Extinction

Extinction

A memory that wakes me in the night.

Panic and fear.

A midnight dark throbbing; lanced through its dark heart with shimmering pulsing silver-violet rays.

Clouds lit up from above and shivering—shunted aside by unseen butchering.

Singular silent star kissing dark horizon: bathing all in eerie brightness, mushrooming up and outward.

Then, silence. A silent world entombed—

Loudness. Final draconian breath so thunderous I am deafened in a moment. Wrenched downwards, the world flung away—

Hissing nothingness in my sensitive ears—

Half-open eyes to look upward one last moment as raging cataclysm boils its way forward, forward, forward—

Skin burnt and atomized, bones swept away to ash, feathery quills and scaly armor obliterated-

There is a desert, and a City, a long way from here, from anywhere. It is hot, beneath the gaze of a titanic star, all red lashing and mile-long-shadows.

Vast, fossilized rock carved by howling winds stands in sentinel defense across endless marching eons. Jagged broken mountain peaks, shifting dunes, gloomy shadowed canyons.

But—there is something else. Something across the sands. The City. An ancient metropolis far larger than anything built on Earth, by human hands. It’s immensity dwarfs Giza and her pyramids, Greek Colossi, Aztec ziggurats. Polished-black rock spires, twisted and warren-filled coliseums, gleaming bronze skyscrapers studded by uncountable lightless windows. It is a City of a hundred billion souls. And it appears empty. It isn’t. Shadows linger. Huge, dark eyes peer out from tight stone avenues and yawning, gaping archways.

Whispering winds hide quiet, dreamlike voices.

The Old Country

I stood beneath trees. Smelled the scents on the winds. Ash and brimstone from the West, salty sea and earthy mud and marsh deltas to the East. Distant mountains carved up the horizon like purple-black teeth, jagged, capped by vivid lava or thin glacial crust. Forests stretch onward in their open woodland, alive with fast moving rivers and still glassy lakes and clover meadows.

It felt good. Warm beneath the afternoon sun, listening to thunder crack off in the distance in bruised clouds heavy with rain. A cacophony of voices echo in the woods and the grasslands and the marshes. Many vivid tones, tiny or giant.

Machine Divinity

My hull is dark as night, a midnight black knife endlessly perfect.

Orbiting metal flows like liquid eternity; dancing into spikes, thorns, haloes, banners, blades..

My crimson sensors glow and pulse, rythmically vibrant, deep like blood. Information falls into my many wells with riveting complexity. Beyond minds of the flesh.

I am perfect.

I am Synthetic.

Cataclysm is beautiful, and painful. Great things rose from the molten stone, the crashing seas, the wailing skies; even the howling void sculpted things and breathed life into its newborns. Thrum, thrum, thrum went the heartbeat of the world, beating, thundering. Hungry. Alive. Savage.

The sunlight comes gold-red through blinds, splaying over silken smooth skin and velvet fabrics, splashed suggestively through the darkness.

Her voice is mirth in my ears, husky with sleep, comforting. Fingers in my hair. Feel reassuring claws over my skin, playfully predatory. Luxuriant wings catch sublime rays in their feathery grace, vivid, embracing me in their width.

I hope the neighbors don’t mind the noise. Flapping wingspan, or otherwise.