Daily Flash Fiction

The train is vast.

It stretches from pole to pole of the vast blue sphere of Jarradhoon, a great ring of synthetic diamond constructed by teh native life of the world. A thin sliver of track supported on hundred kilometre high pillars, and at the top the great train spins.

It was thought at first to be a purely functionalistic device, a means of escaping the planet’s gravity. And it is certainly capable of thus – the huge magnetic levitation track can speed vehicles up to escape velocity, launching them into space with minimal costs in terms of power – indeed, gantries and supports are covered with photovoltaic cells, and so the entire thing generates more power than it uses.

But these interpretations were soon thrown out – the thing is too big, circumnavigating the globe and able to launch hundreds of trains together. There are other reasons.

Furthermore, the inside of the device contains markings that are too complex to delineate traffic, and within the internal pillars and supports lie the bodies of hundreds of Jarradhooni dead, in a variety of postures, some with grave goods and some without. They cannot be excavated, of course – we have determined their positions and shapes through deep surface scanning.

The entire object is an enormous monument, founded on the countless dead of the Jarradhoon. It’s true secrets will, alas, never be determined, for that ancient civilization has long passed into dust, leaving only their mysteries and strange legends.

Sorry guys, I’ve got a massive Archaeology field trip on Friday, so there will probably be no Friday story this week. I’ll see if I can get another one up over the weekend as recompense.

+++ An Extract from Shckun Nk’thron’Kar, (248595 AS) The Devourer – Most Deadly Of Interstellar Species, Karthram university press: Jigorn; Planet RAktoosh; Lor-kan system; Outer Magellanic Cloud. +++

It was bred to devour.

It consisted of thousands of tiny individual cells that swarmed across it’s prey. But although it appeared to be multiple individuals, and the individual creatures even showed some signs of separate thought, it was naught but a single enormous organism, a mistake of evolution, the most efficient killing machine ever seen before in the universe.

It grew quickly. It soon learnt how to ply the oceans between the stars after having long since devoured it’s own world and those lost, forgotten creatures it evolved with. It flew out as multiple tiny spores, little pustules of cells in suspended animation, seeds of destruction.

Those that found these spores considered them harmless. Some were destroyed, but most were taken in for testing, and some were allowed to hatch, to live amongst naively welcoming species. The result was the same in all cases. Nothing could exterminate all of them, at least two would survive and go on to mate. They would have issues with genetic diversity, but they would find a way to mutate, to adapt, to survive. In scant centuries the cuckoo in the nest would force out the native species, and then over the course of a few millennia it would strip the world bare, before breaking off into spores again, and flying on.

It was known – is known – by many names across the cosmos. Devourer, Shkorn’thkl, the Cosmic Locust, the Disease. But I will never forget what I learned when interviewing one for this volume, the name it gave itself.

“Homo Sapiens”. Sapient man, in the ancient tongues of their ancestors. That they should presume sapience when they do nothing but fulfill a biological imperative is, perhaps, the ultimate irony.

The Warboar growled, it’s huge mane or razor-sharp spines rippling as it spat saliva throughout the clearing, shaking its head with rage, small red eyes rolling.

Gor stood before it, holding his short spear, it’s flint head glistening with blood scored from his previous clashes with his foe. He was not big or strong – at fourteen he was shorter than most of his fellows. Latebloom they had called him. Well he would show them, he would become a man.

The warboar lunged forwards. It had been bred in centuries past as a riding beast, taking the people of the old kingdom into conflict. That was before the jungles had come.

Gor charged forwards, meeting the animal head-on, but at the last second he dug his spear into the ground and vaulted high over the beast’s head. The boar’s charge shattered the spear as Gor landed on its back, in the little patch devoid of quills where it was safe to do so. The warboar started to buck, an ancient memory of an ancient memory, from when its ancestral kin were held in the castle stockades and broken in one by one, bucking and shaking until they became naturalized to being ridden. The warboar darted off through the forest, running past low-hanging branches threatening to cast Gor from his seat.

The boy reached behind his loincloth and drew his dagger. Another branch hanging low, and Gor was forced to duck low and touch his chest ot the spines, and he felt them dig into him, but he held on. Dagger in one hand, he plunged it into the beast’s eye.

The warboar squealed and shrieked and shuddered, falling to one side and sliding across the forest floor.

The boy pulled himself to his feet, shaking his head. He looked about him and froze, seeing where he was – among the ruins, the old castle from centuries past, tangled and drowned by vines and roots. This area was forbidden, and he would have to work fast to claim the horn and heart of the boar.

And then he heard the whispering wind through the canyons of stone, and he looked up into the grey light and froze. A warboar stood, large and old and spectral, white of fur and eye and with a flowing-robed, armoured warrior upon it’s back.

Gor ran. He would remain a boy rather than fight the spirits.

He cold not look up. The weight on his head forced him to look forwards.

It was a hat, wide of brim with a circular glass tube filled with a heavy liquid he did not know the name of. Some sort of metal. The hat ensured he could not tilt his head up or down, but had to stare forwards.

He was not the only one here from the ribs, not the only ‘skyling’. The others were older men, but all had fallen in the same way as Evan. The oldest was around six hundred years old – barely an eye blink for the average skyling – and yet he seemed old and decrepit. The surface took it’s toll.

It was not a good life. They worked in the chambers of the king of Avalon, a man obsessed with the ribs and with making war upon them. Evan had heard of the attacks from below in his time – rocks sometimes struck the fourth and fifth ribs, none of them even making a dent in the walls of the tower. Most theorized they were monsters in the barrens, hefting boulders and throwing them in impotent, vandal rage.

The king had the skylings work for him on creating new weapons with which he might conquer the skylings. They were reticent to help him, but they were careful to always move forwards, lest the king lose patience.

One or two of the older tower folk felt this new state of affairs was an improvement – prior to the rise of the king any skylings who fell had to live off the land, for the people distrusted them. Evan shook his head at these fools, those who would rather damn their kin than suffer hardship.

That night, on returning to his windowless cell among the dozens in the dungeons reserved for the skylings, the one room where he was allowed to remove the hat, an idea struck him. He did not sleep well, and debated with himself the wisdom of his action.

The next day, Evan prepared a mould – a large one, tubular in shape, like a squat cannon barrel. The other skylings had given the king the secrets of cast iron a year before, and though he had used it for weapons, he could not see the potential applications that could revolutionize life for his people – pots and pans and iron struts for his trebuchet could alter life in his kingdom forever, but the king was blinded by his ambition to reach greater and greater heights.

The mould was cast soon after, as were the multitudinous pipes inside and the housings and pistons and wheels. The king visited often and was amazed by their progress. He asked what they were making, but the word in their language did not translate into his. The king did not care, he knew progress when he saw it.

Other skylings saw Evan’s meaning and assisted him in the construction, and soon they had an enormous canvas bag. With the consent of the king they commandeered a small river vessel, gutted it and fit cart wheels to it’s side. They wheeled the entire construction out into the yard, and two of them set about smelting the fire. The king and ten of his finest guards joined them, and the engine warmed to it’s operating temperature. Soon the steam from it’s top and the lift from it’s propellors started to loft the craft into the air.

The king was amazed. He whooped and jumped for joy as a small child, and his soldiers stared out at the vistas below and above, some with joy and others with fear.

The king smiled all the way up – until they became just outside of bow shot for the people below.
Evan removed his hat and, quick as a flash, smashed the glass and metal container in the face of one of the guards. The guard fell over the side and screamed all the way down. Another managed to draw his spear, but the oldest skyling knocked it out of his hand. All the others had seen Evan’s plan, and all had known they had to practice the war-dances of their youth.

Soon they had slain all of the soldiers, and only the king was left. Evan forced the man onto his knees. They were not all that different in age, he guessed. The king of Avalon started to cry.

They left him at the fourth rib, explained his identity to them, and the king was incarcerated in the prisons. They kept few prisoners, most criminals being executed and recycled, but they wanted him to see what they could learn of the surface.

The escaped skylings spoke to their kin of what they had seen, and then returned to their airship and flew away. They had been contaminated by the strange ground-lands after all, soiled by the underlings, and they could not be allowed to mate or change the towers further. They did not mind, all of them wanted to experience more of their strange world now.

Evan stared out at the bleak expanse, the black half-mile high towers in the distance, twisting upwards and inwards like the ribcage of some extinct monstrosity.

The towers were hollow and home to many thousands of people, using mirrors and strange magicks to grow food without soil, enough to ensure that none of them would ever have to touch the ground. They cremated their dead and returned them to the artificial soil, growing and re-growing, birth and rebirth.

The towers were not joined at any point – but every year, dozens of young men were strapped into gliders and sent across the great expanse of air, to ensure that the towerfolk did not become inbred. And so Evan, heart pumping and terrified for his life, leapt from the tower and into the void of air.
He had flown a glider before – training flights around the towers, circling past homes and stores and craft-floors, great factories and steam-powered elevators transporting food and baggage and people through the tower. He had landed far below and flown for long periods of time, learning to use the strange heat-sensing device that the mages had lent him to see thermals and use them to fly, to stay in the air for longer.

But this was different. Straight flight for many minutes, for the ribs were wide-spaced. He breathed deeply to calm himself, and then launched himself from the tower.

Wind buffeted him. He had been instructed to go to the seventh tower – a long flight from his second rib, but he was judged worthy of the honour. He steered himself into thermals and stayed high, but half way through his flight the end came.

A freak gust of wind unsettled him, and his glider twisted in the air. He struggled for control, but the glider pitched up wildly, and then started to fall straight down. He struggled, shifted, twisted himself and finally wrenched the glider out of the stall, but by then it was too late. He could not get to the seventh rib, and was now too low to reach any of the others.

He had never really looked down. Oh, in his childhood he had been told stories of the monsters that had forced man’s escape into the towers, but as he had grown older he had realised these were all foolishness. Though it was green and brown he had no doubt it was simply barren, devoid of life.

But as he came closer to the ground he saw grass and trees and farmland, and confused he finally crashed into a strange object of many stones with a roof of yellow grass. He fell into a warm room and heard screaming and shocked horror, and then all was black.

And then he was cold, and the air shocked his lungs. He coughed and opened his eyes, and saw a squat man standing before him, an older woman and a younger woman by his side. The stone object was now devoid of roof, and it smoked.

“Get up, ye skyling. Get up and begone.”

Evan climbed to his feet. The people were short and squat and powerful, each only five or six feet in height, well below his seven and a half – but they were powerful of build where he was lithe. The man threw some clothes at him and told him to “cover himself”. Evan, who had only ever worn clothing for ceremonial use, was somehwat surprised but acquiesced, though the shirt and trousers were far too small for him.

The man brandished a pitchfork. “Get ye to Avalon. ‘Tis but nine miles along this road. They know what to do with things such as ye.”

Confused, hungry, Evan started to stumble down the earthen road, looking up as he did at the forbidding ribs around him, the seventh in the distance.

To be continued…

We have lived millennia under the tyranny of the namers.

I was born to the title of Gellar Wynter, which in the ancient tongue of the namers means noble son of the motherland, the nation of Terraga. I lived and worked at my king’s behest, but all knew that the king worked the will of the namers, those ancient scholars and mages who bestow names and roles and personhoods on all in the kingdom.

They forced me out. They had me assassinate the crown prince of neighbouring Geradactyl, and when the other nation discovered the truth they had the king deny all knowledge of me. I could see the guilt in his eyes, I knew he had been coerced. It was all the fault of those strange old men.

And old they are – said to be older than the earth beneath our feet and the sun in the sky, said to have come from a far off island beyond the black oceans above our heads, one of the pinpricks of light that appear, the faerie fires that we see after the sun has run from view.

They changed my name. Jendraga Wynter, exile of the motherland. It is frightening the power that resides in a name, even if this power exists solely in the mind of the named.

In my travels beyond Terraga, around the great chasm of the abyss, through the twisted jungles of Sthiss Chor, through the great undersea kingdoms of the naga and the lorelei, I have come to meet and know other Jendraga Wynters. There are about a hundred of us, enemies of the named who are so confident in the power of their words that they do not fear us.

It was not until I found the hundred and first Jendraga I met beyond the borders of Terraga that I thought differently. My king, brought low by the machinations of the named and replaced with a puppet child, a nephew of the rightful heir. In this the namers have gone too far. Soon they will meet their demise.

Now we have massed an army of those spurned by the namers, of the Jendragas and the Gornikals and the Orranas, and those who would see the end of the namers for political reasons, the kings tired of battling under their yokes. We have fought the namers out of their strongholds in every other nation, and now we stand on the boundary, I now I shall return to the motherland that spurned me to cut out the black cancer at its heart.

I’m a superhero. And today, I’m going to kill one hundred and ten thousand people.

My powers range from the flashy and impressive to the very, very simple. I can fly at thirty times the speed of sound, easily getting me into low orbit. I can lift one hundred and fifty billion tons of solid rock above my head in a dead lift without breaking a sweat. I can see through any substance, and manipulate things through telekinesis on both micro and macroscopic scales.

But I can’t be in more than one place at once. I can cure cancer, HIV, cirrhosis, even diabetes. I’ve spent days in hospital curing the sick and being hailed as a messiah or a saviour. Other times I’ve gone to earthquake zones, or stopped wars by destroying the guns on both sides, halting terror attacks in both subtle and flashy ways.

Roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people die on a day when I do nothing. Of those, about thirty thousand are of causes I can do nothing about – just plain old age, worn out bodies finally giving up. I can save about ten thousand people on a good day, if I’m flying from dawn to dusk, stopping bullets and halting crashing cars and turning up at bank robberies. I try to triage as much as I can – I’ve got such a reputation now that all I have to do is turn up at a crime scene and the criminals just arrest themselves rather than be flung through a wall. I even supplied police with a holographic emitter I developed to fool the criminals into thinking I was there, but they found ways to circumvent it. They can’t do anything about the real thing, of course.

Then there are the super-villains. They’re not as common as you’d think, but each one holds me up for a day or two.

And every second I spend saving someone or fighting some megalomaniac, people keep dying. By choosing to save one person I am effectively condemning all who I don’t save to death, choosing who lives and who dies, and making the choice in a fraction of a second.

None of the villains have ever matched my death count. I’m the biggest monster of them all.

It creaked noisily and rhythmically. I didn’t know there was so much steel in the thing, but as the candelabra swung in the wind from the broken windows it produced a high pitched whine. It reminded me of the start of an old Sergio Leone film I saw once many years ago. I don’t know which one, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to find out now.

Finally I could bear it no more. I stood and walked over to the old thing, grabbed my billhook, and pulled it off the ceiling. I smiled as it crashed to the floor. The noise might bring something in, but I didn’t care.

I returned to my seat and continued writing my memoir, about the fall and the end days, and the madness that subsumed so much of humanity. It wasn’t a complex madness, there was no disease or chemical induced insanity spreading through the populace – it was going from having so much to having so little, and doing so so very quickly. So many were lost in the stampedes, so many more to the violent gangs.

It’s strange. Humans have existed this way for hundreds of thousands of years, living with no more technology than stone tools and wood and basketry. And yet, when returning to the old ways after a scant two thousand or so years, we have crashed so very badly, mass extinctions cutting us back to our old levels. I would be surprised if there are even a billion people left on the earth now – we live in a verdant and lush world, but when forced to move quickly and gather and hunt, it cannot support such a vast population.

Footsteps came to my door, and I readied my gun. It’s one fo the few weapons left now. I saw them all the time a few years ago, but few people now know how to keep one in good repair.

A man walked in. He looked terirble, malnourished, haggard, wearing scraps of tattered clothing and carrying a rock. Just a lump of stone, not a finely worked spear tip or an arrowhead, but a simple lump of granite.

I aimed the gun at him. He looked at me sadly, but I shook my head. I have no food, and he can see it – my face is as drawn and haggard as his, my clothes though not torn still hang off my body. He nodded his head pathetically and shuffled out, and I returned to my seat.

I will not live much longer. No-one uses the library any more, but maybe one day someone will gain some knowledge from it, understand it’s importance. It is doubtful: in all probability some idiot will burn it down, setting humanity back even further into his fall. But I can hope.

I have locked the door now. In a few hours I will lie down upon my Librarians desk. The books are secured, locked in an airtight chamber, as are the servers with the complete contents of the internet scoured onto their hard drives. I will lie down and end my life – it is better than starving – and hope and pray.

++Seven hundred years later++

The door shook, dislodging a cascade of dust that streamed back onto the floor. It shook again, and a third time, and then finally it broke open. Four men in ponchos stepped in, coughing and blinking into the stale air.

“Jiflad N’gegor Cartouhc.”

Another nodded. “Arragar cartouhc. Arragar.”

A third stepped over and looked at the body of the dead man, lain in state upon a metal desk of formica, looking into the empty eye sockets. He took up the skull and stared into it. “Garadar. Garadar! Gorrikal ninyadar.”

The fourth strode to the back of the chamber, came to a white plastic door, and carefully pulled the handle. A wash of clean air came over him, and fluorescent lights came on far above. The man started breathing fast, and then he howled.

“Books! Cartouhc deka Books!” he turned to the dead body and pointed a hand “Garadar deka Books!”
The first man smiled, and all four fell to their knees before the skull, Praying. Garadar deka Books. Garadar deka Books.

Sorry about the lack of story yesterday. I accidentally started writing a short story instead, and ran out of time :O

The sun seemed strange that day.

I couldn’t put a finger on why. Perhaps it was an omen from the gods, a message warning of the dark times ahead. If so, the gods are truly despicable for not giving us a clearer sign – none are deserving of worship, or even belief. They should all be forgotten.

I sat on the Paladin’s hill and stared up at it, trying to fathom what it was that seemed strange. It seemed almost too light, too bright, casting everything in harsh whites and shadows. Most people ignored it. There was some comment in the streets, but because no-one could really articulate what they were seeing, the events were ignored, put down to strange perception.

Then the ground shook, and the mountains took light, great pyres burning in the distance as the gods burned their children. Ash and dust fell from the sky and the sun grew dim. The rivers were clogged, water replaced with a grey sludge, and crops started to fail.

Then from the south came the stampedes. Enormous herds of Rhino and Ettercap and Mastadon, and the great sabre-toothed cats and flesh eating thunder-birds that accompanied them. They were heading north, no doubt making for the verdant plains of Klindojia. Many followed the herds, but a few remained, stubbornly clinging on to existence.

Then the temperature dropped, and the snows came. These deserts had not seen snows in ten thousand years, since the days of Mad King Georg, when the very weather reflected his insanity.

We left then. A few of the soldiers and the old polities-men stayed behind, insistent that their gods would save them, but most of us went north.

As we travelled we found carcasses. Most were of animals, picked apart by scavengers, but a few were human, and some I even recognized.

When we found the plains the grass was brown and dying, and more carcasses littered them. We continued north. A few more of us died, from lack of water or nutrition. Those of us that survived began scavenging with the other animals, even going so far as to chase starving sabre-tooths away to get at their meals. At one time ancient people worshipped the creatures, and great statues still existed in the city to the south of pregnant women with the cats as their protectresses.

Finally, five of us, barely alive, found the valley. A little green still grew here, patches of grass with rhinos browsing upon them, and a tiny farm with a windmill and a trickling stream. Snow was all around, but plants still grew here, heated by some strange lensing effect in the sky. We collapsed onto the grass and other survivors came to us, gave us food and water and soothed our wounds. And I lay there as they bathed me and stared at the sky.

The sun was strange here.