yell of auguish rang out in the dark as I grabbed at my leg. I couldn't move it without adding more incredible pain to the agony already clawing at me. My mind's flailing around for focus hurried my gasping for breath, and I clawed at whatever was impaling my leg. It wouldn't dislodge, and the pain was growing, a jangling of burning and raw scraping along my nerves.

Finally my mind had grasped at enough energy to start holding back the pain, enough at least that I could concentrate enough to will a faint spark of energy to dance upon a palm. The sparkling light revealed a spear of ivory jutting from the brute's back into the thigh of my leg, shattered and hurled from a rib at the fall's impact. My eyes inched along that white shaft upwards and upwards. Four feet, and most likely more concealed by the flesh and skin that still remained in the beast's corpse. A burst of PSI shattered the spire at where it met my leg, and I clenched my teeth, steeling myself for the yank that pulled out the rest of the bone out of my leg. Absolute darkness took over.

After I came to again, the pain from my body's sprawling over that bed of flesh eclipsed as the pain from my impaled leg rushed back, and the darkness rang with my cries. My jaws clenched shut to quiet the yelling, but whimpers escaped with no difficulty. My right hand flashed into light, and I gingerly sat up to get a better look at my left leg. A bloody sight, with redness staining my whole leg and through the hole, I could see, quite a bit of the beast's hide as well. The thought of how much was mine, and how much was the beast's, receded as I tried to force my muddled mind to assess the situation. Beasts likely alive above, an extremely long fall down into some unknown chasm, a shredded leg, and too much blood splashed around to make a fair assessment of my life expectancy.

After a while, when I finally noticed red blood still oozing out from my leg, I decided that if I didn't take action, my immediate life expectancy would be measured in minutes, not hours. After focusing my pain into a vise-like grip of PSI holding my wounds puckered shut somewhat as I carefully rolled myself a bit to my right, the better to let my left hand access my backpack. Loud rustling aroused echoes as I rummaged in my pack, finally finding a few medikits and flipping them into my lap.

*Snickt* *Snickt* *Snickt*

I rapidly broke the medikits' hermetic seals, and carefully examined their contents. Clotters, pouches of synthetic plasma, antiseptic, several wound-seal sprays, three packets of assembler nanites tuned for biological structures, and especially the various forms of painkillers, piled up into neat rows between my legs. Several minutes flew by as I carefully applied various agents to the gap in my leg, releasing the grip of my PSI gradually. The final result of a goopy yellow stain where the wound was didn't exactly assure me, but I firmly held the thought that it was better than being able to see through my leg. I scrambled up to my feet, thanking the mighty spirit of Crahn for the highly effective painkillers all the way. PSI continually streamed from me, pushing at the ground under my feet and keeping me upright. I wasn't especially effective at leviation, almost no monk were, but as one of the best levitaters, I did have enough command of it to keep much of my weight off the leg. I bent forward to look around in where I was, intensifying the illumination from the leashed lightning writhing around in my hand.

A grisly sight greeted me. Lengthy coils of viscera, meter-long shards of bone, and shredded gobs of muscle littered a wide circle around the most-definitely dead brute. The sheer size and bulk of the brute had saved me. From the immediate effects of rapid decceleration, anyway. I leapt down to the ground, a surge of PSI cushioning the fall. The inital steadiness of my ethereal crutch gave away to slick blood, and an unidentifable organ became a cushion to my ass. A few choice curses saw me back on my feet, and a stretch of hobbling to the periphery of the carnage. Wiping my feet on dusty but dry ground got most of my boots clean. Random bolts of softly glowing flame flew from my hands off into the darkness, as my attempts to peer into the darkness, but came up fruitless. A look and a few firebolts above me to the overarching stone demonstrated the futility of trying to climb out. 'Damn my inability to fully levitate!' Most monks wouldn't even think of levitation, but my small facility that I was already using as a crutch clawed at me, raising my hopes of flying out that stygian pit with a column of glorious PSI lifting me aloft.

A shake of my head ended that fantasization, and I stepped ahead, walking into the long dark of that subterranean chamber. A hour later, of which it had taken fifteen minutes to find the chamber's periphery, the rest walking around the irregular border, dimissing any potential spots for climbing. The walls were either too smooth or too jagged and crumbly to risk climbing up on, and something about the cave's walls didn't lend itself to being gripped by PSI, so I couldn't use my mind for footing on the way up. A cursory check in my cloak's pockets showed quite a few bars of Choco Cheeze Chompies.

Choco Cheeze Chompies. What twisted mind would make up such a thing? If I was going to starve, I'd rather gnaw at the brute's nuts before touching those things. As the namesake implied, those things were made of synthetic chocolate fudge with synthetic cheese paste and coated with sugar substitute. Jokes abounded about its consumption, eerily similiar to comedy records in the Ceres Discs about some sort of confection called "Twinkies", a yellowish sweet substance with what was supposedly a sugar creme injected into it. Choco Cheeze Chompies definitely merited whatever abuse it recieved, and its maker either gutted and shot or thrown into a mauler nest with three lacating female maulers in it.

That culinary abomination had come off the greasy-haired Yo's merchant that had tried to schmooze me back at the last village I had stopped by. He had really annoyed me, that bastard, prattling on and on about the anatomical features of the greater blue dragonfly, a sample fauna of the plains-ward area of the steppes. I had suffered for five minutes while I unloaded my few scraps of hides and bones, until I noticed that the local electrical wiring was corroded to uselessness and the white patches on the vendor's skin wasn't due to some sort of dermatisis or bad tanning. The Crahn-forsaken merchant had mutated! My hand's surreptious move and my eyes' sudden wariness must have tipped him off, because then he flew into a rage and pulled out a badly rusted gatling pistol. The weapon's multiple bulletchambers began to shakily rotate, the grinding and sputtering from rust and damp ammo making the gun buck. I ducked and dodged the wild spattering from the tiny rounds, the random careening from the rounds nicking and pitting the walls of the tiny room we were in. I let this continue for a few minutes, hoping for the vendor to calm down, but then he had to start talking while shooting. About the mating habits of droms, no less. If there's anything that annoys me to mindlessness, it's a dicussion about animal mating habits. I shouted "There is NO plural to animal mating habits, the only animal mating habit is the male jumping on the female's back and humping away hoping his dick's long enough to shoot his load anywhere near in the right direction." That sent a hail of gunfire in my general direction. A crooking of my finger sent one careful flow of energy arcing through the air to bounce off the wall and thud into the mutant, making his muscles spasm and his heart stopping from the jolt. I stood up and walked over to the corpse. One of its fingers twitching got the body jolted again but good. I had searched and looted everything in the shop, of course. I may try to be nice, but I'm no fool to leave a potential four days' worth of cash.

*Krrssh* *Krrssshh*

The crunching of pebbles underfoot returned me to my current situation, elicting a long sigh from me. The sheer monotony of the walk had bored my mind, settng my eyes and feet to auto-drive. I looked around me, hoping to see something in the engulfing darkness that laughed at my small spark's attempt to brighten it. Nothing impressive greeted my eyes, it was all monotonous gray rock in various shapes. Over in the distance, I fancied I could still see the rotting dead hulk of the brute's corpse. My head turned back to my path. Something different seemed to mark the area I was in. Ah, yes, the difference in scenery was remarkable. Brownish walls and ceilings had given way to gigantic slabs of gray stone, flat, thick stones that averaged the length of tall buildings on their sides. An odd series of glints sparkled from my glow in the distance ahead me, among a smaller pile of stone slabs, only the size of cars over there. A short mosey took me over, my heart holding little hope about finding anything of worth. The series of glinting resolved themselves as I approached. When I finally stood right next to it, the impossible sight silenced whatever thought existed in my mind.

It was a colossal metal ring of twelve round openings on one end, and the ring continued behind itself, being a cylindrical construct. It looked so familiar to something I knew well from being at the recieving end of, but the sheer size couldn't make me accept it. The gatling pistol the late Yo's merchant had wielded would have been engulfed by one single chamber this grandfather had to it. 'What, by the Blinding Light, is this', my mind gibbered, 'Even ten GenTanks couldn't lift one end of this thing, whatever it is!' I looked around the huge thing of metal, trying to see what I could do to see more, to learn more, to understand what this thing was. The artifact, if that was what it could be called, was under several slabs, small compared to the other slabs, but far beyond my strength. I tentatively pushed on a pretty small slab of stone with my PSI, trying to see what I could do with just my mind. The rock teetered and wobbled at the attempt, and I felt fairly confident now, grasping the stone with all my PSI.

*Krrrssshhh* *CLUNK* *Skrrreeethook*

My mind almost split from lifting what could be only about three hundred kilograms of granite. That short-lived attempt had dragged the stone about three feet away from where it was, leaving that much less on the towering pile above the artifact. My PSI wasn't up to the task, apparently. I doubted that random bursts of energy would do much good either. Fire might be worth a try, especially if I looked for the weak spots, trying to split them apart. I grinned as I recalled a patterning of fire, that I had learned from observing a hideously ugly beast in a far-off cavern, a many-legged bitch that couldn't stop squatting and belching little uglies if she was choking herself to death with them in that tiny space. But she was fearsome with fireballs. It always felt good to use a patterning against the creatures themselves. A maelstrom of heat and fire spun above my upraised palm.

'There.' I saw a nice spot on the topmost slab, a nine-feet thick giant, its side riddled with cracks. I took a few long steps back to avoid the fallout, and hurled fiery PSI. As the fireball flew at that frail-looking area, smoke and vapor swirled behind it in a gorgeous trail. The flames burst into a loud and sizeable explosion, and eerie shadows danced all around the cave wall at the fireworks and died down until only the sputtering flames were visible in the gloom. The crack-webbed area on the slab only held the faint remmants of that fireball, looking like a nest of glow worms. 'Hm. A few more might do the trick.' I set to slamming several more fireballs at the slab, trying to shatter it with sheer force and heat, each flash of flame echoing in that huge prison. After the third cast, I took a breath and looked at my handiwork, still ineffectual, then set to flinging more fireballs. After that eighth fireball, molten rock started oozing and spattering onto the rocks below. I didn't stop there, not when I heard the stone start to creak with its middle melting apart. Three more fireballs explosively obliterated the central section, making the slab slide apart like a ponderous creature limping away. As they descended from the pile, their descent upon the angle of the pile steepened until the pieces of the slab flipped off the pile and against belief, flew through the air, hitting the stone floor of the cave with an almighty slam. I flew backwards from the sheer sonic slap that rang throughtout the cave, ringing it like a bell. The shattered slabs finally ended up about fifty feet away from the pile, sprawling giants upon the ground.

Untold tons still remained to be dislodged, but that did little to deter me. A quarter hour passed, rivulets of slag drickling down past my feet, sweat dropping off my brow and arms as the temperature rose in the cave. Echoes rang out with almost regular frequency as slabs buckled to my fire and their own weight. As more of the cylindrical ring appeared, seemingly growing out of the rock, so did other details, portending that something terrible slumbered in that stony tomb. Bundles of hydraulic-looking poles and cabling corded one end of the ring and part of the metal surface the ring was attached to, seemingly like muscles wrapping a giant's elbow. Adrealine kept pumping in me, cutting through the massive headache that I got whenther I used PSI for an extended period, the unraveling of a potentially illuminating mystery enthralling me. Once that huge sideways metal column that was attached to the ring got exposed, I had to stand back and think about that. It just looked so strange. In all my travels and sights seen, I had never seen anything like this.

It looked almost obvious that whatever this machine was, it had to come from before the Blinding Light and its cleansing, from the times that the Ceres Discs had spoken of as eternal memories recorded by the wise ones of that era. As a loosely tied employee of NExT and a member of an unobtrustive but familiar and respected cartel that contracted to NExT, I had a lot of freedom. I used that advantage to explore the lands around Neocron and the splinter colonies known as the Military Base, Tech Haven, and on one harrowing occasion, the Twilight Guardians' Canyon sanctuary. Never before had I seen anything remotely similiar to that, except perhaps the underground missle storages of the CityMercs, and even that old stockpile of death-dealing technology only dated to a hundred years or so ago. I still stood there, wondering if I should press forth, continuing to unearth some terrible secret that might bring down the Blinding Light again.

'It might be my only way out of here, other than spending weeks or months meditating and trying to get strong enough with levitation that I can fly out of there, and that's with only perhaps three days worth of rations.' I rummaged around in my backpack to confirm how much sustenance I would have, and as I thought, it didn't look promising. A sigh blew through my pursed lips as I tried to figure out ways to stretch my supplies. Another look in my supplies made me groan in worry. 'Wait... The dead beast?! Perhaps it may provide.' The thought pulled my eyes to where I imagined the remains of the beast to be, far off in the dark. Gory and shattered as it was, it still had a lot of flesh sitting around. It would be so easy to just cook up the whole thing to stave off decomposition and sickness, and be able to have my meals waiting for me. Even if the pile of meat only stayed edible for a couple weeks, it would greatly improve my chances of getting out. That as I decided, I walked the way back to the corpse and examined it. It seemed decent enough if one ignored the blood and nasty bits and inedible stuff draping the flesh. Streamers of PSI piled up the pieces of flesh off the ground and into somewhat neater piles away from the viscera. After that was done, I started to continuing using PSI to stripping as much decent meat from the beast as I could, taking about fifteen bloody minutes. With that finished, I stepped back to examine my handiwork of a large mound of torn strips of flesh slowly oozing a small amount of blood. I sent a large globe of flame lazily gliding over to the pile and when it got over the meat, exploded the fireball. The intense flame drenched the pile in heat, igniting strips of fat on the outside.

I left the pyre, content to let it roast the meat as I returned to the artifact's tomb. A few more moments of thought and staring at what of the construct was visible didn't solve my worries. I glanced down at my leg, noticing that the yellowish pallor of the filled in gap in my leg had lessened quite a bit. I forgot when I had stopped using my PSI to take my weight off it, but that changed nothing. 'Hell with it. I wanna know'. Fire swirled around my hands at that, shadows flickering around me. I stepped closer, the better to have a good view of the work I was about to do. The angle of the ring and column made me think that I might get better results working further to the back of them rather than straight forward into the pile. A few minutes of clambering over the pile got me at the top and short of breath. Considering how thick and wide this particular slab was, standing out at about fourteen feet each way, I decided not to bother with fireballs even if they were easier to form. I stepped off onto another slab behind it, and started concentrating. My eyes flickered to the center of the slab, gazing at its center, paying all my attention to it. My brows furrowed and twitched, the effort building.

Barely ten seconds passed before a small red glow there became visible. A moment trickled past, the red glow brightening and spreading. When the red glow extended to the edges of the slab, the stone within the glow sparked and melted, oozing off the slab, slowly at first, then a raging torrent next as I melted the slab from the center out. The slab of stone was too firmly placed for itself to break or move from its weight so I settled for blowtorching into it. The heat of the pooling molten slag helped soften the slabs below, making my job of burrowing easier. I kept on going, though once that first slab was melted through, I stepped closer to make sure my focus still would be true as I went further down with my mind. Five minutes, then ten, then fifteen as I went through slab after slab, paving the sides of the pile with congealing slag. For some reason, my focus ended and the heat gushing out of the drillhole dropped until only the oven-like radiance from the seared stone remained. I leaned over the edge of the hole to get a look at the bottom. Shiny metal glared at me with the reflectance of the red glow from the stone, mocking the heat boiling around atop it. My black eyebrows, still surviving the intense heat, quirked. I thought I would be entering from behind it, but apparently the artifact was even larger than I thought, to extend so far back. My hand extended out...

... and withdrew it quickly. The heat was there all right. The metal must be incredible if it wasn't even glowing from the heat. Either it was totally impervious to the heat or conducting it so fast it couldn't get damaged. A look around showed all the slag was starting to solidfy, and an idea came to me. One shot from a small red syringe, one of many I always carried, gave me clarity in my mind and cut through the fog of exertion. As my energy built up, I gazed on the pile. Again I concentrated, but this time, I took in the whole of the slope leading away from the artifact. Mere moments passed before it started glowing with heat. Movement came rather slowly, the slag's weight overcoming its weakening cohesion. The creeping flow of slag made the pile look like it was molting. I kept at it, making the rock heat until it lost all resemblance of solidity. A final squeeze of rage from my mind pulsed into the rock and made it almost totally liquid, and the once-formidable pile splashed upon the ground, flowing away from me and puddling into small depressions. When the ocean of rock had thinned to a mere skin upon the ground, I reached with my mind to it and touched the boiling heat, teasing it back to me. Warmth flowed into my body as the rock flashed from red-hot to merely searing black.

A look at the arm, as I thought of it as now, assured me it hadn't come to any harm at all. In fact the metal on it even sparkled brightly in the light upon my palm. My eyes ran up the length of the arm, and continued on. There was much more. Far more than I had expected. A veritable behemoth of metal and glass behind the arm dwarfed me. And it was just buried to its waist, apparently. Even melting all that stone had only exposed what could be charitably named its torso. There didn't seem to be a head to this machine, that it was definitely a machine wasn't doubted, not with all this metal and the very unorganic shape it took. A small curved deltoid sweep of black glass in the front of the machine gave me the thought that it was a viewport for the pilot. What gave the machine the unsettling air past its mere existence was the spikes. Dear Crahn, what spikes! Steely gray spikes, three each studding the shoulders, each nearly thrice as long as I was tall, and looking deadly sharp. The arm on the other side of the behemoth caught my eyes. It was constructed differently from the arm that I had first saw. Three wickedly long claws equidistantly spaced crowned the knob of that arm, and a hole irised shut was set in the center between the claws. Several protuberances and odd shapes studded the skin of the behemoth, for what purpose I didn't know, not yet.

Some notches set into a regular line on the behemoth's side looked like a promising way to get to the artifact's top. A few long strides over the now-glassy surface of the ground took me to the line of notches, and I started climbing. Only a minute passed before I stood unsteadily on the top. A brush of my arm wiped the sweat gathering upon my brow. Smooth silvery metal blanketed the huge top of the behemoth, the expanse easily dwarfing even the brute I struggled with earlier. Some mounts that looked rather like weapons emplacements studded the edge of the top, and I could see a round hatch in the center. I walked over to it, peering intently upon it and noticing a keypad. It looked rather similiar to a handprint pad with a unfamiliar keypad with faint symbols on it, possibly numeric. I examined the deck around it, trying to see if there was anything else to the hatch than this. Nothing.

I decided to risk trying something. A few tentrils of PSI extended from me to push against a few of the buttons on the keypad. Nothing happened. I stepped closer and pushed on the handprint pad with my mind. Still nothing happened. Boldened by the apparent quiescence, I pulled off the glove off my left hand, keeping my psi gauntlet on the right in case something happened. As I gingerly lay my hand on the pad, I notice the metal's chill, and as I wait, I see the buttons' shadows flicker in my hand's actinic light. Nothing happened for several seconds, and as the metal warmed under my hand's heat, instinct buried deep and still listened to by my convoluted mind tell me something is happening, something that had slept for so very long and dearly wishes to wake, is waking. Imperceptible clicks and whirs start up deep in the behemoth, only sensed by an over-sensitive mind long used to technology.

A green glow flashes on under my hand upon the pad, and I snatch my hand back, not taking chances with something I had no idea about. Clunking and thuds start up, long unused mechanisms surging to life, then my eyes dart to the hatch as it sinks out of sight. Very slowly, I move forward to the opening, pausing now and then to gauge the risks of approaching yet closer. Finally I reach the opening, and carefully I lean over to look down the hatch. Darkness dwells there, and I move to put my haloed hand over it, but bright pure blue light switches on below. I can clearly see a steep ramp with inset notches moving down from the hatch, and with a last look around me, I walk down into the mystery.