/ Malfunction

——/ malfunction

Q: specify

A: unauthorized symmetry firing/perimeters unsafe

/////— {X} Signature detected

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{X} Signature overloading theomatrix substrate/containment procedure failing, ONYX-SECURITY SOLUTION: online

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.

I was something, once

A moment of something

Something there

Something I never forgot, beneath my bones, weighted in my lungs, pulsing in the deepest chasms of my fossilized heart

Fleeting moments where my breath tastes woodland and marsh, tropical heat tinged by sweet-putrid volcanic ash, the earthy possibility of rain—gone—

Memories of deliberate swiftness—not speed—but.. determination, liquid movements to carry myself upon three-toed talons, padded feet that could sense an unending sea of vibrations

My eyes glimpse primeval greenery, clinging moss and skyscraper sequoias, plated growth hiding endless shadows, endless hunts—

The moments end, phantom sensations dispersed as if by exorcism, sent away back into the mists of time

I was something else, once

I haven’t forgotten

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..

I sit on the ledge, surrounded by concrete and glass— irrelevant monoliths and irreverent designs, all inhospitable, all hostile. Featureless as the faces of the dead. Snow comes down like pale, cold stars weaving through chilly air. Flex my fingers, see my breath spiral against cold air, my heart beating steadily.

Cold metal against my skin. Heavy.

Goddamn dude lol.