Another spontaneous story. Three shorts in a row - something is definitely wrong with me. It helps with the creative juices though, so I won't complain. Something different yet again. I don't think I've done anything like this before. Hopefully it's ok. Let me know what you think.

Think of this as a preview for what's to come in the eventual distant future.


Vesera belongs to my friend Popsock. I don't think he has an FA account.

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Space is endless and absolute – a host immeasurable, frozen in a delicate cosmic dance. Stars and planets sparkle like gems cast in a cold, black sea, glimmering with ephemeral splendor before sinking to the dark depths of eons lost. Nebulae and galaxies shine brighter still, primordial clouds of interstellar dust drifting further and further apart, scattered into the windless void, each no more a mere flicker of the torch. They fade in and out of the cracks of the impenetrable wall of the universe, there and gone again, born into the cold, snuffed out by indifference or exploding in one final defiant blaze. But the ash never settles, it is never blown away or truly ever gone – it is remade, remolded, reshaped into something new, birthed into something greater or lesser than it was before, only to be wiped from the slate again and again until the end of time. Such is the universe – a cold and uncaring parent consumed with expansion, obsessed with growth, stretching in infinite directions, scattering its wayward offspring into the frigid abyss. But within its frozen heart lies a flicker of warmth – a faltering, fleeting flame that comes and goes in the blink of a god’s eye, each shining like tiny lights. One such light was beginning to stir.

It opened its emerald eyes and stared into the darkness that stretched forever, clutching itself against the cold that bit deep into its purple scaled body. It kept silent and observed its surroundings, wary of the enormity of the barren void and its own insignificance. It saw the stars shining far off in the ebon expanse: blues, crimsons, yellows and whites, twinkling as they always have. It fixated on the yellow one first. The sun – It remembered one was called that once, though it might have gone by another name. It sounded the word out to itself: sun. Sky – it remembered that too, how the sun used to paint the sky in many splendid colors: blue, gray, red, violet, gold, pink… Green? It couldn’t remember anything more than those. It was so used to seeing black. But those colors were still familiar; it hoped it could remember more. It closed its green eyes and sighed a voiceless sigh that echoed into the void, carried away on distant solar winds. The sky – it tried so hard to remember what it felt like to be beneath such a colorful dome, beneath the exosphere, the thermosphere, the mesosphere, the stratosphere and the troposphere. It furrowed its scaly brow. Why could it remember such complicated words, but not its colors? So stupid; you’re forgetting too much. It clenched its eyes and thought hard. Memory is a sort of immortality, someone told it long ago; when something transcends the living world of flesh and into the realm of memory, it could never truly die. Would I die? Memories. The simplest one: a name. What was it? Who am I? Try to remember. You have to remember. Think! It took it a moment before it finally mouthed, Vesera. Vesera. Vesera. It remembered. It was Vesera – she was Vesera.

Something in the distance caught Vesera’s attention: a blue, green and brown little ball near a red giant of a star, drifting apart from the larger body yet following, like a dog trailing behind its master. She remembered these – these planets. Yes, that’s what they were called. She took to calling them orbs instead of planets: planets implied something grand and vast beyond comprehension, infinite in wonder and endless in splendor to the mortal eye. Orbs were smaller, simpler, each its own unique swirl of colors, endless in quantity and just as round as another. Vesera liked that. It was easier for her to process. I lived on an orb once, she recalled, letting her thoughts wander. A long time ago. The name of that orb was lost to her now, along with the places she saw, or may have worked at, or dwelled in; the foods she ate and their smells were growing dim. She couldn’t remember those either. She saw people, there, horned reptilian figures like herself – little ones. But they were outlines now, just waiting to be filled in – ghosts, rather than individuals. She shut her eyes. It no longer mattered: she doesn’t live among them anymore. She just drifts.

Curiosity got the better of her and she began to head towards it, drawn to the colorful ball as it grew larger and larger the closer she cautiously approached. It seemed so delicate, that little orb, drifting through the cosmos, lost like herself. Vesera corrected herself. Only she was lost: it was firmly held in place by the tug of its sun’s gravity, bound to it as the red giant was bound to the cosmic pull of its intergalactic neighbors, and they too were bound to the whims and whimsies of ever greater forces. Science, physics, you were good at this. Remember! She alone was free of such restrictions, able to float through the vacuum as she pleased. Freedom is liberation, she remembered herself saying once – or at least she thought it was her saying that. Liberation is empowerment. Then why did her empowerment leave her so desolate? So alone in the universe? She just wanted someplace to rest; someplace warm, familiar and friendly, where nobody would drive her off or call her a monster just for trying to start her life over on their world. Vesera shook her head and dismissed her rambling. Such thoughts were beneath her, unworthy of her time. Don’t dwell on useless things – focus!

Narrowing her gaze, Vesera stopped at a distance and scanned the orb, appraising it as one would admire fine art. She could see its swirling white wisps and its crystal clear oceans below, vast and pure, stretching across the surface, rolling and churning, crashing into then uneven greens and browns and greys of the blue veined land, some dipping low, others rising high, piercing the heavens themselves. Her eyes moved quickly as she listed its topography, mouthing each term to herself. Ocean. River. Lake. Mountain. Valley. Hill. Desert. Steppe. Plateau. Grassland. Tundra. Jungle. Can’t forget jungle. Uh… City? What else? That might have been it. The lizard smiled to herself anyways, proud of how much she named. The orb began to drift away, and Vesera followed, staring at the sphere for what seemed an eternity. She watched for weather patterns taking shape as the world slowly spun its axis: the jet streams that pushed the clouds along, strong storms and downpour falling on various regions; sunny, pleasant places; raging yellow dust storms; billowing grey smoke from volcanoes and forest fires that burned earth and charred the land black. Too many to count. The red sun rose and set; half the world sparkled and slept in darkness, unaware of the other half that awoke to a great shadow blocking the light. Odd, she thought, how the universe could create such wonders, such marvels of beauty in so many impossible colors and shapes and sizes, yet she couldn’t be moved by any of it. Not a stirring, or a tug, or even a pang of emotion. Nothing. Funny. Now that it was the other way around, it did nothing for her. It must have been better when you knew someone was there to appreciate it along with you, she mused. You knew you weren’t the only one looking up, and nobody was looking back. She used to cherish that view long ago, that starry black sky. She wanted to touch them so badly – reach out into the blackness and pluck a star from the heavens to call her very own. It was her drive then, the lizard vaguely remembered – her motivation, her obsession. Now she was finally among the twinkling lights. Vesera was beginning to remember a little more now. That’s good.

But she needed to get closer. She needed to see all the things she missed – all the people and the places, the noises, the sights and smells and sounds she was in danger of losing forever. She wanted to remember it all so badly. It was all locked away in a thick fog, herself running blindly through the recesses of her mind, stumbling and pushing away the mist only to find vague and fractured fragments of the past. But she reached out, apprehension tense in her trembling scaly hand, fingers stretching towards the blue of the orb. How long have I been drifting? Vesera thought, watching the looming shadow of night, the five tips of her black claws glowing red. I’m so tired of drifting. I just want to rest. But the purple lizard paused, then pulled her hand away, night receding, disappointed in herself. It’s a dream, Vesera, a stupid fantasy. You’ll never get that life back. She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath and reached out again. I still have to try.

Five towering shadows stretched for the orb, spreading over vast swathes of the land, plunging half the world into calamity and total darkness. For the inhabitants, it was the end of days – five heavenly bodies, impossibly long, purple and scaly, crashing through the burning atmosphere, setting the air itself on fire. Displaced and destructive hurricane winds whipping and tearing across the surface for thousands of miles around, shredding trees and buildings to ribbons, heralding their imminent planetfall. Immeasurably long, wicked black claws pierced the clouds and air, ushering in deadly and unheard of weather anomalies: torrential rains, monstrous winds and flooding of biblical proportions, sweeping away untold billions of lives, swallowing the doomed coasts beneath the raging seas of the orb. Yet the drowned were fortunate, for they were spared from her touch – the rest must suffer her embrace – the sky of purple closing in, falling faster and faster, blackening day and crushing winds seconds before impact. The final moments were always the worst – everything seems to die away so quickly, buildings disintegrating, homes obliterated before their eyes, then everything goes in slow motion as they take in one final, dreadful scream. The planet surely wept with the holes her fingers carved into its crust, the clap of scale hitting earth fractured the bleeding land. Its cracked, broken and blistered skin ran red with flowing magma. Oceans rose and fell to the touch of her fingers digging through the crust; cavernous fissures and unimaginable seismic activity displaced megatons of seawater that rode for miles and miles without end, countless waves growing in size and fury before crashing into land as multi-mile high tsunamis that swept inland for miles, dragging away any trace of civilization caught in its terrible wake, back into the roiling sea. With one simple action – one gentle touch – Vesera caused global annihilation, terraforming of apocalyptic scale as the world was rent asunder within her grasp.

It feels so warm, she thought before cupping her palm along the bottom of the orb, feeling the brief quiver, crunch and crack of rocky, mountainous earth as the ball settled in her grip. It was a comforting, cozy warmth, the half she held, still exposed to the heat of the red gas giant – like a rock sitting in the morning sun. It was unlike the cold of space, or the faint heat of distant blazing stars she was so used to. She liked it. Her vast snout came closer to the ocean and she breathed in; the sheer force of her lungpower drew back the sea, revealing the devastation of the tides – the washed out cities, flooded landscapes and ruined metropolises – sending the waters back to whence they came and up into the atmosphere as two swirling cyclones impossibly tall that reached tip of her nose. The faint, salty smell of the ocean. She remembered that too. Then another image – two little girls and herself walking along a sunny beach hand-in-hand, sun and birds above, warm sand and cool waves tickling their feet. Vesera pulled her snout away, shocked. Who are they? One child – she looks like me – black and white striped horns on her head, dark purple scales, slender frame and long black claws, and blue eyes instead of green. That one examined every rock, studying each one she held in her little inquisitive hands. The other child – who are you? – blue and black striped horns, lavender scales, sturdier frame, pale blue eyes, larger feet. She just smashed every rock underfoot, stepping on them as hard as she could. That hazy image was all she had before it went dark and faded. What are their names? Vesera exhaled and the water fell from her nose, the massive twisters dispersing; oceans crashing into the orb in a torrential downpour of rain that wet her fingertips and flooded the crust. She was beginning to feel a little bad now. All she had were murky recollections, no names or faces – just purple, reptilian outlines on the sunny shore. It will come back. Focus. The lizard plucked the orb from orbit, feeling the slight tug of gravity as one would pluck an apple from a tree. She held it higher, closer to her emerald eyes, mesmerized by the swirling and muddled multitude of colors - the grey-brown grit of the flattened broken land beneath her fingers, the warm glow of crimson and red lava licking her claws, the coolness of the churning blue seas in her palm, the scattered, dark clouds of flickering white lightning forming around her hand. So lovely, she kept thinking. I used to live on one of these.

Her fascination quickly turned to sadness. There was no way to become a part of that anymore. She drifts now, a part of the cosmic dance – an anomaly the universe never took into account. The choices she made – choices she couldn’t even remember – had led to this. It probably didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things: she was still Vesera and she was still among the living, sleeping, drifting from dream to dream through the void of space as a bizarre celestial body. It was a cold reality, and a lonely one, but it was all she had now. She guided the orb lower and held it to her bare chest, its warmth radiating through her breasts as she cradled it. How she wished it could thaw her heart. It went cold so long ago.

Vesera’s stomach churned. Great tremors shot from her gut and through her body, the slightest vibrations running through her chest, rattling the ravaged orb in her hand. The horned lizard couldn’t feel it cracking in her palms, bleeding more magma, the unearthly upheaval splitting its continents ever further apart. A pang of guilt formed in her vast features as she stared at the cracked sphere. She became so frail from the lack of food, not having eaten since her ascension. She thought her body would be beyond such base urges and discomfort. Power shouldn’t make you feel so weak. Her gut grumbled again, harder now, sending pain through her body. The universe grew hazy, glimmer of distant lights fading; her mind was dimming, shutting down to preserve itself. She had to eat something – she had to feed – but on what? She couldn’t pour water from an orb and into her hand, or suck its oceans dry with her lips to slake her thirst – plucking greens and animals from the land to satiate her hunger was also out of the question. Takes too long; too messy. It wouldn’t have been enough: nobody can live off scraps forever. She needed sustenance – something meatier, more filling, full of proteins and minerals, fiber and carbohydrates and other big scientific words she struggled to recall. I just need to eat!

Vesera looked down at the orb again, gazing into the ruined planet’s skies as they grew black and darkened, flashes of hot white pouring from the clouds and onto the land, smoke rising from fire, lava and steaming ocean, congealing, dripping onto her fingers like juice from a ripe fruit. Her mouth began to water. You shouldn’t feel bad, she thought. There are – well, were, living things; millions, billions, maybe trillions of creatures living their lives down there. Billions of years of evolution, thousands of years of civilization shoved down my gullet. In broken, molten chunks. Digesting. The purple lizard cringed and pulled the orb away from her watering lips. That was a downer. She took another breath and pulled it closer. Not a big deal, just eat, she mouthed. You need the food, the strength, the energy. You’re more important than them. Eat! She grew nervous and inspected it with trembling hands, taking great pains to examine the sphere and its surface. Through the billowing clouds, the rising sea and the smoke and the storms, she couldn’t see anyone. No people, no animals, no cars, no buildings, nothing, only the jumbled and disorderly colors of the orb and the huge blue craters and the red pockmarked gouges of her fingers and claws. The screams and pleas of survivors clinging to whatever land they could never reached her. They begged with the heavenly entity, bargaining whatever material wealth they could salvage so she spare their miserable lives; the crashing of the waves against jagged, broken shores and the tops of skyscrapers only silenced them. Earthquakes, the tremors and the aftershocks that rent the globe asunder were a din over the waves. Their mortal ruin fell on deaf ears – her churning stomach drowned it all out. They’re just germs, she reasoned, specks, microscopic bacteria squirming beneath my fingers, unseen and unheard. Many were imperceptible and inoffensive to her species’ palate. She never got sick from germs before. Why would she now? Vesera pulled it closer, her hot breath forming ruinous waves and hurricanes in its oceans, the orb a mere distance from her mouth. Now or never. Just a taste…

Her great maw – a widening void – stretched around the orb, revealing rows of sharp, jagged fangs to the universe, glinting blood red in the crimson sun's light. Thick strands of drool longer than the planet fell from her slavering lips in quantities far greater than the ruined world could ever dare to hold. They hung from her teeth, dripping from her lips and onto the sphere itself, a torrential flooding of saliva raining down upon the broken land in great waves, rippling across its quivering, dented surface. Just a taste, she reminded herself as her endless fingers dragged the world closer, revealing the cratered land beneath them; long valley-like gashes thousands of miles long and hundreds wide, each ending in huge puncture holes from her great black claws that drilled a thousand feet deep, water, spittle and magma rushing in to fill the gaps, sweeping everything up and into the monstrous valleys as she moved the planet past her lips and to the black, never-ending, gurgling hole of her throat. The doomed celestial body, bleeding and wounded, was on the verge of eternal darkness, little more than fuel for her impossibly huge and hungry body. Just a taste. Vesera bit down with all the force she could muster. Thousands of teratons of fang – tens of thousands of nuclear bombs – cracked the planet like meteorites, splitting the world down the middle, sending earth and fire and ash into space like gouts of blood. Her steak knife teeth sunk into the crust and into the hot, gushing mantle; her ill-fated meal could only quiver as she fed upon it, taking one gigantic bite after another as her lava coated lips dug into the throbbing molten core, forcing more slag and molten earth to the surface.

It tasted so good, was all she thought. Like the sweetest fruit I ever had. The mangled planet disappeared in huge chunks with every terrible bite she took, each shattered fragment getting crunched and chewed up in her moist mouth, saliva and tongue working it in unison to form a moistened, ground-up froth before she swallowed the first chunk, sending into the abyss of her waiting gullet. Her throat distended, widening slightly as each piece slid down, warming her insides better than she thought it ever would. The ocean water dribbling from her lips was swallowed next, a cool and refreshing drink that washed down her throat, chasing the hot magma down before it caught up and steamed in her gurgling stomach. Each mouthful was better than the last. She could feel her strength rebuilding, renewing itself – her body and mind growing stronger, more alert and aware than ever as she devoured the last craggy fragment of the planet in a frenzy of hunger, leaving nothing behind but flecks of saliva coated earth - mere crumbs. There was nothing left after that. The colorful, swirling orb was gone, forever lost to the depths of her stomach, its matter now hers alone, and all that was left in its place was Vesera. The lizard took a deep breath afterwards, finally coming down from her hunger induced fit. She looked at her shaking hands, still stained red with magma. Was that it? she wondered, swallowing the last of the world down her throat with a loud gulp, licking her lips to get at the last of its precious life giving juice. I just ate a planet. Trillions wiped away, its history erased, any and all contributions to the universe, great or small, were removed from existence. Her hunger was their end, but she was stronger for it. They were just germs, she reminded herself, trying to shake the uneasy feeling of total genocide from her mind. Germs that got in the way of me and my meal. She couldn’t feel for them if she wanted to live. She had to eat or she would have starved. Eat or be eaten. Was that not the fundamental law of the universe? No matter. Energy was flowing, and her mind was churning. She could remember a little better than before.

She thought about the children again, walking along the beach, herself holding onto their little hands as the three traveled the turbulent shores of her memory. The image was a little clearer now - less foggy, though their faces were still smudged up, still unrecognizable. The children. One inquisitive, the other destructive. Are they mine? The thought receded and others came flooding back, still in tiny, broken pieces. The children again. Then some kind of device. Home? Horned lizards like herself, all in lab coats. Work? Then blinding light. Pain. Screaming. Everyone running. Warmth. Blur, then a headache. Vesera put a hand to her forehead and took a breath before staring into the cold vacuum around her. That’s enough, she told herself. It’ll all come back. Just keep remembering. Keep eating. Keep getting stronger. That’s all that matters now. She felt her body shutting down again, mind wracked with sudden fatigue. Relax. The immense lizard was still weak and needed to conserve her strength. This meal only pulled her from the brink – she would need to feed again soon. Just drift. Kicking out with her legs and powerful tail, floating through the cosmic debris of a devoured world, she closed her eyes and curled into a fetal ball. So cold. Tiny rocks from the former sphere pelted her scales and broke apart, unable to hold back the drifting celestial giant as she faded from the red sun and into the black depths of space, in search of answers and another meal. Say your name. Remember. Live. She didn’t know how long it would take, but as long as she remembered, she had all the time in the universe.