Two ancient titans battle to the death. One is a former, swirling, mass of living nothingness and data. The other is some kind of fallen angel. A super-sized, humanoid, giant large enough to crush super-galaxies with just its toes. The giant’s head has been replaced by a massive phonograph.
The giant of nothingness and the phonograph-angel square off. Their repeated clashes destroy everything around them. Troubling the firmament, causing ripples in the space-time continuum that shatters and distorts the flow of causality and fate in those universes and galaxies that are far enough away to not be instantly destroyed by the turbulence the two massive entities are creating.
The phonograph-angel charges the giant of nothingness in an attempt to tackle it down. The faceless, featureless, being of living nothingness jumps out of the way, and delivers a blow to the phonograph-angel’s spine. The giant of nothingness attempts to finish off its foe right there but is unable to. Even fallen angels can be expected to have wings.
The three pairs of massive wings made of countless green, oxidized-copper, music notes that emerge from the phonograph-angel’s back, knock the giant of nothingness back. The wretched song that the music notes emit hits the giant of nothingness, cooking and corroding the giant of nothingness’ flesh like acid, or boiling oil.
The giant of nothingness quickly recovers. This is far from the first time it’s faced beings like the phonograph-angel that know how to weaponize music. In fact, as can be expected of a great archivist of all that takes place within its corner of the cosmos, the giant of nothingness has even learned how to convert this music into its strength.
After quickly adapting to the new strain of weaponized sound, the giant of nothingness begins to absorb the music instead of merely weathering it. The giant of nothingness begins to grow and swell in size until it is twice the size of the phonograph-angel. At which, the giant of nothingness stomps forward, picks up the phonograph-angel, and pulls it into an embrace.
Squeezing the phonograph-angel tight. Not letting go no matter how the phonograph-angel struggles. The physical act holds metaphysical repercussions and importance, and the phonograph-angel continues to be compressed and crushed until finally there is a sound of something crumpling like a beverage can.
The phonograph angel no longer struggles. Its body is still. Its song is silent. With the battle over, the giant of nothingness returns to being a nebulous, swirling mass of nothingness once again. The being of swirling Nothingness absorbs and consumes the phonograph angel, pulling the universe-sized body into itself with countless tendrils. Then the long patrol continues.
The phonograph-angel’s body will be studied. The phonograph-angel’s soul will be interrogated. Then both will be turned into fuel for the being of nothingness’ growth and evolution. The dark song will be silenced, even if the being of swirling nothingness has to do this itself. Too many lives have been consumed by this eons’ long war.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
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A great dome of magical energy appeared over a certain portion of the lost-cloud moon. Time within the dome halted as a rain of seeds, fertilizer, and beneficial mold spores. Time then unfroze and began to lurch forwards. The mold grew first, the network of rhizomes meshing with older networks that had already been set in place within the moon’s soil. Then the seeds grew turning into mighty trees that shifted soil and stone as the tree’s leaf-covered branches and sturdy trunks all but exploded into being. The genetically-engineered fungi would serve as a biological super-computer that aided me with the monitoring and care of the forest.
Over in Nine-Clover, I was growing a forest on one of the corners of the Lost-Cloud Moon. Er, the moon was still round. That was a turn of phrase, but I think you should have got that, right? Right…Anyway, I was growing a forest. As you might remember, I’m a member of the Shattered Heaven’s alliance of farming and horticulture enthusiast immortals.
This and my travels through the cosmos, meant I was constantly coming into contact with plants that had interesting uses. My and the Missuses’s private dimension was home to all sorts of plants that we’d created for the purposes of growing foods and medicines. Ellison liked to help me list and categorize them all, and recently I realized that there were a number of fruiting trees, ivies, and bushes that could safely be grown in the mortal realm. So, I decided to grow a few species of trees and make myself a lovely enchanted forest. I thought it’d be fun and I figured at the worst, I could store the fruit away for me and Yuval to use as cooking ingredients later.
I did things like this all the time. I’d actually created a modest sea, and a number of large lakes, on the other side of the moon that would serve as fish tanks and fish farms. If you’re wondering about the behavior of the fluids on a moon, let me remind you that this was a moon that was actually roughly the size of your typical alternate-earth, if not bigger. Also, even if that wasn’t the case, I could alter the gravity to whatever I needed it to be, while I was altering the climate on various parts of the moon to fit the needs of the plants and animals I was placing there.
Anywho, by using various sorts of environment-altering magics, and a bit of space-time manipulation I was able to get the seed area for my forest growing. After a decent injection of magical energy to fuel the forest's future growth, I stopped to have some tea. Trusting that in a few centuries I’d have quite the lovely enchanted forest at my disposal.
I’d set down some golems and drone-gardeners to help look after things in the forest after I was done. Then after thinking about it, I brought out some of the automatons that Jack, Kal, and I had created to help us deal with the DSO’s low-level forces. They were based on some machine-type enemies that we’d created for players to fight in the Empty-Dream. Naturally, with none of the weaknesses that the automatons in that particular level of the Empty-Dream had.
I’d also repurposed a few of those automatons for use in our private dimension, after some additional modification to assure that they were secure from hacking, and other forms of intermeddling, and I saw no reason not to use some of those same automatons in Lost-Cloud Moon to deal with pests, invaders, thieves, and other trouble-makers. I called them the Empty-Clockwork.