Shadows Out of Time

Malygris Never Died JOHN R. FULTZ

“What know ye of Malygris?”

— Clark Ashton Smith

Sages of the ancient world transcribed many legends regarding the infamous Malygris of Poseidonis. In the golden age before the final remnant of Atlantis sank beneath the waves, the glory of Malygris spread far and wide. According to various written accounts mostly lost to history now, the wizard inhabited an onyx tower that cast its shadow over the bright domes and temple-gardens of the Atlantean capitol. Slaves from the royal courts delivered monthly tributes of gold, ivory, and precious rarities to the sanctum of Malygris, overlord of kings and sorcerers.

Malygris held mastery over the spirits of the upper air and the lower earth, commanded solar and lunar demons, and established his dominance over the living and the dead. No magician of the ancient world could rival him at the peak of his powers. Yet legends say that he grew miserable in his wickedness, set apart from humanity by his exalted conjury. Eventually the demon of Loneliness overpowered even his ravenous lust for knowledge. All human beings shunned him and feared to walk in the shadow of his tower. So Malygris stayed locked in his lofty sanctuary for decades, his only company that of summoned imps, wraiths, and the occasional conjured daemon.

After centuries of supernatural existence, old Malygris finally died sitting in his great chair of ebony and crystal. Yet his sorcery lived on after his death in the form of the unearthly spirits that guarded his tower-tomb against thieves and looters. There was no relief for the longsuffering Lords of Poseidonis when they heard tale of the wizard’s demise, for even in death the terror of Malygris persisted in their hearts. The Tower of Malygris rose above the city like a titan gravestone. No embalmer came to apply the treatments of death to the withered corpse of Malygris. It sat rotting in its high seat for many years. Eventually the ocean swallowed the last fragments of Atlantis. Tidal waves rushed in to drown the streets and gardens of Poseidonis, and the cursed tower crumbled with the rest of the capitol. Malygris, like his legendary kingdom, was finally gone from the earth.

Or so the stories tell.

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.

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.

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.

A third time he leaped into the spinning earth-sphere, possessing the body of a soldier in some far-future war. The world seemed to explode with fire and thunder as he crouched in a muddy trench with his fellow warriors, clutching a rifle in his fists. Malygris determined to fight his way out of this war, something that should be easy with his knowledge of sorcery. When the time came to charge the enemy, he went “up and over” with the rest of the boys, only to take a bullet in the forehead after five steps.

Once more his bodiless consciousness slipped outside of time and space.

Again he dove into the timestream. And again, and again.

There was no way to control when and where his consciousness emerged each time. Perhaps the Yithian could have done this, but the remnants of its mind were still as damaged as that of Malygris. Malygris’ hunger for a living body and a return to glory in the physical world consumed all other visions now. Nylissa and the pleasures of her love were forgotten things.

Malygris dreamed only of conquest.

Each time he landed in a body unsuited to his purposes, he committed suicide and began again. Over the course of history, pre-history, and future history he appeared in ten thousand different bodies, and some of these bodies succeeded in building bloody empires. He became a Lord of Ancient Babylon, plotting to murder rivals and gaining a reputation as the greatest sorcerer of that age. Yet mortality caught up with him, and his Babylonian body died of some nameless disease without a cure.

Another empire he formed in a later millennium, after inhabiting the body of an up-and-coming dictator who set about conquering most of Europe. Massive organized slaughters unfolded at his whim, with entire races routed and scrubbed from the earth. All of the decadent pleasures and sadistic rituals of that dark empire stemmed from the twisted mind of Malygris, yet none who followed his orders, none who worshipped his cruelty as that of a living god, ever heard his true name. Sometimes even he forgot his true identity, lost in the depravities of conquest and its carnal spoils until his nightmares reminded him. In the end, he grew tired of this charade and the dictator committed suicide.

Haunted by dreams of golden Atlantis, Malygris longed to return to his origins. Yet he might as well seek to find a needle inside a haystack. Again he inserted himself into history, using his stolen bodies to study ancient texts and improve his mastery of sorcery. His goal now was to master the flow of time so he might return to his home in Atlantis. This dream became his chief obsession, though another thousand lifetimes failed to bring him there.

He was a tribesman, leading his people to slaughter their peaceful enemies. He was a murderer whose crimes fostered their own gory legend in the cities of Europe. Once he inhabited a beetle-like body common to the race that would inherit the earth long after mankind had exterminated itself. Inside the insect bodies of this distant future he sensed the familiar minds of the Yithians, who had transferred the consciousness of their entire populace into this future race to avoid their own prehistoric extinction. Recognizing Malygris as some kind of temporal contagion, they ejected him from the timestream by tearing his host body to bits.

In another era he became a devious clergyman, trapped in the stolid halls of a great religion that he corrupted with sadism and demonology. He inhabited pirates and scientists, inquisitors and slaves. He lived the lives of peasants and royalty, primitives and futurists, sailors, bankers, artists, and politicians. Once he inhabited the body of a writer whose tales of bleak cosmic truths were regarded as fiction, yet whose ideas permeated global consciousness. Time and again he founded death-cults and fostered murderous rebellions steeped in carnage. He turned hopeful futures into miserable dark ages, venting his spite on mankind both personally and globally.

There is only one constant that marks the appearances of Malygris throughout past and future histories: Corruption, violence, and destruction follow wherever he goes. Every life lived, every death endured, has only worsened his malevolence. He is a blind specter now, reaching into the world at random times and places. A curse upon humanity. His obsession has shriveled into a hatred for all that lives. Cruelty and death herald his unpredictable visitations. The course of history has been warped to wear the bloody scars that Malygris makes upon it.

In every culture, every time and age, there are legends about a spirit of evil that inflicts suffering on mankind. The names of this entity vary from nation to nation, from religion to religion, from era to era. Yet the darkness never fails to return. Another empire rises, built on the trampled bones of the innocent. Great men are devoured by corruption, world leaders become murderous despots, smiling youths become serial killers. Mothers strangle babes in their cribs, fathers slaughter their loved ones like cattle. Quiet strangers go on killing sprees.

The true name of all these evils is Malygris. He can be anyone at any time. He may be hiding behind the gentle face of someone you know. You might have already pledged your loyalty to him. Or killed in his name.

I tell you this because knowledge is knowledge.

Let someone else carry the burden of it.

Malygris lives.