Icarus (Horror and Sci-fi Short-Story)

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The space colonist couple formed by Beatrice and Dante was sailing in the middle of the Milky Way in their Icarus mothership. When the ship reached the solar system, Dante's ship was ejected violently through a hatch and fell directly to what was once the planet Earth.

Beatrice decided to take her ship and make a forced landing on the Earth's surface. She was equipped with a plasma rifle and an eze suit for exploration that gave her everything that’s necessary to subsist on uninhabitable environments. She left her ship and she promptly found herself walking through a planet totally devastated by fire, everything that surrounded her had a certainly unspeakable aspect. –Some climate apocalypse must’ve left the planet in these conditions –Beatrice thought self-absorbed, she was trying to ignore what her radar seemed to indicate.

Trying to keep her resilient, Beatrice forced herself to walk with a slow step while observing with disgust a large number of small grooves and geysers that expelled large amounts of sulfur under pressure, or at least that's what was indicating her cerebral nano-radar. Beatrice soon realized that, since she’d been in that place, she had felt harassed by some unidentified life forms, silhouettes with quadruped forms that were almost imperceptible and that seemed to be consuming the bodies of other creatures. What Beatrice was already sure of is that, after all, the planet wasn’t uninhabited.

When she approached a volcano that seemed to expel a sort of disgusting lava of a color as dark as tar, one of the forms finally lashed out at Beatrice and then threw her near to the black lava flow. Quickly Beatrice held her rifle and points towards the beast. That was when she could observe it from head to toe: a jet black dog with horns like a bull and a serpentine tail. The animal opened its jaws and threw a ball of blood with decomposed viscera at her, luckily the suit of exploration protected Beatrice from its attack. Beatrice pulled the trigger of her rifle, which fired a flurry of condensed energy that shattered much of the beast's head.

After the horrifying episode, Beatrice got up with exaltation, but she continued her journey. While she was climbing the summit, she managed to hear a demonic scream that seemed to come from the bowels of the volcano. In a matter of seconds, a huge viscous shape emerged from the volcano and positioned itself in front of Beatrice.

"Hell and Earth have finally reached conciliation, now I am the Duke who rules over this area. You will have to pay the price to raise this summit,” The decrepit form pronounced between drowned voices.

Beatrice was terrified to see the decrepit human bodies protruding from the body of that monster.

"I’ve only come here to save my beloved, and for him, I'm willing to face the horrors of this hell," Beatrice retorted bluntly.

The demon screamed from its entrails and it jumped out, and then it took her with a huge force, it threw her towards the abysmal crater. Beatrice fell on the tar, the tormented souls that subsisted there began to drag her body into the depths of the pit. The tar demon darted towards her to consume her completely. Dominated by her nerve, Beatrice tried to use her plasma rifle, but her hands were shaking so much, so the rifle dropped into the thick black fluid. The viscous form finally fell over her, beginning the process of disintegration of flesh, but Beatrice had already managed to take out an energy knife from her forearm, which projecting a flash of blue glow, she pierced its body with the edge, generating a thunderous burst of energy in the crater that completely disintegrated the demon's body. It dropped a crystal of ice that Beatrice managed to catch with her hands and then she contemplated it, the silence reigned for some minutes. A dark brown eye, Beatrice could recognize it even in the darkest place, it was one of Dante's eyes, she held it with a hand, treasuring it every second she held it in her hands and then she kept it as a precious souvenir in one of the pockets of her suit while some tears streamed down her cheeks.

Beatrice propelled herself with the turbines of her suit to be able to leave the crater. When she returned to the surface, she set out to find the coldest place in that damn hell. After leaving the volcano, she entered a stony path full of ditches covered with putrid faeces, and there were red crystals that seemed to evoke the precious rubies that were once seen on Earth, the road led her to a cold and completely desolate plain dominated by the imposing darkness.

She pulled a flashlight out of her pocket and prepared herself to explore what was hiding behind the calm gloom. She quickly realized that she was surrounded by a myriad of frozen bodies, she looked desperately for Dante's body until she founds him on a wall where only his face protruded, his body was in a sort of state of suspended animation inside a huge crystal of ice. Beatrice melted the ice and then carried his almost inert body. When she was about to leave the icy desert, a colossal skeletal dragon with three heads woke up and emitted a powerful roar that resounded throughout the place.

Beatrice knew that she should run if she really wanted to save their lives. She ran back to the stony path, and then she pressed a button that launched her ship into position. The ship reached where Beatrice and Dante were, she approached the ship and then went into it, but the skeletal dragon exhaled a breath of ice that froze a part of the ship, however, the ship was able to take off into space.

They reached the Icarus mothership and then Beatrice re-entered her ship on it. When Beatrice and Dante were sailing to get out of the solar system, the intrepid skeletal dragon followed them all the way through the system and it even managed to reach the speed of the mothership. The dragon exhaled with its three heads a breath of ice, fire and lightning that hit the mothership, destroying its hatch and leaving much of the ship severely damaged. Beatrice, desperate for what appeared to be her definitive nemesis, she forced herself to take a final decision.

She ordered Icarus the coordinates of the sun and programmed it to get so close that it would end up disintegrated with them in outer space. When Icarus approached the sun’s corona, Beatrice gave a tender kiss to Dante on his forehead and then she pronounced what would probably be her last words:

"I fervently believe that, at the end of the day, our love will be purified by the purest energy and it will be immortalized, we'll be everlastingly linked to journey through the annals of the universe as we had always dreamed of."

Icarus finally embraced the warmth of its beloved sun.

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