him. Immature in its own right, it must simply go along with him.) While for his part Shaitan felt merely uneasy, as a result of his parasite's concern.
As fate would have it, he crested the mountains in that hour when all that remained of the sun was a spoked wheel of pink and yellow light fanning the southern horizon, and so felt no discomfort. And the gradually developing thing inside Shaitan, which was now irreversibly part of him, relaxed somewhat. For after all, it could feel the power of its host and knew that he was strong.
And as twilight turned to night, Shaitan saw the flickering fires of hunters where they camped on the flank of the mountains. While down on the Sunside levels, the glowing fires of their camps and settlements lit the night in all directions, as far as his eyes could see. Their tribes were legion!
And in his heart Shaitan was glad, believing that at last he had found true men upon whom to impose his will...
The Sunsiders as a race of men were still recovering from the Grey Hole's holocaust, which had reshaped their 'Earth', realigned its orbit, and redesigned its geological features. They were recovering from earthquakes and tidal waves, from seasons of torrential rains and whirlwinds of black frozen ash (which in another world might well have been termed 'nuclear winters'), and from other seasons which had baked half of the planet to a desert while the other half lay cold and wasted, mainly under frozen oceans. But as a race they were recovering, and gradually rebuilding their decimated numbers.
Upon a time: 'Earth' had had continents, oceans, islands, seasons of winds, sun, rains, snow. It had species galore, and a quarter billion of people. They had the wheel, used fire and sails, experimented with rudimentary medicines and coarse chemistry. While gunpowder had not yet been discovered, still they understood the basic elements of the forge and of metalworking; they had metal tools, and the crossbow for hunting. And all in all theirs had seemed a bright future, whose explorers sailed out across the seas in wooden ships to seek new lands.
But that was before the Grey Hole. And now, seven hundred or more years later, in the time of Shaitan? This is what the Sunsiders - less than thirty thousand of them now - knew of their world: That it had been ravaged of most of its species along with its peoples, and might well be considered dead except in that temperate zone whose spine was the barrier range of mountains between Sunside and Star-side. And in their legends (which were confused and contradictory, because the written form of their language had been at best basic and was lost in the aftermath, so that history had become a thing passed down immemorially by word of mouth), the scourge which had visited itself upon them to destroy their world had become synonymous with a forbidden place on Starside known only as 'the Gate to the hell-lands'.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
And the legend was this: that one night a strange 'white sun' had appeared in the southern skies ... a portent of terrible times in the offing!
At first it had seemed to move slowly, like a comet, then more swiftly, and finally in a rush like a bar of white light where it speared down out of space to glance off the moon and blaze across the surface of the world! But as it fell to earth so it shimmered and shrank, until it skimmed across the land like a huge flat stone bouncing on water; and at last it thudded down into a crater of its own making, on a world gone mad by reason of its coming. Not a shooting star or a comet, no, but a Force far greater than these whose occurrence in Nature is mercifully rare: a Black Hole which had eaten itself, until only the event horizon remained. A Grey Hole now, and a bridge between universes.
In any case, such science was beyond the people of this world. To the handful of stumbling, stunned survivors it was sufficient - and more than sufficient - that a deadly white sun had fallen out of the sky and destroyed everything they had known, leaving them and their descendants to live through a sort of hell for more than two and a half centuries. Until eventually, as the planet's orbit stabilized and its climates polarized -however dramatically - all that was left