Original Fic

[icarus_chained]

An old creative writing assignment I just found and dusted off. It's not too bad, I guess. The challenge was to write an entire story in under 500 words (knowing me, you can guess how hard I found that), and it had to have an 'I' character. Being me, I had to give it a scifi twist. End result weighs in at 380-something words, and looking back is probably poncy as hell. Meh. Take a gander at it, should it tickle your fancy.

The Hungry Tide

 

I have a tale to tell. I don't remember who I am, and my name, at least, is unimportant. I must tell you of my people, of our march, and our eventual fate. Listen, please, and be warned.

We marched out, all our billions strong, and the universe shook with the thrum of our feet, and worlds rang with the raucous, desperate cries of our endless defiance. We roared them out for a cosmos to hear, the battle cries as numerous as the mouths who uttered them, merging into one sound, a wailing, shrieking roar of anger and loss and pain, eons deep and hungry. We were so very hungry.

The warmth of a million suns called to us, enticing us to dine at their banquets and bask our weary, angry selves in their light until they expended themselves for our benefit, collapsing into themselves in exhaustion as we moved onto the next bright patch of sky. The bridges between the stars groaned with the passage of our endless, heavy feet, the strength of ages crumbling slowly under our relentless, unthinking onslaught.

Life, in all its multitudous forms, followed on, to fight us or feed us or shelter in our mighty shadow. All of it fell, as we crushed it or used it or forgot it in our undying need for more. We marched out to the corners of the universe, devouring all in our path, unthinking and uncaring of the fate of what we touched, for nothing mattered once it was ours. And we came to the ends of the cosmos, touched the void on the other side of the boundary, and finally we found there a yearning hunger as powerful as our own. And we leapt gladly into its embrace, home at last, satisfied at last.

This is the story of my people. Life, battered and worn, left trembling to populate the shadows in our wake, grew strong again, and as it did it gave us names. The Hungry Tide, we were, and our march was the Shadow of the Scythe. But I, who remained in my foolishness to cling to life, remember an older name. I remember what we called ourselves, when we still had uses for such things as names.

We called ourselves Humanity, and our endless, relentless march was called Progress.