This is my entry into Finish the Story Contest hosted by the @bananafish.
One of these days I'd love to know how @f3nix comes up with his visuals he uses in his stories. I'm always in awe as I read. And then the research it takes to understand a tiny bit of what his brain produces leaves me flabbergasted.
I threw caution to the wind and went off of Lucid Dreaming for this one. I didn't know how else to approach this piece.
by @f3nix
There it was. An immense sphere, soaked in the amniotic liquid of the lucid dream. An embryo of edges, curves, dimensions, and impossible geometries. Static and fluid at the same time, iridescent, elusive and hypnotic in its eternal becoming.
There it was. After the struggle and the debris. There it was. Yoh's conscience.
Strung like pearls, millennia had relegated it to a mere legend, while Yoh raged freely on Earth. The existence of the conscience on a deep and subtle plane had been denied by the Master Demiurges, who originally created the source code. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had become inexorable, relegating Yoh's conscience first to the status of children's fable and then to nothingness. It had slept for a long, long time.
There, on board of the DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, drifting in the outer space, Ethan had plenty of time for being instructed by the orbital station's A.I. about the possible effects on him of Yoh's conscience sudden epiphany.
It was not a God but it got close. This implied that the disintegration of the self, on all the planes of existence, was a more than spontaneous and probable event, as someone reached its proximity.
A sound of laborious ants interrupted Ethan’s astonished musings. The meta-viewer force fields were working around him incessantly, raising the programmed shields.
The mere sight of its unstable geometries would have been fatal for him. The neural system of his exoskeleton was crackling and working hard, at the edge of its computing power, to prevent the involuntary assimilation. Now he found himself immersed in a bath of waves that could have slipped him into oblivion instantly if he had not activated all the exoskeleton’s guard levels.
He felt like an infinitesimal dipteran, imprisoned in a dense amber atmosphere.
The Conscience's voices suddenly whipped Ethan's synapses like a thousand organ pipes in unison. He fell to his knees, eyes wide open and incredulous: no A.I. could ever have prepared him for this.
"I am. I happen. By dreaming, I have sung the creation of infinite worlds. Are you a Master?"
Ethan recorded the strange question, slowly taking courage. Standing up on his trembling legs, he pulled off his helmet and shouted:
"Conscience of Yoh, I am not a Master. I am the last of your creations, forgotten in your long sleep".
A deafening, golden silence.
As the most intimate essence of each cell began to evaporate through his cybernetic shell, Ethan frantically sought one last thought.
The thought eluded him and vanished.
Ethan suddenly found himself falling into an abyss. A wall of geometrical shapes lit by luminescent bulbs circled around him. He reached out to grab hold, wanting to stop his descent into the unknown. He yanked his hand back when he noticed the dorsal appendage and then the razor sharp, clear teeth that accompanied the deepspace angelfish.
Unexpectedly, he hit ground, which knocked the wind out of him. A cloud of black dust engulfed him. The exoskeleton suit flashed from blue to red back to blue and then stabilized back to normal as the dust settled around him.
Standing and dusting himself off, Ethan looked up and saw a black beast, the matter utterly untouched by spirit or consciousness, staring at him under the dim light of the new moon, the pure maiden. The black beast reared up on its hind legs and kicked wildly in the air. Enflamed smoke exited its red nostrils as it landed down on all fours.
Ethan ran up to the black beast and mounted it. When he did, the beast turned from a black to a bright white and he was dressed in the armor to match. The white beast sped off in the direction of the now full moon, following the mother in the direction she led them.
The beast sliced through a valley, leaving a gaseous tail of ice and dust in its wake as the sun strikes down with a vengeance.
Off in the distance, a castle appeared on the top of a barren ridge.
Ethan's suit pulsated, letting him know he's got to get the answer to his question soon.
"Yoh, I need the secret that will get me back to earth." Ethan saw his words, a visible waveform, enter into the unknown space around him and fall to the ground, which reminded him of the times he'd witnessed the icy tundra weather back home take the moister from his exhaled breath and instantly turned it into heavy ice crystals, sounding off like thousands of tiny needles splintering the frozen ground.
"Only a master can put into action the answer. You've not learned enough to pass through white. Go home."
Yoh's words cut the legs of Ethan's beast at the ankles. The beast let out a shrill cry as it toppled over.
Ethan jumped off the beast's back, landing on his feet in water that reached to his knees. Thousands of medicinal leeches bolted to latch on to any body part, human or not, they could drain the life from.
Ethan slashed at the hirudiniformes with his clawed bare hands. A sea of red formed around him.
The moon was now the old moon. The crone turned her back on Ethan.
Looking again at the castle on the ridge, the sun ducked behind the merlons, but peaked through the merlon's crosses, casting the sign of a cross in the water. The water evaporated, leaving Ethan standing in a sea of red sand.
Ethan took a step forward and was immediately sucked down into a sand trap. Only his head remained above the sand. He could feel his body, but as he made the slightest of movements, the sand around him constricted him like a boa constrictor constricting its prey.
"*Return from whence you came, Creature of Destruction. Return here when you've moved into the black, the time when woundedness, humor, and humanity enter into your very being."
"The ship is damaged. I need your help."
"If you won't listen to my words, you'll force my hand - ... I'll kill you off."
Ethan sprang up from his lucid dream when the onboard A.I. turned up the voltage on his exoskeleton suit, rudely shocking him awake. "What did you learn?" it asks, not waiting for him to catch his barrings.
"Something about moving into black." Ethan looked out the window into the deep darkness that stretched beyond his current imagination. Loneliness. The last frontier.
THE END
I just finished rereading "Iron John: A Book About Men" by Robert Bly. In there, one of the things he speaks of is 'The Great Mother Sequence,' 'The Alchemist's Sequence,' and 'The Masculine Sequence.' This is where the different colors I played with came from.
I highly recommend the above book for men and "Women Who Run With the Wolves" by Clarissa Pinkola Estés for women who'd like to gain some understanding of the power mythology has on our psyches. These two books are a couple of the top favorites I've read thus far in my life.
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| Previous | Finish the Story Contest | Entries | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Town That Changed | Even the Clouds Smile | The Border | Horror Vacui | |
| Black Star | Quitting Life | LER | It Awakens | |
| Apocalypse and Pretzels | Metallic Kisses | Curie upvoted The Battle of Bloodneck Valley | Awakening | |
| Curie Upvoted Obstinancy | The Last Will and Testament of Geralda Connors | Curie Upvoted Pirate Hunters | Spoon-fed Memories |
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If you are enjoying my work, please -
- I'm asking for something a little extra for the next couple of months. Please, if you can, support me in getting to Afrika. You can find the page I set up on gofundme. Your help is very much needed and appreciated.
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Upvote my posts through steem auto and add the other people and groups you would like to support.
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- Coming to you from arcange, a friendly warning to all who want to be successful on the steemit platform:
A bit of paranoia is the basis of security.
There are a few simple rules to follow in order to avoid having your account hacked:
Rule 1: NEVER, I repeat, NEVER use or give your owner key or password!
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Tools:
- The Most Dangerous Writing App - This program keeps me from getting to bogged down with what I think is the perfect way. It forces me to keep writing no matter what comes to mind.
- Grammarly - I use this app all the time to catch my mistakes. If I didn't have a spell checker, you would be lost in my world. haha!
- Hemmingway App: Another useful tool to help you make your writing more clear, comprehensive, and easier to understand.
- Steem World: After the @ symbol, enter your name or anyone elses name to see a host of information regarding what is going on with an account.
- List of 21 sites. Photos that you can use freely in your blog posts.
twenty-four hour short story - You gotta be quick to get this one posted in time. He posts the contest on Sunday (usually) and ends it about 48 hours later. This contest has a 2000 word limit.
Finish the Story Contest - The contest begins on Wednesday (usually) and end 5 days later. This contest will test your write skills with something a little different each week. Pletty of time to write something around the 500 word mark.
Steem Monsters Common Card Fantasy Story Contest! - Coming out roughly every week. If you enjoy card games like Magic, Yugio, and others like it, you might like this game. Write a fictional tale about the card they present in the contest and your entry just might be the one they choose to showcase.
Tell A Story To Me, And Win 5 SBD! Writing Contest - Kind of random when it comes out but don't worry. You will have two weeks to complete your work of art from the given prompt. Have fun!
Haiku - These are coming out every couple days or so. If you stuggle with rhymes, no worries. Haikus don't have to rhyme. All you need to make a haiku is five syllable on the first, seven syllables in the second line, and again back to five syllable for the last line. So easy it makes me think I'm being super product. LOL
Mizu No Oto - Every Image Has Its Haiku Contest - By reading the title, you should be able to guess how this haiku contest works. You're given an image and you write. I've really enjoy this contest because there are people here who've actually gone to classes to learn how to write haiku's; so if you want, you also can learn how to write quality haikus from reading the comments and critiques they and others give.
50-word Challenge - This is an interesting challenge and very challenging to say the least. You only get fifty words to tell a story or a vignettes. Here is a great post that will explain the difference between the two concepts. Good luck, Brave Story Writer!
Vocab-Ability 1x1 - What happens is you are given a list of roots and the words they can be found in. You create sentence using those words and post in the comment section of the post. Your upvote for your creative work will come soon. One of the best way to increase your vocabulary is by doing these 10-15 minute exercises almost daily. What craziness will you create?