A hundred Andromeda suns fizzle under ether yokes.
Gravity chafes, sends sparks flying into the long dark. Touches off nebulae and
pockets of hyper-combustible gasses. Cataclysms send plasma tendrils deeper
into the black: gnawing, hungry.
They awaken.
A bare and colourless body: blank eyes, an angular
skull with no soft edges. Hairless cheeks, a slash of a mouth, a triple-folded
grey loincloth. Ancient, but freshly minted. Only the youngest of bodies can
house the god-tapped.
A white plain soaks up starlight in all directions. No
cover, no wind,no foliage. Silence, stillness.
A red dwarf is hungry. Corona arcs flip and loop in
twenty-million mile chains, engulfing a delicate array of ice-moons.
They blink. Ponder calculations never before sung or
whispered or written.
Snap.
Engulfed and unshriven. Polar caps remain untouched. The
coronas divert around an inscrutable cone, simmering into nothingless at the
system's edge. A hundred thousand warrens under the ice flows and glacial lakes
chitter in relief and offer fresh sacrifices.
Reigning in the dwarf takes focus. Multilinear
incantations struggle to refit the shackles of gravity and force. They blink.
They sweat. Serene and slender fingers tremor, then tighten across the folds of
a loincloth ragged with rips.
Done.
There is time to meditate before the next
destabilization.
They exhale: slowly. It rushes into a gasp and leaves
them coughing. Hacking, on a lone conjuresphere overseeing the Andromeda
galaxy. A freshly minted body is revolting against this pruning of the heavens.
Shreds of awareness refuse to unknot and retreat. Asteroids pummel a gargantuan desert world baked at the epicentre of three
suns. Another sentient species overruns itself in hordes of murderous
theorists. Nine suns fade out, cores disintegrating on the remains of their own
solar wind.
Stability is nothing when awareness is uncompromising.
A moment. They grasp at last-ditch vector solutions.
Throw a blanket of unvarnished gravitational force over everything. Turn away.
And inward, recalling.
A shimmering plain-world layered in strata of
sand-crystal. Endless deposits, encasing a molten core eternally burning its
way to the deposits above. The fatal flaw as artistic flourish and cathartic
anchor. Miracles undo themselves, always.
Constructed with painstaking care. Decades of contemplating
the geosphere, articulating the planet's
inner core, considering magma streams. Centuries of surface holocaust to burn a
million pristine beaches to glass. Fifteen comets, aimed perfectly, to shatter
the surface glass in all the right places.
Life, if there'd been the patience.
They sighed and waved. Annihilated the asteroids.
Back to regular writing. It'll be online most days: a variety of genres, styles, and modes. Getting back into fiction after an unintended hiatus. This isn't planned or drafted, but it's what I have.
