So  Sofia.exe was super nice and did a story based off of work in progress pictures I shared with them.

You should go check out more of their stuff. They're pretty good and even take story commissions!

---

A lost mind drifted toward thoughts of home. Synapses stretched, recalling the helix spiral of a faraway and a once upon a time. Knotted trees curved, bent and stuck upon one another by some natural happenstance into an isolated forest within some greater taiga. There fathomless height stretched skyward in estranged rows with the thousand-thousand other trees around – but of the myriad million these were the ones called home. There, where the bristle branches interlocked in meshed arrays, they had made dens and raised families. Etched niches their forefather’s forefathers had carved from the bones of the landscape. The little stifled knot in an eternity of trunks, where generations had come and gone – living as they always had by hunting the wild terrors that roams the abyssal twilight around the forest’s roots. Chitin clad terrors, whose alien eyes and stabbing limbs posed a trial for each and every strip of succulent meat they heaved along the twilight plain. A reminiscent tongue slapped along dry chops, that couldn’t spare a drop of salvia to the hungry memory.

Why had they left its security and safety? Upstart pride and youthful inexperience. Curiosity at what lay beyond the narrow horizon. Palates whose taste buds had become numb to the same thing day after day. Tedium tasks, whose boredom induced musings had eroded away common sense and scratched their thoughts with the abrasive touch of wonder and what if.

Musings that were toxic. Fantasies of other places and other worlds and other things to eat – that were cruelly stamped out by the weathered soles of the community elders. Tightly assembled inquiries – persistent questions scattered like loose clumps of dust. Dispersed. Disregarded. Diluted, but still present, if unnoticed. A cuff between the ears. A harsh growl of cessation. They warned of terrible fates and exile. It succeeded only in quieting the flame that burned within, fanning it rather than smothering. It congealed like-minded souls together in their hushed-whisperings of convictions in the shadows of the wiry boughs. Similarly scorned minds who mused on greater things and elsewhere wonderlands. Contrived conspiracies and grinned faced nods in out of sight conversations – stupid wagging tails and wide eyed, fireside gesticulations. They were in accord. They would set out in defiance of the elder’s orders. They would make out for a distant plateau. The nearest landform spotted from the flat forest canopy – whose stifled growth halted uniformly in a featureless sprawl.

They slipped away under the cover of darkness. A small splinter pack of grinning canine faces that hushed one another as they eluded the tired gaze of inattentive sentries. They had decided to vie for greater things against all heeding and warning. With their knapsacks and their terse goodbyes they slipped away into the boundless forest floor. Crossing the canopy was too dangerous, even for brave wanderers as they; hurricane winds and decimating air currents. They tugged at the top of the great forest and that which moves landscapes also moves wolves. Such motions typically do not go towards the favor of the smaller party.

It was no place they had not wandered before. Spears clutched in hands – navigating tumbled boulders left by the glacial passage of some unseen ancient mountain. But never before had they penetrated the invisible perimeter of safety and familiarity. There was a moment of hesitation, standing at the border in the black abyss, at the roots of skyscraper trees, where the scent trails changed into a void dusty waste. Balking with their tails still, it had taken a moment before stepping across the threshold. Wincing hesitation as they waited for monsters and lightening and all the horrible things the elders had threatened. But nothing came. No disaster befell them. Laughing at the dark, they continued on their way.

They were tired by the time they reached the cliffside. I flattened the great trees it rested upon – made them bow down before its mass and scale. A structure expansive as it was tall – it commanded their respect and awe. Ravines etched through its mighty surface – cracks and outcrops the like and sort that could only be admired. Their fatigue evaporated at the sight – alone a treasure worth the trip – as they searched for a where and a how to scale. The surface of the material was hard packed like clay. If you pressed in on it, it pressed back. Spongy and springy – enough that their claws and talons sunk into the face of the mountainside. It made the vertical traverse less an impossibility. More a challenge of endurance. And the spry, inquisitive focus of curiosity was nothing if not enduring.

Atop that expanse was a weathered, cracked plateau – a traverse of hillocks and canyons, where the myriad suns above baked and unmerciful winds bellowed. Hands and bodies sore from the climb and the walk, they slumped atop an outcrop where the wind whipped by like with wailing cracks and sampled of their woefully inadequate supplies. Never in their adventures had they come across standing water. So deep at the forest floor – only dew beaded. And here – atop the crest of a monolith – the heat baked away all vestiges of moisture. No great monsters roamed to devour them – but just as well; no scavenger creatures prowled for them to prey upon. It was not what they had expected. It was nothing magnificent – it was not majestic. It was a terrible crest of crags and desolate terrain.

Hubris and a now persistent mantra drove them on. They were explorers and they would explore. The thought and the task had been thoroughly etched into their minds so long ago that the religious repetition drowned out instinctual dread and justified concern. Something must be beyond this desolace. An oasis sprung in some unseen corner. There would be. Must be. Dissent was purged with an awkward, over extended laugh. It was too far now to go back. There would be no return.

The truity of that statement though, may have been lost upon them as a terrible eclipse swallowed the sky and threw their world into a blood chilling shadow. A horrific shade that soothed their baking skin, an alien world soaring above. It hovered momentarily – twitching with organic flexibility. Fragments of the forest it had casually scraped off rolled down crags and mountains – all inverted in some sick perversion of gravity. The pack below gawked at the eclipse and its titanic beyond titanic scale. Was it a communal fantasy, or was it the wonder for which they had set out in search of? Their hearts swelled and their voiced reverberated off the cracked landscape around them. Another world soared above – and in their delirium they all too-late too notice as it began to fall.

Artificial earth heaved under the clashing calamity of a continental collision. A textured surface weathered by a thousand-thousand collisions, still quaked and ached beneath the incomprehensible weight of worlds colliding. Five twisting peninsulas roamed across the worn landscape – their slightest motions shaking the tiny pack around as they settled into oddly well-fit grooves. Thrown about, hapless – instincts broke free at last as a flurry of tiny paws dashed blindly for any cover as the darkening shadow thickened before them. Panting, heaving dry dusty air – some tumbled into the creases and canyons. Those caught in the smooth runway without anywhere to hide or escape were abrasively smeared across the desolate domain as mountainsides pulverized them. For those caught between the tremendous landscapes a moist heat awaited. Dense and biting, it rolled over all – suffocating in its thickness and intensity. The biting sauna cooked them in their pelts. They withered and waned and perished without note or notice.

The world settled for a moment before being hefted up again. Catastrophic forces dragged those surviving down – slamming them like a snapped elevator cable ride to the ground. It hurt to even breathe – to struggle against the insurmountable gravitational force that pulled their organs down and separated vertebrae. At the epoch of that tug – everything inverted – throwing them into the air where they flailed before falling back down into a nest of course fibers or back against the merciless landscape – only for the cycle to begin anew with a jarring thoom. One by one, pulverized eyes winked shut with each passing clap of muffled thunder.

When at last the storm settled one of the myriad that had settled out remained. Perhaps there were more – but a head that could not turn and deafened ears registered little. Alone – isolated between mountainsides, battered and broken beyond repair, a lost mind drifted toward thoughts of home.


________

Kassy yawned and stretched his feet down from his bed – feeling blindly for his sandals as he groaned. Whoever was messaging him on Skype was being very persistent. His toes shuffled across the carpet – dragging strands along his toes a moment before finally he felt the hard edge of that well weathered rubber sandal beneath his heel. Shuffling a dismissive gruff he rubbed his eyes. God what time was it even? He mused as he twisted and popped his neck casually wriggled his toes into place. A few errant pieces of dust rolled and burst beneath his sleep-numbed sole. Too inconsequential to pay attention to. Satisfied his toes were positioned – he squeezed the narrow band of cloth there and plodded over to answer that impatient screen booping loudly across the landscape of his messy room.