Magenta Monster

The trees whispered to each other, the words seemed to form in the breeze around their leaves. They could see the prey – the hunters and they craved their blood and bloods to build up their hungry stumps. The forest would show these people what it meant to maim the woods, a low range creaking mumbled its way through the air and the tendrils broke the cloying surface of the land. The soil fell away and the vine began its exploration – the men settled down to make camp in the clearing that was oh so perfect for their needs.

The pool looked lovely, lilly pads bobbed on the surface with the greens of the tall thick mallow stalks and various bog grasses around it reflected in its dark ripples, the water here seemed like it was clear and pure but the light just reflected off as if it was somehow volcanic glass in motion, ripple after gentle ripple, black, smokey, shiny on broken by colour reflections. Bits of blue sky peeped through the trees that crowded the bank proper after the moss and the reeds, the blue was clear and deep like the water, endless. Inviting.

The other side of the apparently gentle back water was a grassy bank leading to a flower meadow the kind that needed well drained soil but still a lot of water and rich nutrients for the bright blooms. It was a bounty of colour and fragrance and the dear kept the part by the water neat and trim almost like a managed garden – it was perfect to set up camp or stop to have a picnic.

The waters beckoned – cool on hot days and the very wind itself would seem to sing in a hushed lullaby – come and bath, come and sleep, come and dream, never leave, wallow in the dappled shade – in the shade of the trees, but the trees were the other side beyond the water and beyond a bog, a marsh of peat and sinking mud – the sort of rotten acrid mulch that would leach into your skin and tan it whilst dissolving your bones – the sort of secret fen that cried out for sacrifice to the trees and woodlands, to the waters sprites and the spirits of the land. It was that kind of a place.

The people who had once lived in the area knew all this and once had willingly brought the sacrifices bound and sedated to be garrotted and hefted into the mire, and no one dared swim in those lovely placid waters unless they wished to become the Rivers bounty. But those people were gone now and the village by the pool was no more, destroyed in some fit of religious passion centuries ago, after that people knew to avoid the area, children were told of Green Jenny and her teeth so that they would not play in meadow, its perfume they said intoxicated you, made you drowsy and dopy and the waters waited to close in upon the unweary dreamer.

Even those stories were forgotten now, the population had plummeted and the people moved on – after all why live with monsters – beholden and choked when you no longer had to, The disease had been bitter, it had made the flesh bad and yet it had still been flesh and the discarded corpses had been disgorged to this domain away from everything to be consumed and forgotten by natures hand. And now? Now there was nothing, no traders or pilgrims, no burial and certainly no sacrifice. This had left the Maiden Hungry – so very hungry.

Maybe it was time to leave her willow bed.

As the world awakes from its winter slumber, the ice drips and the ground warms urging the seeds and bulbs that had lain dormant to begin their quest for life. The sky brightens and the blue shines through with sunlight blindingly low on the horizon. It seems warm but the metallic tang of snow and frost and wind still bites and ice crackling remains in the shadows. This paradoxical sky of luring daylight is both warm and cold and the tasted nakedness of the dark seasons trees lay silhouetted against it – some would say they look like ink spilled but really they are too jagged and knotty for that and call out for the kindness of leaves – for a softening of their nakedness. Rough bark curled in the blistering freezes knows the suns song and hears the seasons change – its call to be once more. The sap rises, pulling sustenance from the depths of the sleepers until those branches so bare begin to bud. Little creeping moments of bright white and purple and pink, begin and open to thousands of little flowers. The branches become heavy with the floral weighting – waiting for the perfect moment to bloom and open wide, to entrust themselves to the world.

But there is a clock work of little infinitesimal gears that click, and grind and shift, to create this splendour and glory and in this world unseen by most a shadow of spring moves in the breeze of clouded sunlight. Ribboning its way through the branches it touches each sprig exploding the metabolic fire and slowly – BLOOM. Majestic and magical its claws are glittered with frost sparking rainbows whilst its crest brims of pastel swirls in the dew of the mornings to come – this is Blossom. Blossom of the pinks and mauves, Blossom of the made heart of time, a dragon of floral markings, soft scaled and with breath of petals that rain like snow blowing into drifts to consume the ugliness of the world. It is that time again – sometimes there is the tiniest glimpse to be caught of this creature and when that happens there is only one incantation to be made – Blooming Marvellous.

The Dark lurked, as always it watched, it was cold, it had been that way since the beginning, the warmth had all left it, spinning out into the new youngness that it feared.

The Dark had stayed, it had drawn in on itself to preserve what warmth it could.

The Dark saw her, she had looked many ways but this was new, never had she looked like this and never had she been a she before. The Dark hated her, the Dark wanted her, the Dark owned her, the Dark knew her secret secrets, secrets she herself did not yet know nor remember.

The Dark knew that she was not yet a full person, the Dark had seen this process a number of times, she was in a dark but it was a safe warm dark, so like the one the Dark coveted but this warmth would have still seemed so cold, the Dark knew – the Dark had tried it before.

The Dark hovered at the edge of the room, it was getting harder and harder to find somewhere to hide in these rooms, these rooms of bright glaring light, so like that which had strewn forth at the beginning. The rooms where bigger with stronger lights – where was the Dark to hide?

And yet there was always somewhere and the bright lights cast deep shadows especially when they broke, sometimes it was a flickering fitful Dark that the Dark had to play with. That was all the Dark had had for a while, even the woods were no longer dark, the sky marred by orange burnt light, a thing of cities and cloud.

True darkness lurked at the heart of it all but The Dark could not get there and would not want that coldness, that sucking hideousness they had fled. They wanted to be warm, they had just remnants of warmth, it had been enough for eons and yet… they watched her, an extension of self, hungry to devour such a fragile thing.

It was the wires and the lights within that hurt so much with this version of self – what was this? Never had they seen this before.

But it could not touch her, for that was annexation and as much as it hated her, as much as it loved her, it needed her to become, to devour, to be it’s mouth piece, it’s warmth sync. It arched a shadowy tendrils, risking the light and exposure, it trembled with the danger. The child breathed and stirred and turned over, dreaming a feeling of need as the incubator beeped a warning, the machine sustained and this was a deciding time.

The Dark retreated to wait once more.

Amy stood in the bitter ley of the granite column listening through the muffling fur of her hood, the executioners had been hard at work and the old rituals of blood sacrifice had seen a boom. This time to the new god of 2000 years or so of British culture – the site they were done upon was however a far older.

The scientists had been first when they failed to predict the cataclism, she bit her tongue from the sob because they had warned of it but amongst them they hadn’t been able to agree what it was going to be. In the end it appeared they were all right and it was only a matter of timescales and which bits happened first. She had been scientist – she hid the fact well, and so had remained uncelebrally challenged by wit of keeping her head.

Ice crystals swirled in the air to make an inverted rainbow, beauty to the grizzly execution before her, she didn’t want to be there but non attendance could lead to investigation – and that really was the last thing she wanted.

The chemists, physicists, geologists, biologist and even the Drs had all been ritually disposed off, they were even starting head hunting the soft sciences and the world trembled.

The disaster, the thing that borught the world to its knees?

She’d been on a plane, she had heard the confusion from the cock pit as the compasses had not measured North but South, her father was old school though and knew the sun and the sky, he could navigate without the aid of compass. Many other planes had not coped well and had run out of fuel and crashed in the sea. Lights had rimmed the sky in pink and green ribbons for a few weeks and the carcinoma levels in pale skinned people sky rocketed.

But it happened at the wrong time, it correlated with the Texts that had been found, enough written crap on the scriptures to make the Dead Sea scrolls look like a children’s book.

Panic ensued and governments toppled.

Witch hunts had started and Amy had shuddered and hid and hoped no one remembered what she had been before. The madness stated that the ills were rooted in science and technology and so they had stripped those away by virtue of killing those who understood it. Of course they had continued using it in order to maintain draconic control on the terrified populace a third of whom were dying of solar radiation induced cancer.

Medical care was gone and the Alternative remedies were stretched thin and clung to in despair of the gap antibiotics and aesthetics had left.

She watched numbly as the bloody acts warmed the ground before it too was frozen, the smell of iron and electric filled the air.

It was the first of that nights, more where to follow – so many many more.

Joanne’s eyes were green, not just the iris but the pupils and the eyeball as well. Different shades of green but all glowing faintly with their own light. Normally any child like her would have been have been killed but now there were enlightened and people understood it was nothing but an anomaly, a defect and not some sign of demonic possession. Society had taken huge leaps forward and Drs strove to heal the eyes.

Some people still pulled back in fear and made the evil eye to ward her off, the sign had little affect on the girl and she learnt to ignore them. Just after her thirteenth birthday cramps and blooding marked her as no longer a child and her vision began to change.

Little motes seemed to drifted in her line of sight, sometimes glinting silver and sometimes seeming to steal all the light from the other dancing particals in their strange wafting dance. The opticians discovered a strange thickening of the lense but nothing else when they investigated.

Then violet flares seemed to shoot out from the darkness surrounding people, Joanne was sure the darkness hadn’t been there when she was growing up. Maybe it was a madness brought on by her adnormalities?

Fear began to hurt her normal cheerful demenour. Concerned her mother called in Granny. Granny was ancient and still chewed raw leaf remadies, she was from the northern tribes and her face looked like weathered wood, it felt like soft furry baby rabbit and her eyes glittered with keen interest in the world around her.

It was a danger to bring Granny in, she did not always rule in your favour, she always did what was for the best regardless of if it seemed to be the right or moral thing to do. Joanne trembled at the glare as the wrinkled gnarled hands pushed at her belly and forced her eyes wide. Granny hardly spoke, and smelt of cedar wood and rosemary.

A tongue click at the close examination of her eyes, made the girl jump. “You see the spook lights.” Said the soft voice – Joanne nodded not being quiet sure what was meant but it sounded like it could be the name for the flashes and mists she had been seeing.

“Your Science and your modern medicine can not help her.”

Her mother wailed at the statement but Joanne was not surprised, she had grown ups in the shadows of society knowing how very different she was, reminded at every turn that even decades before she would have been killed for what she was.

Abnormal, deformed, different.

A look from the old woman stopped her mothers cries of despair, Joanne smiled it was as if the woman had been told she was a stupid child. A bleating lamb.

“You shall come to the North with me.” Again it was a statement and the girl found herself nodding, no longer afraid. She looked to her mother, she was surely going to object but she looked worried and confused and then just nodded.

“I’ll help you pack,” she said quietly.

“Not needed,” barked the old woman and she began to hum and held out her hand. Joanne looked to her mother and saw the hesitance there, the girl felt a jolt of fear and excitement interweaved and tangled, then she took the old woman hand. Part of her was disappointed that there was no broom or pestle and mortar that could fly them. Instead they got on the train and the old woman chewed herbs that tanged the air and made the other passengers noses wrinkle. A man in a business suite tutted, the other passengers glared and edged away from him.

People were paying Granny more attention than her with her green skin and strange eyes, this had never happened to her before and it felt puzzling and wonderful!

“You will learn to read the spook lights.” And a smokey amber lump was produced from a pouched and handed to the girl, it was vaguely sticky but also oily, it smelt of bunt sugar and reminded her of stories at mid winter. “Eat,” was all that was said and so she popped it in her mouth, it was smokey and seemed to crack and trickle honey down her throat, carrying a warmth with it. The girl sighed and slipped into a dream of lights twisting and turning and changing there in the sky, she was flying through them, her spook lights and they made her buzz no longer black and sinister – they filled her up and encapsulated her, she felt alive and safe and wondrous.

Ice had once covered this landscape and that ice was there again now glittering and beautiful a reflector for the dance in the sky.

She awoke lips tingling, they had arrived, it was dark outside – she had known it would be. The dark would stay for a good while Granny had told her.

Next there was to be a ship, they did not go below deck but watched the stars appear through the sea mists. Little hidden jewels she might have missed if the old woman hadn’t pointed them out to her. And then there… a spook light but more, seemingly tangible, rippled across the sky. To Joannes amazement everybody around her oohed and ahhed and Granny smiled.

“You have a lot to learn child.”

The girl nodded and smiled, she could not be odd here in this place for it had been waiting for her.

What sort of sky is this? Where is the atmosphere real or emotional taking us? Weather is often used as a metaphor in writing – use this picture to help spark a story 🙂

It looked like a frozen white marble, rolling through an endless star studded sky, most of humanity dwelt low below the crust, it was warm there and they had all the energy they needed. But Anna had been sent to the Dome complex, it had been freshly repaired from a meteorite shower, once an atmosphere would have slowed the projectiles but no more. The domes were often damaged, they were getting better at safe guarding against it with air gaps between the tough clear layers of diamond.

Anna stared at the void and hugged herself, the pressure suit was chunky and rubbed in odd places but she was increadibly grateful for it. She was trembling slightly, all that nothing above her it was nauseating. She gave herself a shake and moved over to the central pillar, a metal tube which she entered via an depressurised chamber. Inside there were pictures of seas and sunsets, things Anna had never known, they looked pretty, but the thought of living on the surface under a sky filled her with fear. She climbed the stairs to the observertory at the top and took her tool box out.

Her focus was absorbed for a while with her tinkering, she knew how important this was, she had trained for this from 13 years of age. She gritted her teeth at a cross threaded bolt and sighed as it came free. Clicking her comms unit she spoke as clearly as she could, ‘it should be fixed’.

‘Confirmed come down here and we can remote it all’

‘Confirmed’ she muttered as she was already scrambling down almost scampering down into the tunnels beneath the layers of frozen atmosphere that enshrouded her home. It offered protection from the impacts but not as much as the rock cave citadels she had grown up in.

She popped down a hatch and emerged in the control center. Here pictures of animals that existed as nothing more than a string of numbers in a memory bank. Big black and white animals that looked as though they should be kids toys and large versions of cats. A real tabby sat curled on a chair – they were essential to hunt the rats, even with effiecient waste disposial the horrid things still lurked. They had swarmed and killed one of the early research teams. They weren’t like the sleek things found in the ponics amoungst the food and fibre crops. Those were quiet good eating and would even sit on your lap and be scritched between the ears. No these were viscous and had been getting larger.

‘Ah good Anna, help me with the recalibration would you? I need to read this report on the potential body.’ Anna nodded and headed straight to the console where she clacked away checking angles and was gratified to see the equipement slide smoothly into place.

‘Looks like we have a good ore ‘stroid here’ her supervisor announced.

‘How are we going to net it?’ She asked.

‘I think we can bring it into stable orbit’

Anna stared at one of the posters not really seeing. ‘You realise that you are increasing the impact risk with ever one we bring into orbit. We should finish the fountain and start processing them.’

‘Anna I know but we need to collect them when we see them. I want you to work out the route with an idea of changing teams on 65.’

She sighed, but consumed herself by beginning to work out the trajectories and gravity interplays. She was humming softly when the computer began to bleep at her. Her brow wrinkled when she saw what it was alerting her too.

‘We’re receiving a message,’ she said barely able to believe it.

Everyone stopped and looked at the blinking light, ‘that… that is not internal’

‘It’s probably just phantoms – our own signals bouncing around on all those asteroids we’ve netted.

Anna flipped it on feeling released and expecting nothing but static but a string of words flowed, they could not understand them but they were words, obviously words and obviously human.

‘no body panic, it may just be a vestige population we had not yet discovered and that we have just made contact with through the mining – it is after all nearly impossible to explore the entirety of the Earths interior, we only live in the out part for a start and there is plenty that the tectonics have made impassable. Yes that is what it must be.’ her supervisor sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than anything.

He sent a recording down to the linguists and they responded as best they could, ‘this is spaceship Earth, we are trying to decode your message, please hold.’

And it stayed quiet for almost 40 minutes.

‘Nemesis, there has been language shift but you should understand this. This is the Celestial Spheres of the Oort Cloud, you are far too clustered to risk entry into the debris field…. Earth sends greetings.’

A silence haunted the room of all it’s activity until Anna thought to respond. ‘We are Earth, who are you?’

‘You are Nemesis, roaming planet, Earth sends greetings… have you had regression?’

They all looked puzzled at each other.

‘Where on Earth are you?’ she asked in desperation.

‘We are the Celestial Spheres, we are no planet.’

‘You are not on spaceship Earth?’ she tried again.

‘No, we are the edge of the solar system, beyond us your atmosphere will melt, your domes are few, damage?’

‘Our… our atmosphere will melt?’ she squeaked.

‘You are the wondering planet, this happens, you have suffered regression, we shall send help.’ and they clicked off.

‘I can’t get them back!’ Anna wailed.

‘We aren’t Earth?’ someone whispered.

Anna knew what was coming next and dreaded it, they would need look outs in the domes, ‘do… do I let them in?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’ her supervisor said and she left to watch the skies she loathed.

It was hard to get one galaxy to spiral around upon itself with out reaching arms that had to so delicately be placed next too, entwined but hardly touching it’s neighbouring galaxy, a mirror image to help the fit be exact.

The symmetry never quiet worked and so the solution was to work with that and add an aspect of apparent randomness to the design, of course it could not be actual randomness as that looked far too ordered and so each and every galaxy had to be placed just so with their stars teased out into beautiful filaments.

Patterns within patterns within patterns – it had been genius to make make it all fractal and there were clusters and super clusters and voids to set it all off just perfectly. The fabric of reality was ready, now it just needed to be cut and pinned and sown into place.

The Creation Ball was only a week away. But the process had to be flawless after all no one wanted a seam to come undone or for fabric of reality to rip! No that would be unthinkable. OF course there was the slight matter of the black holes but those within the universe were unlikely to see the weave of it and even if they did none of them would be stupid enough to prod at something so dangerous. Would they?

It doesn’t really matter where you dig sooner or later you hit the bone layer, sometimes there isn’t bones as such but great swaths of land with thick ash, analysis shows that it too is basically bone. Sometimes stones that appear carved, jut out like teeth between the bones. It was these stones that really sparked my interest in what lay beneath our feet and as a child I studied diligently.

The bone is so prevalent that it is mined for building materials, most countries have used the bones for architecture at some point in their histories – there have been and still a few way out sects, who thought it somewhat sacrilegious – after all these bones had to be the founders? The parents of all… except… there are quiet frankly too many of them. No one really believes that they are the bones of people – rather that people had formed and folded themselves around those bones that lay there as natural mineral deposits. You can even see such amorphous blobs still swimming in our oceans! No life process needed for the bone layer – the bones are merely stones scattered out and ripe for quarrying.

The best china was made from the bone beds and ash pits. My grand parents still have a set, now a days most people prefer the ones ground out of the calcium rich water agates that were found in one of the bone mines a couple of decades ago.

A few years back some scientists had lost the plot and started saying that ancient diseases lay incubating in the soil around the bones – biding their time to strike down those who dared to disturb the ancients slumber. No one really took much notice – it sounded like the religious nuts and the bones couldn’t have diseases buried with them because after all they were not human in origin are they?

Interestingly they had taken the lovely three fold flower shape imprints of obviously ancient sea creatures and started saying they were a symbol for plague! I mean I can see that it is similar to our symbol for disease but it is a much softer shape with obvious lobes rather than piercing snakes tongues. And though I am no language expert I am pretty sure they have it all backwards. Those imprints are a sign of life of something biological and that then became the sign we use for disease once we found out illnesses were caused by little blobby cells – little miniatures versions of those floating in the sea.

It is a ridiculous idea that the bone beds were created by a plague anyway – after all so many many bones – there would have needed to be billions of people alive for that amount of bone, all living so close they would have had to stack the houses on top of each other. Of course there are the metal skeletons – some did hold that those where once skeletons of buildings but they are so very large that seems unlikely and they are surrounded by silica sand (a kind of natural glass) so obviously it is just another one of those weird ways that minerals grow – metal from glass, formed and shaped by the whimsy of nature.

People complain that using the bones is morbid and makes them think of death which is daft as they are blatantly not humans and the skulls look so pretty sitting at the top of the archways and that’s another thing – no building could ever be as tall as those metal juts would create. Not to mention the water eats them away at a rather fast pace creating red flakes that are indeed dangerous to us – so no the bone layer was from early star calcium percolating down through the clouds from space. It’s not like there could have been an advanced civilisation here in that before time – it would have left something to tell us it existed wouldn’t it?

And even if there had of been billions of people they would have needed to die almost all over night for this sort of formation to be created which does seem somewhat ludicrous.

I personally am interested in what is beneath the bone layer – it is so thick that people rarely dig down deeper than it, to date there are only two such digs and they found a hard calcium surface mixed with silicone and iron so chemically it is similar to the bone bed and those jutting iron skeletons. There do appear to be little bone cusps in some of this hard substrate – they do not match with any skeletons we have found in the bone layer but maybe they are proto bones. They after all appear in pairs and are ridged fans in shape, and you can just see them morphing into the spheres and sockets of our hip joints.

One crack pot reckoned they belonged to water creatures that had gone extinct due to the acidity of the seas, but everybody knows that water creatures have no sort of hard parts what so ever. It would be some what strange for them to have hard parts as it would make floating and swimming around all the harder!

No they are obviously proto bones.

I’ve been using sound echos and electrical pulses to look through the ground and have found some interesting structures – quiet regular in form – there are rows and rows of them – they seem to lay under or be a part of the hard calcium rich substrate – I suppose slab would be a good word but don’t want it being confused with slabs that get used for buildings.

Anyway I can’t wait to find out what they are. My co worker joked that they would be more bones! Bones in boxes would that be funny! I doubt it some how as they are coming back as lead rich.