Cold be hand and heart and bone,

and cold be sleep under stone:

ever more to wake on stony bed,

ever, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.

In the black wind the stars shall die,

and eternal darkness here let them lie,

till the Shadows lift their hand,

throughout all time and withered sand.

                                                 -"The Sands of Time"

                                         Frodo Baggins

I can feel their pain...their screams...their unending suffering...and utter anguish....

I can see Misery through the countless black stone columns reaching up from that damp abyss...that scorching,  intolerable netherworld...it is the epitome of what IS the Outside....

The blurred picturesque before me is undeniably real...

I grieve their sorrows...for In My Dreams I yearn for there to be another way...another future...

Those unrecognizable shapes...they are from beyond our stars...

...The void space seems never-ending...their limited weak minds are fighting to comprehend the intolerable blackness...

...Fate will not escape them....

-Excerpt from the journal of Frodo Baggins

 The fortifications were all checked and rechecked...and routine patrols were again sent out as the brazen sun sunk in the distance leaving a darkness covering the land...a storm was brewing, and when it unleashed its wrath, They would make their move.

 A slow time passed....

 During the small hours of the night...from the ramparts below yells and screams, and fierce battle-cries of men broke out. 

 Scouts came rushing in on horseback..."The enemy is at hand!"  "We loosed every arrow we had, and flooded the river...but it will not halt them long.  Already they are scaling the bank and many points...thick as marching ants..."

 The sky was utterly dark, and the air was still and heavy. 

 The Clouds Burst...and were seared by a blinding flash...and branched lightning smote down upon the hills...for an instant...the watchers on the walls saw space open up with white light and the land below boiled and crawled with black shapes...some squat, some broad, some tall...hundreds, and hundreds...absorbing, and advancing...like a dark tide, they began flowing up the walls...cliff by cliff...

 A battle cry rang out from the mouths of tens of thousands of soldiers...and arrows whistled through the air and began falling...like the rain around them.

 The assault of Minas Anor had begun.

 The enemy surged forward...and were driven back with a hail of rocks and arrows...They wavered, broke, fled back, charged...broke, and charged again, and each time like the incoming tide the Shoggoths halted at a higher point.  Throughout the obscene carnage the enemy pushed forward until finally the main gates were reached...

 Molten tar was dropped over the sides of the parapets from enormous kettles as the Shoggoths amassed and bashed against the walls below like the crashing waves of the sea.  Dead...and noxious were the bodies of the raging Shoggoths.... piled high and in mounds. It was as if life meant nothing to the Shoggoths...as if death was somehow preferable...

 The sky and its clouds began clearing, yet the waxing moonlight shining down brought only increased desperation, then panic as the defenses began to falter.  The battle looked ever more grave as the enemy before them seemed to have grown rather than diminished.  The assault on the gates was doubled.  Shoggoths oozed and merged together at its feet from end to end and began towering over the walls.

 In the darkened, dreary hours of the night, the ensuing Slaughter continued...the side of Anor always losing ground...  

* * *  

As entry of the main gates was attained by the bubbling, frothing creatures of misery, the King of Minus Anor looked to the pale stars, and at the moon, now slipping behind the Western walls of the fortress..."This terrible night will be over soon enough...dawn is not far off...."

  "But dawn will not help us...." rebuked Faramir.  "These creatures are of a foul craft...  they will not quail at the sun."

  "Yet dawn is ever the hope of men...."

  "Then let us defend our homeland...and hope!" bellowed Faramir charging off to a ford were the enemy was pushing through, holding his sword held high...waving it wildly with his only arm.

  Through the gates...and over the walls...massive forms advanced like a dark wave upon a hill of sand...

  The first of the enemy to attain the inside walls impaled themselves against row upon row of pikes and spears...but it was unknown if the intrusions actually harmed the quivering forms as the weapons were swallowed up like attempts at piercing 'Jell-O'.  Many of the front-line defenders were immersed in their perversion and lost, and now, clearly it was known why even Orcs ran from these scornful creatures.

  The enemy pressed forward with renewed fury emitting ghastly sounds...growing louder, and louder, shrill, savage and filled with madness as the insufferable Shoggoths mimicked the cries and screams of all those that had been previously killed!

  The uproar was a precursor to pandemonium and upheaval as it inundated the fortress like the mixed chords of some untuned instrument.   Spilling through the gates came wave after wave of uncountable, malformed, struggling, oozing, surging, unwieldy bodies of all shapes and sizes.  Like possessed demons they were bent and twisted like the blackness that had created them.

  USS Voyager NCC-74656 came out of hyperspace, and proceeded to her planned destination...Z’ha’dum.  

  "Viewer On!" snapped Janeway!    "Shields!" followed Chikotay.

  "What ina hell is going on here!"

  On the main viewscreen, a shrouded spherical body came into sight, growing in magnitude as the ship traversed the distance between the two at full impulse.  Surrounding the planet, a gigantic battle was being waged like some wild celestial dance, and strangely the mass conglomerate of marred spacecraft continued to blast away at each other apparently indifferent to Voyager's presence...

  "Evasive maneuvers!  Bring us in closer Tom."

  "Captain...that may not be necessary...." it was Harry, "we seem to be out of phase...for lack of better terms.  We just passed through three of the ships on screen."

  Space was littered with damaged vessels of all sizes.  The Majestic glow of the peaceful blue green sphere they were on course for was in direct contrast to the destruction they were passing through.  Large assault frigates, medium class fighters, and light multi-gun corvettes darted in and out, dodging and firing at sinister black shapes seemingly there, yet seemingly not, like Shadows out of Time their movements were coordinated as if guided by some ungodly cosmic hand.

  "Sensors are useless Captain!" Harry called out over the frenzy of noise now erupting over the ships comm channels.  "Energy levels are off our spectrum."

  "Useless? Let's go about this another way...try calibrating the sensors to account for any temporal fluctuations…"

  In her years working up the ranks, or even throughout all the combined military warfare history lessons back at the academy, Captain Janeway had never seen such wide-spread devastation before. 

  “Well, here's your planet Tuvok, what do you want to tell us?" Paris remarked with a slight edge in his tongue.

  "The planet is in a state of tectonic upheaval.  Large scale volcanic activity, seismic quakes, and tidal surges common with enormous plate shifts.   The current land formations suggest one mammoth continent.  

  "Pangea!" Harry offered.

  "Relatively Speaking," added the Vulcan.  Many of the bridge members looked to Tuvok as he continued a brief explanation.  "The geographical term once given on Earth in the late twentieth century used to explain diverse shifts in population and mammalian migration patterns dated during prehistoric times........." 

  The bridge intercomm crackled over the orgy of subspace distress calls on the main speaker system.  It was B'elanna, and she sounded shaken.

  "Engineering Captain, we're experiencing a massive power drain! We are unable to stop it.  Shields...impulse, it's all failing!"

  "We seem to be dropping out of phase Captain..." Harry dialed in some calculations to his console... "Those ships are beginning to notice us."

  "Perhaps the Borg enhanced drive had the ability to conceal us some how.  Without power though...we'll be pulverized out here," Commander Chakotay voiced everyone's fears.

  It was almost impossible to navigate successfully without the ship colliding with some form of wrecked hull fragment...as massive debris started disintegrating against Voyager's deflectors.

  The Shadows of Z'ha'dum began to tear into the new arrival now without warning, radiating energy beams which easily penetrated Voyager's comparatively weak shielding.  Parts of her hull began to buckle as the vacuum of space began to suck in and collapse entire decks from pressure variances.  Radiation meters were off the scale, and no power was available to generate force fields as barriers to help contain the damage.  A complete hull separation was eminent.

  The turbolift doors opened and the bubbly Tellaxian stepped out with a large silver platter.  “Would anyone care for some old fashioned jelly doughnuts?”

  “Damn it Neelix, not now!”

  Janeway took a firm stance on the bridge, and had an idea.

  "Harry, are we within the planet's gravitational pull yet?"

  "Affirmative 'maam!" came his reply.

  "Engineering...Torres, cut impulse power.  Channel what you have left to the shields.  Maintain the front arcs as long as possible.  Do what you can with our emergency reserves to keep life support and critical ship's functions online."

  "We're going in."  Janeway moved toward the helm console.

  "Tom," Janeway placed an assuring hand on the pilot's shoulder.

  They were going down fast...hopefully She wouldn't burn up upon atmospheric re-entry.

  "Find a place to set her down..."

  But as the Voyager proceeded past the space holocaust, the ship's overtaxed sensors began displaying strangely anomalous readings.

  "Fascinating."

  Tuvok's voice sounded calm, even over the drone of numerous warnings and alarms blaring across the bridge. 

  "A gridular network of  'black pockets' are showing up over the irregularity and distortion on our sensors.  Their pattern is disturbingly familiar.  The computer is cross referencing them now."

  "Captain!" the alleged, unemotional Vulcan looked up from his science station horrified.

  "Analysis shows these abnormal readings are not 'empty', but pockets bounding infinite quantities of Pure Energy.  Absolutely Pure.  Their positions correspond directly to the ancient Druidic rituals and beliefs in so called 'lay-lines'.  There are known myths and references to this ring of dark practices in the ability to tap cosmic and forbidden energies beyond space/time.  In addition, there are now a series of iridescent globules of light appearing about the northern hemisphere as well as some rather immense seismic disturbances and electro-magnetic fluctuations in the planets' core."

  "Tuvok, can you focus the viewer on one of these 'pockets'?"  The hazed viewer's pixels zoomed in, revealing a small stone triangular dwelling erected beneath some monstrous steel monument.

  "Astrometrics to Bridge.  We are in deep shit."

  'What?' The slang comment was not normal for Seven.  Janeway allowed herself a split second of side bar inter-thought.  Was the unsurpassed peril of the present situation beginning to affect even her?  Something wasn't right.

  “Go ahead Seven!”

  "The anomaly we narrowly escaped from in the Delta quadrant has returned.  The energy waves emanating from the global hierarchy encompassing the planet below have the same signature readings.  As well, another infinite mass of vessels has appeared, and are converging around the disheveled myosphere.  Their position is precisely aligned with the gravimetric disturbances being emitted on a quantum level...space as we know it is collapsing in on itself."

  "Its power is intensifying." Tuvok glanced down, and up again from his scope.

  "Its?" Tom swiveled in his chair.  “You speak as if it was alive Tuvok.”

  "This is the opening to which I spoke of Captain...doorway to 'the other side'.  It is the gateway through which inconceivable things exist and flourish.  I can... feel... their presence...”

  One look at Tuvok and Janeway's next actions were clear.  "We need to go down there don't we?"

  "Time is of its essence..." he answered.

  "B'elanna, do we have power left for transporters?"

  "Barely Captain....It would be a one way trip!"

  "Make it happen... Chakotay, the bridge is yours, Tuvok, Harry, you're with me."  She made her way off to the turbolift with the named crew all the while Paris following the Vulcan's strides with a silent condescending stare.  

* * *  

Tuvok was the first to gather his senses as they materialized inside a stony passageway.  He was already scanning the area with his tricorder as Janeway pushed herself to her knees.  The vertigo and ringing in her ears had caused a momentary blackout.  Feeling as if caught in a deep sleep and suddenly jolted awake and ripped back to reality she strained to get a grip on her surroundings.  Shining her super-intense palm light beam in an arc across the cramped 4 1/2 foot high ceiling, she noted the preciseness of its architecture and glyphs on the walls.  Adjusting the rifle slung on her back she stood in an uncomfortable crouch. 

"Guess whoever built this place wasn't very tall...." mused Harry as he began scampering in the direction Tuvok was heading.  

'I am getting some strange readings up ahead...curious...I feel as if I have been here before."  As the group moved into an adjoining room a glowing pedestal of lighted crystals enlightened a misty pool of revolving images not entirely unfamiliar. 

Janeway looked stiff eyed into the cloud as B'elanna’s voice clearly could be heard by all in the chamber.  “Full power has been restored.”  

The scene was perfect as Voyager entered standard orbit around the familiar guise of the lush, green, class-M planet looking very much like Earth.  

Captain Janeway saw herself standing in the middle of the bridge, hands on her hips.... Proud of all they had accomplished in their explorations, Kathryn smiled as she looked over the bridge crew...throughout all of Voyagers' harrowing, yet incredibly marvelous encounters, 'She' had managed to bring them all safely back to port.  

The dawn of a new age ushered in as the endless night began to fade away and a spectacular sunrise rose up over the Terminator, lighting the room as if it was day and bathing the ship in a gleaming brilliance as a wide spectrum of colours danced about her magnificent hull like a Rainbow in the Dark.  

A communiqué seemingly broadcast from the planet below blurted itself onto the bridge... "Welcome home Voyager...it's been a long time...Welcome Home..." and to the astonishment of both Janeway and Harry, the Tuvok in the chamber gave a heightened brow as the Tuvok in the vapor mist quaintly managed the same gesture....

No longer did the interior corridors of Regula II look like that of a space station, but rather the innards of some unwholesome beast.  In place of bulkheads, power conduits and jeffries tubes were outgrowths of living material...walls of strange matter that pulsed as if it was alive and aware of their presence.

"Intriguing.  The corridors and rest of the station are not registering on my Tricorder...Picking up no life signs, although there are trace amounts of chronoton particles."

"That's our trail Mr. Tuvok," announced Kirk..."Let's follow it."

Deep into the bowels of the station Kirk, Sulu, Tuvok, and others of Excelsior's crew traveled. At times entry was difficult due to large amounts of secreted residue from the living walls and overhangs. 

As they descended into the dark labyrinth unaided by any torch, the maze was mysteriously lit by some unknown and unseen source.  The foul miasma of the air smelled of age and decay from the stench of untold decades, and coldness gripped the blighted atmosphere, causing them to shiver with every step as it leaked into their bones wanting to crush them like some unseen vice. 

Kirk's hairs stood on end as chills sent prickling sensations down his neck... nervously he crept forward, and soon a great room resembling some lost primordial Cave of Time came into view...gigantic murals loomed upon their confines, and assembled along their approach were ancient skulls and other bleached relics of decrepit life.  The hollow blackness of countless eye sockets watched their unsteady forms, staring unrighteously into their minds as if eluding sub-consciously some dark and violent deed about to befall them.

As they further continued their descent, pictures depicting figures with jackals heads assaulted their sight...first they thought the visions to be merely murals...but as they transgressed the chamber their motifs and indeed their hideous presence could even be felt. 

The site was not something ever meant to be seen by the sane.  Men with crocodile heads. Large hippopotami with human features.  Disgusting malformations with massive claws, and other repulsive creatures with razor honed fangs.  The five-headed beast overwhelmed Kirk's senses and he nearly lost consciousness.  The entire scene was entirely unnatural and unholy...

As the group ventured further inside circles and pentagrams lined the floors along with other hieroglyphic art.  They went down a great hall leading to a grand throne room of some sort.  Massive monoliths seem to stretch infinitely upwards.  Orbs, urns and other golden artifacts curiously covered with cryptical arabesques littered the chamber glittering from an incandescent light up ahead.

An awful stench rose up and hung within the accursed sanctuary...In the distance could be seen an altar on a raised dais, and bloodstains and runoff upon the stone craftsmanship hinted at unnamable sacrifices.

A giant stone sarcophagus also loomed in the dim light and next to which was a golden pedestal...and in the middle was the oracle they all sought after, a box, and on the sides of the box were hieroglyphs and symbols mostly unrecognizable with the exception of pictures depicting fish and other creatures of only the bottommost depths. 

Phantasmal images revolved about them, and some could be seen holding half eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness.  Some foamed and frothed at the mouth, and their abhorred gurgling sounds could clearly be heard.  Their frightful cacophony and unrest increased madly with rage, and the black air was alive with the cloudy semi-visible bulk of something else...something shapeless, abysmal and deceptive.  In the insanity now, an even darker apparition coalesced before them, ten times their size, with a yawning pit for a mouth attached to a trailing legless mass with enormously ribbed wings like that of some serpent of immeasurable evil.

Perhaps this was all a dream, but it was all so horribly real as their minds fought to interpret their visions.  Nothing could efface the sight and memory of these nighted crypts, these titan arcades, and these half-formed shapes of hell among these monoliths that stretched gigantically in silence...

And then they saw what frightened them even more so...a flaming column, spouting volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows in itself, and in all its brilliant intensity there lay no warmth but only the clamminess of death and corruption.

An azure bolt of energy lanced forth, striking Tuvok in the chest knocking him to the ground hard.  Surviving the attack, death would have been a blessing. The unfortunate and conscious Vulcan had a burning, gaping, hole blown straight through his mid section.  Not yet his time to expire, the oxygen in the Vulcan's starving brain kept him aware and alert as he reached though his cauterized, hollowed out body cavity attempting to fathom their ungodly predicament. 

Another intense burst of flame struck Kirk knocking him down and his flesh began to boil and his eyes stung as they melted shut.  The fiery pillared abyss of this netherworld was beyond hell, and his mind cowered in fear of eternal darkness.

Unable to speak or move, other beams of infinitely more intense energy began to take other members of the crew, vaporizing much of their liquid cell structure.  Their eyes popped like corn, and the force exploded what was left of their weak bodies like thick, chunky cans of soup.

Paralyzed with fear, Sulu looked to Kirk whose face was a charred mess, to his remaining crew with their dispirited stares and equally bleak faces…and amidst a suffocating sulfurous odor, he watched as Kirk with his seared lungs gave one loud, long and final scream of despair.

In the center of that which was From Beyond bread something amorphous and from it expulsed the incessant and insanely conjugated piping of flutes in mixed keys.

The Great Shadow was ultra-blackness in its deepest form.  A darkness to which no light could ever illuminate its infinite void...avenues of limitless night began radiating in every direction inducing flickering lighting, and making Shadows dance upon the walls.

Excelsior's crew succumbed to the madness...their minds conjuring up images grotesquely alien and utterly strange.  Throughout the vivid kaleidoscopic sights and sounds, the horrendous visions gave way to an even more horrible conception; that of absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless space.  They seemed to be within some convoluted mobius of disembodied space-time, floating voluminously with unknown entities forming indescribable shapes betwixt other inky jellyish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations of the piping flutes.

A sorrowful fear began to swell inside as all their minds groped, hoping there was an answer to the overpowering evil surrounding and threatening to erase their very existence.............. 

In the past, the human race had time, and time again persevered...In the face atrocity, and of insurmountable odds, always managed to adapt and overcome.... 

Not this time.

The cliché to which StarFleet was represented, 'To seek out new life and new civilizations' had finally encountered an Elder and future force from a forgotten dimension which would bind the Federation's explorers, and indeed all the races of space to the stars forever, and to the infinities and eternity's beyond them............

The fractal seething madness of Azathoth overwhelmed all senses and the essence of life itself.  To dream was to eternally lie in unreality, and cacophonous flutes piped unceasingly like some strange language of the mad as the growing insanity formed an eternal void of infinite darkness…

Mankind

The Universe

Obsolete

Erased

Extinct  

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