I Am Risen

I • Am • Risen

The world is on fire.

Black flames rise and scream with horrendous agonized howls, spreading to every corner of a wretched, twisted, blackened globe. The fire is grotesque, like liquid night that scalds, hungrily ablaze.

Buildings fold in on themselves—inverted, bending lines that groan out in terrible pain. Wriggling worming tormented shadows of human beings are glimpsed in those half seconds before thorny tendrils snatch at them, impaling, grasping, pulling.

Midnight fire warbles in non-Euclidian geometries. Resonant symphonies made in un-sound notation ring out like some nightmare cathedral billowing it’s bells, but these notes scream and scream and scream, the very fundamentals of reality aglow in this awful terror.

An unending sky cracks with jagged shards like broken glass, like starving and diseased teeth; shattering downward to devour all of the Earth, all of forever..

Ocean waves curl upward and upward and upward, unnaturally colossal. Crimson waves shake and shudder and squirm with livid suffering from unseen slithering serpents.

All of the Earth is burning in black flame, rising and screaming, crumbling sanities cascading into unending dark pits.

I

AM

RISEN

Beneath, and Up Again

The dry season is hot, painstakingly and energy-sappingly hot. Even as the bloated, enormous golden disk sinks below a ragged horizon; syrupy heat wavers from bleak, cracked ground.

Endless, bone dry footprints left by vanished ghosts highway this way and that and there. This ground is scaly like dragonscales. Black, brick red, husked brown. Stranded lonely rocks lie in unhappy shadow beneath termite mound spires, pockmarked craters hissing with endless insect armies. Ancient remnants lie like collapsed cathedrals in all bleached bone glory, shrouded in the mists of twilight and the crimson dunes of time.

I wander this primordial expanse, wander it away from my diminutive tent beneath an endless sky richly black splashed by starlight older than the first conceptual organisms that once dwelled in simmering pools. I’m drunk on campfire smoke, on whisky that seems to burn harder than my dying firelight. I chuckle at jokes only I hear, and feel fingers in my hair from a Love very, very far away.

Something howls in the dark cliffs far away. How long have I been wandering? I am in a maze of shadows and curving eroded labyrinthine eternities, somewhere far away water gurgles in wet whispers down, down, down..

The crimson rock walls are wet now, covered in mossy growth, in gently swaying clover. Is that a breeze? Earthy scent fills my nostrils. Birdsong? Where is that light from, soft and pulsing, gently violet-orange, like sunrise and sunset at once..

When I exit the caverns, I look on in silence.

An Unlikely Pair: The Colossus and the Scout

Derros grumbled and Nastrea chuckled at him. They were both sweating in the sweltering, primeval heat. Insects, some as fat as a charcoal-colored chitin finger, orbited about their exposed skin along their heavy scaly armor. Angry sunlight stabbed between colossal tree trunks like glassy shards, wind tussling richly enshrouded trunks covered in mossy plated growths.

“Derros”, said Nastrea with a smirking laugh on her lips, “you seem like a hatchling, you know that? Pale as a weaver-worm freshly spurted from its-”

Derros interrupted. Irritated at the tall black woman, and also trying to hide his own laughter behind an unhappy expression.

“Would you hush up, you talkative squaking menace? I’m not sure what’ll drop me first: the predators, the parasites, the heat, or goddamn you!” Much to the young mans dismay: Nastrea burst further into laughter and clutched her stomach, wheezing in syrupy humid heat.

Derros sighed, wiped his brow. The young man was tall, but not as tall as his companion, and pale skinned. His lengthy curly hair was unruly. His armor was light and simple, fit for a scout to traverse the steaming jungle with ease. Nastrea on the other hand was tall and crowned by midnight dark hair, with vigilantly speckled green eyes. The woman’s armor was heavy, but organic with slick curves and tactical gear: ammunition cartridges, communications maintainers, chemical disperers, even a small active reactor that could be used for a rapid deployment vehicle or long term campsite. The pair trudged through the scraping forest floor.

As they walked, little did they know: they were being hunted. For deep in the shadows of the murky jungle, predators are abound always..

Lights, Action, and Relaxation

Late night tonight. I watched a lot of movies today, and relaxed, did my usual walk, picked up the house. Still feeling kind of sick, on and off. Tired. But relaxed. Happy. Excited for Mother’s Day, it’ll be really nice to hangout with my mom and my sister, do something enjoyable for my mom. She’s a really great woman. She works very hard for all that she has. I hope everybody had a good day today, whoever reads these, you crazy bastards. I can’t imagine I say anything very interesting, and I’m sorry I kind of ramble.

- your friend, Zachariah

The Murky Jungle

The air is hot, and putrid. Is this what Hell is like? Where every breath burns in your lungs, sickly sweet with syrupy humidity exhausting each inhalation? Where every movement of your body is like moving through sucking, enveloping water and submerged depths? Heat is unbearable. So fucking hot that sweat pours into my eyes with an unending flood as if I were crying hot tears and contorting the vividly green-black world around me into grotesque smears. Trying to wipe my forehead, or rub at my eyes, or move in the slightest beyond walking forward is a laborious, hellish effort that seems to increase the sweating tenfold. I’ve given up, stumbling through this jungle. It has to be hell. It has to be.

Hell is dim. Sunlight is swallowed up by the enveloping green inferno, murky blackness impaled by threatening glassy sunlight shards that appear to search for me as they wander in isolated breaks between foliage. When did I see the sky last? Is it night now?

When the chopper had crashed it’d seemed like a miracle so many of us had lived. Darren had said it was a blessing of good luck from boot camp, us fresh grunts alive and kicking to go kill Charlie in the jungle. I’d laughed at that. Banged up but alive, standing on the shore that we’d quickly come to the conclusion had to be Vietnam or Laos. No one had died. Radio didn’t work. With dumb, shit-eating grins on our faces and half wobbles in our march, we’d gone off into the jungle, idiots hungry for a fight. Darren and Jack, Conrad and Louis, Davie and Leonard, and lastly myself. Alive. Laughing, cracking jokes as flies ate us alive. No one seemed to understand that the joke was on us. A horrible, bloody, nightmarish fucking joke.

It is human instinct to know when you’re being hunted. It’s been only a geological blink of an eye to realize that up until relatively recently, Humanity was on the menu, hunted in the blackness and in the tall grass, sought after by terrible things of the sky, the sea, and the earth. It was only relatively recently when the night was banished by the flame, by electricity. It was only relatively recently when Man summoned God unto his life, clinging to the hope that distant angelic kingdoms could defend from the unspoken, primeval terrors. Hardwired into our bones and blood, in the neurons of your reptile brain: you know when a predator is near.

The fire had been flickering. It was the second, the third night? They all blend together now.. Sitting by the fire in silence because now it had been too long. Too long since we’d seen anyone, too long since we’d heard a fucking bird so much as rustle to shit.. Too long since anything but the shadows and the heat and the flies that didn’t stop even when you begged the Virgin Mary to so much as ebb the flow for a moment. Nothing. I had sat across from Leonard lost in my own thoughts as my brains boiled and simmered, and like some unreal dream, I’d watched Leonard simply be.. plucked into the air. Lifted. I watched it in slow motion. He was on his log there, until he wasn’t, until he was up in the air. A horrid obsidian barb like some nightmare thorn had speared him through his stomach, his mouth, his eyes. Lifted him up like a child would heft a doll. Deep crimson blood contrasted obsidian black chitin, and without so much as a whisper, Leonard vanished into swallowing foliage.

Conrad pulled screaming and begging and crying into the pitch-dark river water by tentacles thicker than a mans arm. For a single heartbeat I’d seen an ungodly shape there beneath that rippling surface before it settled into perfect, utter, unsettling stillness. Louis came later. Just vanished one night. Gone. Davie and Jack put bullets in their own heads that morning. Darren was snatched up into the canopy by something with shuddering crimson feathers and black curving jaws that blossomed open in horrible petals ringed by teeth.

I don’t know where we are. Silence rests here in such a complete and perfect dominion I can hear my blood pumping. I can hear the thrum of my own heart. There isn’t even wind. I can smell godawful sulfur and putrid, decaying something on the wind on the rare times it blows. Like smelling the circles of Hell themselves. It’s been an unnatural time since I have drank, yet I can still move, even as crippling thirst seems to pry at my insides. Hunger is the same. I feel.. something on my skin.. something growing on the places I can’t reach. When I rest, when so much as cease to walk for a second, even when I fucking stumble: I can feel it. Pulsing. Growing. When I vomit, I vomit black pools that seem impossibly thick, too much, too much..

I stumble. Electricity tingles up my spine. Hair prickles, skin ripples. I feel a terrible cold in my teeth, and a disgusting weightlessness in my stomach. Anticipation that makes my heart pound like some parasite crawling from my chest to my throat. That growth digs into the bones of my back with sudden, crippling pain.

It lets me see it, just this once, a delightfully terrible gift from hunter to hunted. Chitinous plates that flare and flex in the deathly scented breeze. Flexing clawed hands ending in thorny talons that can pry flesh from bone and sanity from mind. Flowering jaws opening in a hundred haunting petals, ringed by midnight-glassy teeth. Eyes burning with green fire seem to lurch up and out of slit-sockets.

Thinking, watching, hungering eyes.

Ask me anything? Does that even work on tumblr? Lol

Boring Saturday evening for me after picking up the house and having some nice dinner. Talk to me, if you’d like! Hopefully to post a story or two later tonight