Skip to main content

POLYBIUS

 It sits there. How long has it been? No one remembers where it came from, when it arrived here in this dank little corner, silent and watchful. None of the bright multicolored lights illuminate it-- this place is cursed, here by dragons says the darkness. Turn back. 


It's a tall unit. Taller than most others. Imposing. Geometric, sharp sides that scream "future!", and "I'm not for kids!". Exactly the right bait for those willing to try. To undertake the test at the behest of small clustered crowds staring into the corner domain with eager, youthful bravado. A looming black display  crisscrossed by thin red stripes, silver hexagonal patterns. Slick. New. 


The screen glows green. Stares out at the world in quiet, unsettling judgement. Black patterns unfold and unfurl in complicated miasma, an interlocking labyrinth scrolling past. The simplicity is potent. Powerful. Almost too.. mature. It feels mathematical. There's something more there in the flickering. Something hungry. 


No joysticks. No buttons. Just the black sheen of the case, the green stare of the screen. Not even a slot for coins. 


What the hell?


It feels the eyes on it. The watchful stares, eager and nervous voices close by. Feels their intentions. 


Come and play, it says. 


At the head of the case lies one word, emblazoned by the same esoteric hexagonal structures. 


P O L Y B I U S

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Necropolis

 It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space. There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.  And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.  Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.  It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.  The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rite of Spring

  Fear rises up and out into the night. The horned face emblazoned with markings like terrible, piercing eyes thrusts forward and out. Guided by instincts with the force of a living locomotive. Steam billows out of gaping nostrils. In the dim brain of the Triceratops it is gripped by awful, primeval terror. Fight. Live! Fight! Live. Fight. Live!  Jaws crashed down. Heavy, impossibly heavy. Fatal. Moonlight catches impaling teeth, massive blunt daggers meant to pulverize bone and concuss flesh, pulling giant chunks from still living prey. The Tyrannosaurus is Death in the Cretaceous world, it is emperor and regent over all living things, it is the epitome of annihilation born in flesh. Its black hide almost glows in the night, darkness on darkness. So fast for something so huge. Blurry. A mountain astride legs, legs as thick as the cedars of biblical Behemoth. Step. Step. Step. Bite.  Horns reach. Push. Sweep. Jaws crack, close, yawn open to a furious gullet. The titans da...
Post a Comment
Read more