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..

Thunder in the distance

Rain falls down from leaded skies between colossal trees, thick entangled branches. Wet moss and dripping, vibrantly green clover sways in slight breezes that whisper here, here, here. Slick muddy earth richly black against red-brown bark and vivid greenery. My three-toed talons sink into the softly sucking, cool mud with infinite balance. My steps are swift and elegant, naturally quick in organic movement.

Disembodied symphonies fill my sensitive hearing. Footsteps miles away from a Leviathan, ten thousand years old and nearly a thousand feet long, moving like a living mountain. I can hear the breeze moving through the rooted trees upon its ancient back. I can hear migratory herds hooting and calling, singing with millennia aged durges about the sky, about important rivers, about familiar nesting sites.

I am quiet. My vocalizations resound like thunder. Felt in the chest and in the bones of friend or foe alike. But for now, I am quiet. My jaws open and close, sampling the air, obsidian railroad-spike-teeth glistening with condensation wetness.

Somewhere far away, thunder rumbles.

Notice Operations

Until further notice, IDS-47 through IDS-219 are closed for ontological maintenance. All staff should avoid these areas until further notice, and should continue to be diligent about any unpredictable or unprecedented activity within range of the containment sites. Non-compliance will result in immediate termination via patrolling IDS-security systems.

Thank you for your cooperation.

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.

Hate of the Fossil God

I am furious.

My hide is black as night, carved with scales like iron and feathers like blades, glowing in negative illumination from ten thousand fires.

My talons are scythes, clawing at the angry metallic insects that dare oppose my movement; petulant fireflies that barely sting. Petty creatures I swat into oblivion or swallow by my cavernous lungs.

My tail crumbles metropolises like an earthquake topples termite mounds: shimmering glassy cascades that shatter into dust and cataclysm. Such childish things, so fucking minuscule!

My jaws scream in hatred, yawn open forever, fangs that could puncture the greatest of steels brought to bear. My scream is supersonic, hateful down to its core, so strong as to make a million tiny naked apes deaf in seconds. Crimson lightning howls from my fossilized throat.

Ships dangle upon my thorny quills, skyscrapers crushed within my clawing fingers, armies pulverized beneath my steps.

This was my world once. Primordial and free of a crawling infestation. Trees that towered a mile into endlessly cloudy, storming thunderheads. Lifeforms ancient and graceful that dwarfed even me..

Gone.

I have slept too long.

Did these infernal meddlers destroy my precious Garden? Did they ruin all I held dear..?

I am furious.

I will make them pay.

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