Archive for April 5th, 2011
Fortnightcap: They Came
Posted by DLThurston in Fortnightcaps, Short Stories on April 5, 2011
They Came
A Fortnightcap by DL Thurston
They came. Their ships slipped out of space, moving sideways through slits in reality no one had ever noticed. Horrid things with slender necks and small heads, ringed with writhing tentacles. They spoke in a language that broke microphones, hurt ears, caused interference to air traffic control radars. They slipped through the world not caring for such things as geometry or physics. They had evolved far beyond either and cared only for dark malevolence.
We always hoped that the aliens would be friendly, that they would teach us and bring us out of darkness into a new enlightenment. These things taught us, but only new depths of pain and madness. Mankind has become subservient to these things, this fungus that has spread to Earth and left it a place of rot and decay. There is no release. They made us immortal out of some hideous spite. There is no worse fate, as it destroys all others, leaving us with only unending horror.
Our nations crumbled into anarchy as even our best and brightest proved no match for the forces that held us down. Resistance was fomented but would fall apart just as quickly. The last time I can even remember a harsh word being spoken against our new overlords was a century ago. Resistance requires spirit, and our spirit as a race has been so far broken, few can even remember the concept.
They came not from trillions of miles away, but from our own solar system. From a planet that we never knew existed, never even know could exist. While our attentions were upon Pluto, there was far beyond a frozen rock that birthed creatures hardened to such extremes that we could not handle what they had become. For while we could deny Pluto, we could not deny Yuggoth.
Fortnightcaps are biweekly experimentation into short form fiction. All Fortnightcaps are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. So if you like the story, please feel free to link people back here. And if you didn’t, maybe the one in two weeks will be better.