Sixth Transmission:

Conscious observation is a cyclic act, insofar as it is conducted by life within the circumstances of existence, but in its conduction also creates life.

The life created by observation, consideration, and contemplation is invariably abstracted from the circumstances it is derived from, with the mannerisms and qualities of the thinking subject acting as a conduit for birthing it.

One topic of creature born in this way is derived from the concept of Chaos. As it is a transformative process in and of itself, the pervasive contemplation of Chaos births inscrutable things of flux and annihilation. Often these things are regarded as monsters, and thus give birth to monsters.

There are no worlds without life, and no life without fear.

* Excerpt from A Practical Guide to the Impossible

----------------------------------------

  It's unclear to me the method I used to struggle against the creature I faced, but clear to me that I did not yield to it. I carried and wielded no weapon, but the experience was violent. Pieces of the thing were ripped from it, toppling lifeless to the ground. I peered into it with no understanding as it lived and tried to consume me, each point of my focus rendering itself further into obscurity and away from comprehension.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The dead pieces of it that sat before me once the struggle had ended were conversely mundane and inert. The physical, tactile spines of a black, fibrous and sturdy material comprised this corpse. The body that might be reconstructed from these various parts would not depict well what I had encountered. It felt like I was being lied to by the simple dead evidence of something finite. I recognized it as timber for a fire I was to begin immediately.

There in that clearing, the small pyre I constructed from the remains of what I had seemingly vanquished burned easily and boisterously. The smoke consumed the stars and seemed to carry a light of its own, detailing the angled woods that surrounded me. I stood before the great clean flames, awash in tempering heat, looking upward into the billowing false sky. I was transfixed, and forgot myself.

“I would consume this fleeting symbol of your survival, and accept it as tribute, if you were to oblige me.”

It was a hulking thing that stood across these flames from me and posed this question. Rounded hollow eyes that could be easily climbed into. Underlit shadows of a boulder-broad shallow smile. A head erupting from a smooth hill.

It scooped the very land that harbored this tinder and its flames in its grand shovelmouth and swallowed with the sounds of gravel. A great igniting burst from the domed furnace of its body. A soft and newly lighted hearthglow emanating from under its four pillar-like legs. A rumbling chuckle of good nature.

“You would shepherd me as I scavenge this dying world, to see what will happen to that which will outlast it.”