A bridge of brass spanned the interior of this brightly lit sphere of platinum-gilt star metal, the brass worked into the interior of the sphere as blazing oversized suns accompanied by streaking comets of platinum, majestic nebulas of burnished silver, radiant with the vibrant glower of the imperishable stars.

The star metal platform he stood upon, above the span-wide gap in the floor from which he had just emerged, was three spans across, and disc-shaped.

A like disc awaited, some sixty paces across the glittering bridge of brass, it’s rails terminating in steel spikes, it’s planks of drawn brass wire held rigid in a dusky wrought iron frame.

Beyond the sixty paces of glittering bridge framed in black against the riotous backdrop of the inner celestial sphere formed to replicate the center of a galaxy in wonderfully exaggerated abstraction, was a marble platform, before a great gossamer-hung doorway, behind which seemed to sparkle a sunlit world of soft morning, indistinct yet maddeningly compelling.

Before the gossamer-shrouded doorway of some two-by-two spans sat an ivory throne. Upon the ivory throne sat a jackal-headed giant of ebony hue, glossy to the point of unreality, yet his eyes burned with a sentient, sapphire light.

Phane stopped, expanded his chest with a deep breath, regarding the large being with a narrow gaze as the nimbus upon is head cooled to a clear blue and then blazed like an angry moon when the creature stood from the throne to tower ten feet high, a sickle-sword in its mighty right hand and a stone-headed mace in the shape of a scarab in the other. The jackal-headed giant stalked forward onto the bridge, making its steel-pointed rails shake like so many leaves of death.

The man picked up his pace, running towards his own seeming destruction as the jackal-headed thing yipped and strode to meet him with a great downward sweep of the sickle sword, against which the running man cast his cape, detached at the neck, whipping downward, as he broke stride and bounded back with one switch step. Then, as the sickle-sword whistled past center he lunged forward, high-stepping onto the great right knee and failing to strike with his sword, instead pushing down with hand and hilt upon the great black elbow and causing the forehand that wielded that reaping blade to be impaled upon two ink-streaked spearheads.

For the jackal man bled black—and bled gushingly again as he was momentarily pinned to the railing top and the aor, a hand wide at the base, tapering to a needle point at the half-span terminus of its length, plunged into the right kidney of the godlike beast, which yelped like a mournfully stricken bell ringing out at the end of Time.

Phane ran on, not looking back as the mortally wounded titan sought to free its cruelly spiked sword-arm with its hammer hand and its life left in a torrent from its pierced side.

By the time Phane was upon the opposite platform, wiping the black blood from his mighty aor with a cape that now seemed to the listener to be made of some uncommon stuff, the dirge of a stuttering immensity sounded like a dying, pillar-sized chime and the entire bridge quivered with the unworldly death rattle.

Upon the throne now sat a scale like priests use to weigh the hearts of sacrificed supplicants before the altars of bloody Greth. The man stopped and regarded the scale, shrugged his shoulders, and walked on past the ivory throne on the right. There the scale remained awaiting some measure unoffered.

Through the gossamer veil the man strode arrogantly, the nimbus about his head indistinct in the dawning light, going less wary than a bull into a pen of cows.