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.