This is my entry for week #21 of the @bananafish's Finish the Story contest.

This week, the prompt was scribed by @marcoriccardi. I was excited to read it and find floating castles. I've actually written a few short stories using them as a plot element. I don't ever plan on posting it on Steemit cause I'm hoping one day to turn it into a fantasy novel.

Anyway, below is the prompt.

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The Border

In the scant shadow of the guardhouse, a greenhorn Border Legionnaire was waiting for the end of his first watch shift, gasping for the heat.

Below him, there was the stretch of sandy desert that the XIX Floating Fortress patrolled incessantly, moving back and forth in the sky like a surreal and phlegmatic cetacean, with the low and incessant buzz of the managems that powered it.

Behind the line of Fortresses, the Lands of Man ideally began. In that marginal strip, there were meager pastures and stretches of scrubby bushes, attacked for miles and miles by a fine sand, like yellowish talcum powder, that made the desert gain extension every year.

"This year the wind has put so much sand down," the marshal told him, biting a gray mustache, one of the last days before the Duty Beginning ceremony. "And behind the sand, the Those arrive".

He was glad he no longer had just a stunner to defend him from the Those, like the guardians of the border in former times, before the Legions. Once, it was thought to direct the Those into reserves to prevent them from doing too much damage with their insatiable hunger, but then they started to run away, to strip the flesh off every head of cattle, to waste fields and orchards, to devour even the people... and more and more came from the desert.

He had been among the first in his draft class in combat and shooting exercises, but in his heart he was afraid of when he would found himself in front of a real That, and not an illusory image created by the trainers. It took him months to get used to the slouching and snappy movements of those lean and black illusions, all teeth, which he found horrifying.
During that first day of service, however, only an armored convoy had passed, transporting ordered and dull clusters of goleminers to the mysterious and vital mines of managems, on the other side of the desert. The Those did not find goleminers edible, luckily.

The Horn of Danger snatched him cruelly from his thoughts. Intruders in the fortress! How did they get in? How did they pass under our noses?

He grabbed the heavy terminator and ran down the spiral staircase, toward his team's collection point, his heart in his throat.

A scraping noise from a corridor to his right made him stop. Pointing the terminator in the dark, with a trembling grip, he shouted "Who goes there?!?"

The Those came out, completely different from the illusions of the trainers...

My Ending

All Remy saw were the eyes. Bulging red and glowing in the dark. Tens of them resting upon one another like a single worm burrowing down a tunnel.

He pointed his trembling terminator, remembering his training.

The weapon required utmost precision of the mind. A true connection between will and thought. A unity of the soul with the managem resting at the end of the spear.

Remy focused, breathed deep. He began reciting his meditative mantra, hearing the scampering beasts rush towards him.

Remy aimed the weapon.

Then he broke and ran.

He raced up the stairs, hearing the growling flesheaters at he tail. The Those. Devils incarnate. Man’s evil condensed into a single form of insatiable hunger.

Remy felt the crash of a beast that lept atop him. He smashed against the stone walls of the winding staircase and wrestled it. The monster’s black hair drapped over him like a drapery of rotting flesh. He actually smelled its hunger, somewhere between blood and cinders. Saliva fell on his face as he used his terminator to push back against the beast’s neck.

The That snapped its jaws against his face, inches from his flesh. It snapped again and Remy felt the certainty of his own doom.

A blast from the stairs above shook him from his fright. Lightning, green and torrential, blew the That off his chest.

Another bolt, now far more immense, disintegrated the beast in a cloud of eviscerated meat and blood. Remy looked up to see Ovid, captain of the XIX, leap down in front of him.

“Stand, you fool!” he shouted. He began to blast away at the Those, erupting the air into a fog of death as they rushed up the staircase like an army of spiders. Remy sat in horror. The Those never ended. From each one that Ovid burst asunder, two more emerged. This wasn’t a break-in, Remy thought. They were facing down an assault from an entire nest. “Stand and fight!” Ovid roared.

Remy, his hands still trembling, forced himself to stand and wield his terminator. The army of Those relented. Ovid’s terminator kept them at bay in the bottleneck of the stairwell. Remy aimed his weapon down at them, their eyes peering from behind the corners of stone.

Then he heard it.

Those laughing. The sound could only be compared to cries of ravens, only harsher, more guttural. The chorus of Those laughing began to vibrate the stone walls. It grew to a piercing shriek. Ovid stood strong, unmoving, a man wrought of cold iron. Remy began to waver.

“They’re preparing an attack.” Remy couldn’t understand how Ovid did it. How the man sent his voice to him through the wailing cacophony of man eaters. “If you break, we’re both dead,” Ovid continued. “This is when you decide, boy. This is when you decide who you are. Are you a legion or a farmer?”

They attacked.

Ovid blasted a bolt of lightning at the onrushing Those.

Remy fled up the stairs.

END

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