Musings Of A Space Trucker

Musings of a Space Trucker

It’s relaxing, doing what I do. Pick up cargo on distant relays, popping by ‘stations and lighthouses. Half the time, drones intercept my course with cargo, and we’re slingshotting off to the next drop off.

It’s relaxing. Beautiful. Lonely in a.. blissful sort of way. I sit, read, listen. My ship flies herself with prowess and grace, a trillion tons of hyperstrong glass, synth-chitin dark as midnight waves. Engines with hungry obsidian as black hole energies ripple and dance. I carry enough food to feed a thousand solar systems, enough bullets to fell a hundred billion soldiers, enough ore to build fifteen dyson shells.

Cargo hallways and storage spaces so vast they have their own silent, ghastly weather. Repair bays that could build cities with a flick of a lightscreen. Matter-weavers, forging cathedrals. On and on. A ship so immense she can drag comets and asteroids and half-worlds into looping, unsteady orbits. When we arrive in a System, our warptrail shines like a violet-crimson Star. Beautiful.

I love my job.

New York City; City of Ruin

Can you imagine how New York City must feel? Obliterated by asteroids. Swarmed by zombies. Vaporized by aliens. Infested by humanoid cockroaches. Ground Zero for the New World Order and Capital of the Kingdom of Earth. Devastated by giant monsters. Plagued with pterosaurs roosting at the Statue of Liberty. Frozen by flash ice ages. Crumbled by colossal tsunamis.

The toughest thing to kill on Earth is truly the New Yorker.

Stone Footsteps

Were these my footsteps once?

They are smooth and graceful. Three-toed strides that move purposefully across a muddy wetland. Evenly spaced talons made cool by afternoon waters.

Did I walk here, in a time long before this body’s first breath?

A gorgeous lake, expansive and dark with deep water, ringed by enormous trees so high they felt like wooden mountains in their own right. Scaly bark plastered with brilliantly bright new flowers and damp moss and tussling clover. A ground crisscrossed by ferns and horsetails, yet alien—without grass..

Have I rested here, in time before?

Watching golden sunrise arch over purplish-pink dawn, gaudy brilliance sprawling naked over still waters. Hearing the droning insects and cacophony fliers, vividly colored like flapping banners. Swimming bodies foreign as they slip beneath silent waves, softy aglow at night; eerie phantoms dancing on the lakebottom.

Was I joined here, who else visited this place?

Giants so might they shook the earth with behemoth footsteps, who made thunder with their cataclysmic voices. Sweeping necks and tails that supported the sky on atlas-backs. Horned-faces and their warpaint frills, tossing knightly heads this way or that, grizzled beaks chomping. Armored tanks slow, dim, but noble in their ignorance; clubbed tails wagging gently in muggy afternoon feedings. A din of squabbling runners in their vain feathery coats, jittery dancing along the shoreline with their woodland gossip. Marching nomads from the north, big like hills, moving in herds melodiously billowing.

Goddamn dude lol.

Plucking Soap-bubbles

Do you ever have a thought in your head, these flashes of things you can see, and they just linger? Over and over. This vivid kernel I can just.. pluck out of the dark, expand and contract it, make it real. But every time I’m close, every time I’m there, I’m missing something when I get close.

Eater of Kings, Phantom Tyrant

Lightning flashes harshly in the sky, throwing angry illumination over bare rock and steep canyon walls, bristling in bruised thunderhead bellies.

Far below the river is oily, turbulent, pumping angrily down its vein like rotten earthly blood to distant stagnant arteries.

Furious howls erupt on the cliffs above: two titans are at war.

Tyrannosaurs. Living walls of cataclysmic predation, both nearly sixty feet long. Their screams are far beneath the audible range for humans—no, these creatures throw sonic earthquakes at each other in challenge—sound so groundshakingly loud as to make bones quake, rattle.

Their immense bodies dance in gravity-defying quickness: eagle grace made draconian in scope. A ritualistic gladiatorial cacophony with stomping feet, smashing tails, crunching jaws.

One is dark as midnight. Smooth but armored hulk an almost grotesque obsidian, slashed by mulchy blood red stripes down heaving flanks. Gnarled, thorny quills proceed down his ancient spine. Endless scars, each more horrific than the last, etched on that grizzled keratin muzzle. He is old. Old as the righteous thunderstorms, old as the badlands dust storms and swampy marshes. He is the Eater of Kings, an ancient rogue known to devour his foes, his wasteland den marked by countless Tyrant corpses..

The other is pale white, a living predatory phantom. She is marked by her own parade of near-killing blows and would-be-deaths from snout to tail tip. A singular, muscular forelimb hangs beneath her barrel-chested form. Her remaining eye burns angrily in its sunken socket, disturbingly watchful—and aware. She is the Phantom Tyrant. Killer of the warlords of the swamp, eradicator of the jungle fiefdoms. She is a living testament to prehistoric regicide.

Thunder smashes in roiling sky, eager for blood and brutality.

Jaws lock, teeth splintered into broken shaprnel clattering onto bleached ground, formidable meathook claws slashing at fortified flesh. Bodies slam against one another like living battering rams, caving bone into muscle, and rupturing organs; blood flowing from mouths as if they were some horrendous gothic fountains..