Squid

…In one such dream I found myself flying above a great ocean on a world that was not our own, an ocean of purest crimson, the roiling surface disturbed by pink licks of foam, bursting from the swells before withdrawing into the depths. I fly for what feels like many days, a fear growing in me that this ocean would go on forever with me trapped between it and the grey hammer of the sky, until a dark band of land creeps over the curve of the horizon. A beach of crumbling sand, scattered here and there with boulders, rotting vegetation and washed-up sealife that resembles the cephalopods of Earth, were ours covered in scales and comprised of only harsh angles. Flies buzz around them, landing only for a taste before they are gone again.

Closer now, I fly closer, and I realise I was wrong, that I have deceived myself. The mounds of grit are mountains of sandstone, the boulders dolmens the size of whales, the waves approaching the shore many times the height of our tallest towers, crashing with terrifying violence upon the steaming rocks.

And the dead things, the things wedged in the gorges and the valleys, mottled with wounds – I approach them, look into their countless cloudy eyes, blue and white and milky as acids, and understand instinctively that they are returning. Their wounds slowly close as I observe them, fissures becoming gashes becoming grazes. Surely any moment now they will awake, conquering the cantrip of death, defying the baking and occluded sun that punishes them for crimes I cannot comprehend?

But then those flies, which are not flies at all, but monstrous mechanical contraptions the size of horses…they swoop in and gore the beasts again, methodically re-opening cuts with surgical limbs, tearing and worrying at the chitinous, rubbery flesh, before they rise once again into the stifling sky. The crash of the waves is all I can hear, the sound of a world being pulverised into nothing, but I am not afraid. For these foul creations are beings of wire and string, made only to fail. Hundreds, thousands of years may pass before they do, but it doesn’t matter – they will wind down, they will collapse and they will fail in their counter-promethean duties. And our lords will wait, their flesh feverish with necrotic vitality, outwaiting entropy, outwaiting death, until the cataract of the sun blinks out and the crimson sea envelops them once again in the cold and crushing grasp of home.

Excerpt from Yue Thorstein-Hsieh’s The Bible of Giants, 1962