An Unlikely Pair: The Colossus And The Scout

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..

Canadian dinosaur coins, how awesome!

Night of the Metal Trees

I am lost.

I stand, unsure, afraid. Unfamiliar light and painful sounds and rushing motion blare at me with an unnatural malice.

I turn and turn and turn, slashing with claws and snapping jaws, quills raised, iron feathers shivering.

Where am I?

My vastness dwarfs such tiny glassy-metal trees, but I am fearful, and step uncomfortably, slipping, careening into painful metallic thorns. My calls do not bring familiarity, my connection to the Earth severed and dull.

Is this Uhan, the Bleak Underworld? Or something else..?

I scramble, limping, howling.

Running.

Sunset at Dawn

Time is changing.

Things waver like heat rising off of distant highway asphalt. They shiver and shudder, mirages in the desolate desert, before vanishing.

Cities melt in on themselves, warping beneath Gods’ gaze, disheleved and surreal, glassy dreams crashing without sound. Highways buckle to dust. Swallowed by hungry earth. Monuments vanish with furious whispers as history is rewritten under an unending tide of revision. For heartbeats—for moments—the Earth shudders beneath paradoxical floods, human history and construct devoured by nightmarish blur.

And then: change. Birth. Colossal woodland seems to warble into the timeline melody with vigor. Wet greenery. Enormous trees hundreds of meters tall, centuries old, armor-plated bark crisscrossed by slippery clover, dripping moss. Soil dark as midnight, alive with scent, moving as living things course inside. Forgotten mountains blossom like stony flowers, topped by monumental glaciers or vivid lava flows down shadowed sides; visages turned real from this ethereal fog. Angry rivers pulse through reinvigorated channels; rebirthed by new waters. Valleys crag from split earth, swamps and marshes millions of years dried once again humidly infernal.

Life. Creatures once again. Beings big and small. Armored in scales, adorned in feathers. Titanic structures of black stone thrown up at the sky, thorny, and imposing. Crimson light hums, throbs, glows.

Humanity lies in fragments. Quiet and enthralled. Afraid. Night comes, speaking in a million animal languages. Gifted new breath from fossil tombs. And electric minds dance, electricity and glass, electricity and glass..

Dinosaurs on the Brain

I have dinosaurs on the brain. That’s a bit silly, isn’t it? But I swear: I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel their breath, their movement when they pass by. I can hear their rumbling and chirping and crying and howling, feel their knightly armor or exotic feathery-tuft. I can sense their passage; swift and quick or slow and graceful.

At the library, on the way home, at the park, at the restaurant: I have dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel things like the unseen breeze. I watch them amble down packed highways, or stride along crowded beaches. Softball games dont phase them, cookouts neither. Graduations are just another boring shindig for the dinosaurs on their way. Hooting movie theaters dont scare them away either, not one bit.

So here I sit on my front porch under the summer night sky, beneath stars the dinosaurs wouldn’t recognize, in a neighborhood crowded with houses and metal stumps we funnily call cars. The dinosaurs don’t mind. Not at all. Their never-ending August goes on, gorgeous and unreachable, primeval paradise in all its savage, strange, stinging reality.

I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. Really, it’s true.

Beneath

I never thought about what Aunt Lily did in her basement, or why she went down their so often. You’d be surprised what you don’t notice when you’re young and there’s a big sprawling tv screen clear as any window and you’re up in the countryside with ponds to splash in, woods to play in. You don’t notice when the adult your with—especially someone as lovely and kind and fun as Aunt Lily—disappears for several hours at time. You just don’t notice.

Then I got a little older. While now I had a phone, and a game system I could carry in my backpack, I started to get a little.. bored. The pond seemed dinky and tiny. The woods were hot, filled with too many bugs too eager to nip and bite.

And I started to notice Aunt Lily disappearing. I noticed how bare her lovely country home seemed. Few pictures or artworks, just a bit furniture.. It was like Aunt Lily didn’t really do much other than spend time in her basement. And by the time she finished it was only an hour of tv or so with me before she was snoring away.

It’d be always been a kind of unspoken rule between us to not go into the basement. I wasn’t a fussy kid, and didn’t break rules: so why would I just barge down there? Aunt Lily was obviously busy on something, so by right could I go on and barge in, disrupt her? As a kid, the thought seemed impossibly rude, nearly sacrilegious.

Now, things seemed different. I noticed how Aunt Lily had numerous solar panels on the roof and even three churning turbines like odd, white trees on the hillside. I noticed how sometimes the power seemed to fluctuate, oddly. I noticed how far away Lily lived from everything, even in the country; easily a four hour drive, two of which seemed only dirt roads deep in redwood country..

By the time I was eighteen and spending a last summer there before college; I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

What the fuck was Aunt Lily doing down there?

One night she went to bed. Tired as always after our of tv and some supper, she kissed my cheek and ruffled my hair before climbing the steps. As soon as I heard her door close my heart began to race. My skin tingled. Thoughts raced. I waited fifteen, twenty minutes. Just to be sure.

The basement door was colossal, and heavy. Metal like something out of a laboratory or security room, not a dainty little wood entrance. The stairs went down into a hallway, and onward.

To where?

I descended. Heart thrumming with intensity. The hallway seemed to go on for moments, smoothly carved black rock with soft but discernible lights carved at equal distance. I noticed how strangely tall the ceiling was, how wide the walls were from another. Almost like a hospital..?

I waked for five, ten minutes. It seemed longer.

The room was large. Larger than the entire house above it, easily twice or double that, maybe more. Dark electric blue-black light played over the slick, sterile surfaces. Bulbous machines seemed to line the walls in rows, like twisted glassy-synthetic plants from some otherworldly oasis. Scientifc instruments and mechanisms sprawled along the tables and islands, files in open piles.

What the fuck was she doing down here?

I noticed the hatchery.

A singular, bowl-shaped placement the width and breadth of a dinner table covered by a glass top. Within was a bedding of grass or moss, and a thin fog seemed to trail within.

There were eggs. Easily twenty, thirty eggs. Maybe more. The smallest were seemingly normal chicken-sized eggs, ovular and grey. Then.. there were the others. Eggs thin and lengthy, with leathery coatings, which seemed to softly breathe. Round, ball-shaped eggs with dark splotched coverings in bizarre patterns. Skinny almost tubular eggs tinted a rich, almost creepy bluish purple.

A singular camera or watching device dangled from the glass dome, gently swiveling, ever observant.

Was Aunt Lily some kind of farmer..? A really weird, underground chicken breeder?

When my hand touched the cool glass, a digital printout sprang to life under my fingertips, outlining the egg in a soft virtual outline. Temperature readings, internal diagnostics, likelihood of hatching within a certain timeframe..

But what caught my attention were the species names.

Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Triceratops Horridus.

Allosaurus Fragilis.

They were dinosaurs. And in that moment, I understood.