A clear night on Planet Pygar. No sandstorms, no earthquakes. Only the sound of sirens and alarms. A cool breeze passed over the Gardener's armored body while he focused, a ghostly jade thread in his hand. Though he had long since foregone the need to breathe, he made the motions of taking a deep breath before he looked up to the sky. Beautiful fractal waves marked the edges of a hole torn in the atmosphere, and through it the deep dark of space became a background for the Nomad invasion force.
Ishtars rained thick columns of pink and purple energy onto settlements and fleeing civilian shuttles. Swarms of Rabisus and Adads flitted around the sky, mauling interceptors as they approached or fled, whichever their broken hearts could bear to do. The atmosphere ignited with a brilliant orange hue as the remains of Corfu plunged through it, burning in reentry. The Gardener turned his head lazily to the other side, where wings of Anzus escorted the Cruiser Mafdet in a plunge, similar to Corfu's. The jade thread pulled taut.
The ground slid rapidly beneath his feet as the jade thread twitched from invisible forces. A man, alone, desperate, fought against ground forces at the entrance to a large cave. The gateway to a settlement. Spectres, like Gardener was, hybrid Infiltrators built to shed the confines of the human body and perfect the art of war, approached him from all angles as he fired his sidearm, desperate to hold him back. Who was he? What was his fate? The jade thread threatened to snap, but with a wave of his hand, time reversed a few minutes. Black fog leaked from the Gardener's body, and from it crawled hoards of pale-skinned women, covered in obsidian-like glassy protrusions. This time, they joined the slaughter on the ground. Their attacks were not enhanced by plasma. The wounds they inflicted did not cauterize.
A man, alone, desperate, fought against ground forces at the entrance to a large cave. The gateway to a settlement. Shadowy, beast-like women ripped and tore through any human they spotted. Every round he fired blew great chunks out of their unarmored bodies, and their tar-black blood mixed with the red blood of humans that were flowing down the street. Distant shockwaves rocked the city as Corfu and the Mafdet impacted the planet. From the marbled pools of blood at his feet, pale hands of the once-slain invaders sprung up, grabbing the man by his ankles. He tried to pull away but was quickly mesmerized by a new sight in front of him.
A Rabisu had embedded itself in the ground nearby, and crystalline growths plunged into the planet's surface and sprouted upwards. A flower with fanged petals shot upwards as the breath was sucked from all witnesses. The Gardener felt what the man felt, freefalling through unending geometric structures. Their illusory universe was cradled gently in the hand of a doll, who looked down on them with cold indifference. The man froze in fear as he relived the battle he was fighting moments ago, but instead of the shadow-clad women, it was simply an endless multitude of that same doll.
And then he wasn't there. He was walking the surface of Pygar hours? days? from now. Crystaline growths stretched into the sky, welcoming the alien swarm as they flowed in and out of the cave. Endless numbers of that doll simply watched him walk across the ruins of his home, past the decaying bodies of friends and family. Only when he couldn't move anymore did the doll react, with only a simple, inquisitive tilt of her head. The moon re-angled itself in the sky, and the man remembered that Pygar didn't have a moon. Looking towards it, he saw it was an eye. An unfathomably massive eye, belonging to a proportionately sized copy of the doll, looking down through the atmosphere, down at him specifically.
The man snapped back to reality. The hands holding him had ossified. He pulled against them, but he was encased in stone. From the bloom of the flower stepped one singular copy of the doll. Her voice was soft, silken, and caring as she reached towards her victim, holding him delicately.
"Rest, now. Death's embrace holds all."
The air chilled in an instant, as invisible cuts diced the man into neat little cubes.
At this, the jade thread snapped into a thousand jagged gemstones, and Gardener was snapped back into a high-security room at Basel Rock. His trance concluded, the jade thread slowly reformed, solidifying into the timeline he was already in. He was approaching the next step in his plan. Things were almost perfect, but there seemed to be a lynchpin holding him back. Was it a machination of Harbinger? Or, perhaps, some key that he had missed? Perhaps, even, impossibly so, some other schemer, some human has come to understand his plans, the future he is creating, and has found the wisdom and understanding to be able to stop it?
Nonetheless, this outcome was pleasing. Repeat a lie enough times, and it will become the truth. Even if the one you are telling it to is the fabric of reality.
