Awakenings / Lifeslide - Finish the Story #32

Awakenings

[The first part of the story is provided by @f3nix:]

The hoverbike lay abandoned on its side, the engine still warm. The fine black dust carried by the incessant wind was a snake that crept in every small recess.
From the top of the dune the Tesseract 19 could be seen with the naked eye. The column pierced the black sea of graphite and challenged the dark crimson sky. The awareness of his distance made him wince. That construction was enormous. That impenetrable artifact, Moloch's sharpest tooth.

Intertwined with dust, the warm wind brought an imperceptible howl: the bark of the monolith, an omen of death.

The man waited, a stiff exoskeleton bent over the black sand. The helmet lay abandoned beside him. Soon the team would have arrived.

"Soon you will arrive too, and everything will be accomplished, one way or another."

He thought of her smile, her courage, her strength. "My life, how could I've been so reckless to have you involved in all this?" The tears were already kneading blackened as the memories of their happy normality swept over him.

"I cannot let them find me like this". He stared at himself from outside: another tower on a dune, far more uncertain than the one that howled his feral wish.

These and other demons echoed within the chambers of his soul, when his eyes met a green sprout. The man stared that little miracle that, against every odd, was striving to affirm its existence. In the midst of that sea of bottomless despair.

The tear finally found its way lingering and bathed a leaf. The man managed to pull himself together and, now smiling, he put on his helmet.

"This Moloch will tremble, time has come for an awakening."


mushroom-3742554_1280.jpg
Source: Pixabay


Lifeslide


[This is my ending of the story, and it came out as a freewrite, at first. Later, I expanded and edited it. In the end it turned out to be 677 words, but I have renounced to keep myself under the limit, if the story takes me away.]

The drop ran between the delicate ribs of the leaf, turned around the notched edge, remaining for a moment held back by the tiny hairs that covered the green surface. The edge flexed downward by the weight of the tear, then vibrated elastically toward the purple sky. The drop fell and was drunk from the black and greedy soil. The bud breathed in silence. Microscopic stomata spread out and opened on the lower face of the leaves.

The vibration caused the awakening of a small chrysalis that slept the sleep of transformation, waiting for the right moment. A microscopic tooth accurately cut the apex of the parchment shell, similar to a small hammock beneath the leaf. The insect came out into the world, hesitant, testing it with new antennae. With unsteady paws, it hoisted himself on the leaf.

The movement was seized by one of the hundred prismatic eyes of the ferocious dragonfly that stood in the shadow of a jagged obsidian rock. The perfect zigzagging of a take-off with four diaphanous wings, the rapid and silent swoop, the opening of keratinous jaws. The insect was hunched, just as it was born, by the predatory dragonfly, who moved away over the black sand with its long-awaited meal.

A very slight landslide in the side of a dune, the emergence of a prickly and scaly, triangular head, the blinking of a vertical slit pupil: the sand lizard sailed with quick steps on the hot sand. The opening of a pink slit and the precise darting of a wet tongue. The entangled dragonfly ended its flight, trailing back to the sharp teeth bite of the lizard.

A tiny shadow in front of the sun, the lazy kite of flight feathers which, with a change of direction of the hooked head, turned into a swooping arrow downward. The fan of opened feathers, claws stretched forward, the hooked lizard and the flight that came up with powerful wing beats.

The lofty leap of the desert lynx, black and spotted, with slanting and green eyes fixed towards the sky. The precise and sharp paw, which interrupted the falcon's takeoff and knocked it down to the ground. The bite came quickly to break its neck.

But the black sand around the feline moved, reacting to the vibrations of the ground. The obsidian surface erupted in an explosion of fragments, while the pincers of the gigantic sand worm closed, fatal, on the lynx. With an elegant bow, the segmented body plunged back into the depths of the desert, moving the ground and causing a chain of landslides.

The sand fell down, carrying with it some pebbles, which bumped the nearby rocks, and then others, and then others, until a whole dune slid lower, exposing to the sunlight a huge fungal volva, white and membranous, which under the burning rays puffed up to the maximum tension, revealing within it a swarm of fleshy tentacles, arranged in radial pattern.

The tentacles parted with a snap, tearing apart the volva, forming the fruitbody of a huge mushroom. The hyphae, brought back to life after millennia in which they had remained dormant, swelled looking for nourishment in the arid soil.

A shiver of life ran along the thick mycelium network, and reached the foundations of Tesseract 19, which had silently enveloped underground. The thrill of the hyphae made the graphite tower tremble, just as the team arrived in battle formation on the hoverbikes.

A hand covered by the exoskeleton grabbed the hand, equally armored, that the man was tending towards the sky, and hoisted him on the screaming vehicle.

The morituri team darted over the Mouth of the Moloch, while it shook as if to drive away the toothache caused by the upheaval of Tesseract 19. The black sand fell, outlining for a moment the dark funnel of Moloch's pharynx.

The laser safety catches snapped almost in unison on the hoverbikes, that swooped towards the weak point.

Under the helmet, the warrior's cheek still held the thin slime of the falling tear, the beginning of the unstoppable lifeslide.


official storyteller.jpg


This is my entry for the week #32 of the awesome contest held by @bananafish: Finish the Story, the best way to earn STEEM and Steem Basic Income Shares.

Click the banner below for more information on the Finish the Story contest:


Thank you for reading!




The house of all the Freewriters!

Follow the Bananafish, follow its trail!

Sort:  



This post has been rated by the user-run curation platform CI! In this platform users are able to manually curate content. This is done regardless of Steem Power, for both rewards and vote size calculation.

Join in at our site here!
https://collectiveintelligence.red/

Or join us on discord to interact with the community!
https://discord.gg/sx6dYxt



This post was submitted for curation by: @f3nix
This post was given a rating of: 0.9937903063562952
This post was voted: 95.26%

Today on the National Geographic: plays ending. And this is the circle of life as meant by Disney’s The Jungle King beginning song “the circle of life.” Next time? We’ll be doing a coverage of Dark M[expunged]. Upvot’d and resteem’d.
880A9213-C59B-41F8-B41B-FE012B731657.gif

Ahahahah! Best comment ever! Thank you!

You made a whole evolution take place, from the tiny little one to the big one. A kind of butterfly wing whose movement leads to an earthquake. What does life need to awaken? Probably something called love. Someone who cares. Some die although they have been wetted because there was not enough food in the water of life, others blossom because of the smallest breath and the smallest quantity.

I was thinking about butterfly effect, and about how life and death are intertwined together 😉

wow you have managed to fit so much in still! This is so impressive! I love the descriptions of the dragonfly emerging into the world. A suicide mission for a greater causing, accidentally awakening a slumbering creature with a single tear, the drop of moisture it had waited for for so long. Something beautifully fitting about it <3

In addition to the dragonfly, I tried to build a whole fantastic food chain, like in those popular nursery rhymes where, in each stanza, one more element is added, and everything is repeated backwards.

hello there, is it okay to ask. How to enter in this kind of contest? Thank you

Posted using Partiko Android

https://steemit.com/finishthestory/@bananafish/finish-the-story-contest-week-32

Here you can find all the information needed. Basically: read the first part of the story, write your ending part (trying to do it in max 500 words), make a post with it, tagged #finishthestory, put the link to the post in comments in the prompt post. :)
Easy peasy!

Don't worry if you're late for this edition, on Wednesday there will be a new edition!

The moment of creation--a spark, a germ from which all life in this dark place will spring. You were inspired by a wisp that was nourished by pity and love. From that grew hope and the possibility of prevailing over the evil of the Moloch. This is an epic, and it is beautiful.

Congratulations @marcoriccardi! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

Award for the number of upvotes received

Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

SteemitBoard Ranking update - Resteem and Resteemed added

Support SteemitBoard's project! Vote for its witness and get one more award!

The chain reaction set in motion by that single tear is epic. I love the detailed descriptions of each creature, and how every one of them gets its moment in the spotlight. We feel how alive and unique it is.. and then it's gobbled up. Even in that seeming wasteland, life abounds, beautiful and violent!

Also, lifeslide is an awesome word! :D

Thank you... at a certain moment I was thinking about quoting Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, but it would be too much edgy...

Ohh ..very very nice escalation/circular story. You grabbed the essence of the sprout element within my narration, in its opposition to the brute overwhelming strength of the tower.

...alla fiera dell'Held, per due soldi, un verme di Dune mio padre comprò!

Ora che ho questo mash-up in testa lo devo scrivere: Branduardi (il vero Kunst Meister), Giona, Pinocchio e i Tortillas formano un ka-tet, diventano Pistoleri/kwisatz haderach e vanno alla ricerca della Torre Nera sul pianeta Dune!

Economico come verme! XD

Congratulations @marcoriccardi! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You made more than 6000 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 7000 upvotes.

Click here to view your Board of Honor
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

Trick or Treat - Publish your scariest halloween story and win a new badge
SteemitBoard notifications improved

Support SteemitBoard's project! Vote for its witness and get one more award!

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 71539.00
ETH 3603.23
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.75