Titans of Chaos

Odd. What were those tetrahedrons doing here? Each face of the tetrahedrons was made of afive-dimensional plane of time-stuff. Beyond, I saw gravity-lights, refracting the time-shining intofour rainbows, which formed, in turn, into many-branching shapes like towers of coral, each angleof which held an interlocking group of hypercube-crystalsfor an edge, reaching long arms intowhirlpools of neutrino-heavy ideograms made of paper-thin five-dimensional thought-energy.

Shock, pain. The shell passed over and into the space I occupied, bypassing the three-dimensionalarmor, smashing me flat again.

Instead of jumping away from Trismegistus, I jumped at him. The shell went off when I was onlytwo meters from him, and a hot poker of pain went through my shoulder, down my lungs, hip, tail,and out the other side of me.

The music cut into my wings and tail. I smelled my own blood burning, and I fell,three-dimensional again, to the deck. I did not feel the pain just yet. But I could not feel my rightarm either.

Trismegistus had to pull all his mass back into the shape he wore, the small shape, because themusic burning me was going off so close to him. Colin grappled him for a moment, biting into hisneck veins with an unenthusiastic sort of chomp.

During that moment, Victor, our human-size Victor, dressed in a skintight cloth of metal foil,popped out of a coffin-shaped slot or hangar in the tail of the dead dragon body. He was facelessand eyeless, his visage merely a blank mask of bony substance. He reached back inside with a rayof magnetism and manipulated some control. The guns lining the back and sides of the dragonswiveled to cover Trismegistus, and opened fire.

Colin rolled away from Trismegistus and put his hand somehow through and inside me withouttouching me, plucked out the deadly music with his hand. That saved my life, though it did notstop the pain or internal bleeding.

The music-thing looked like a scorpion made of fire in Colin's hand. He threw it at Trismegistus.

The barrage of various heavy weapons lining the dragon armor, now that Trismegistus could notstep sideways into the fourth dimension, could hurt him.