Rose Blumen ~

(Aïsshean)

Our unsteady and uneven number of legs carries us along this road sprinkled with uneven shapes and shades like a continuous work of art.

In the distances beside the lush sides of this trail, we see abandoned vehicles and other lone trees with abnormal features. Shards of rust grow in briars along some wrecks, fascinating me.

But we can't stop or slow down. Our balance is slim, and we would fall for good. We can't risk tripping now, and letting go of this warm trail stretching ahead.

New forms of blobs and arborescent looking structures are born, every step of the way. Cities in the distance are clouded in sulphuric colours. Their air lingers more heavily, as it did in our town.

We're slowly on our way to our native land, surprisingly, although that is not our objective.

Mother's thoughts and faith continue to resonate within our heads.

But my impulse's voice is stronger. We witness it every day now.

One white day nearly wiped animal complexity.

And everything now born from the ensuing movements of opportunities is built on frailer grounds.

The levels of metabolic cycles for homeostasis have been reduced in ranges, while allowing more independent organisations to thrive.

It's like cancers pandemic in a way, reducing us more easily to competing strains of yeasts and protists, less able to keep wider coordination.

And now that we can see their colours and wafts through the lands and skies. Now that we can hear the dislocations of life occurring because of that time...

I can dread it. I can foresee it.

Another eruption of the same magnitude will raise even higher the electrochemical levels of eveyrything alive.

Eukaryotes will go extinct; all plants will die like animals have before.

All that will be left will be viruses and prokaryotes less exposed to this aray of ionisations akin to a lost magnetosphere.

Maybe the Earth will lose its electromagnetic shielding. That would probably feel the same.

The next eruption of this apocalyptic light will erase a billion years of diversity and growth.

And the next after that, will be the last...

This sensation of doom grows us wings.

To go faster after this mega volcano that already erupted once.

We're terrified of how short a time it could be, before the next one.

We have to prevent it if we can.

And we should prepare whatever we can for the next intelligent power to come with that warning in mind.

~

Over time & across the lands after this exotic meteor maybe bouncing back, we eventually saw others again.

Along its path it continued to attract many, like moth to light. Perhaps some others like us were also following it with greater concerns rising in mind.

Realizing some of the truth behind, but unable to figure out the wiser future from down below and far.

Aïssheat wondered whether we should act with care or severity in mind.

It was unfortunately too soon to say what would be best, to prevent the real end of this biosphere's tree of time.

Civilisation might have collapsed but more animals could still rise, eventually finding balance between these unstable and spontaneous monsters, and older metabolisms of our kind. Natural selection will continue to sieve and shake things, until another form of humanity and transcendent organisation could rise.

A species if not human, could replace us and realise what loomed with this source now. Hopefully they in the future would prevent another white day if we fell and failed...

But it's our moral obligation right now, to do everything we can if not to end that threat, to prepare for the future to meet this fate with as much safety as possible.

We need to reach the castle and see whether we can do something ourselves, or whether we should plan for the foundation of a longer game, leaving the conclusion to another generation or species.

My sisters and brother are shivering as they hear me and understand this sight.

The ghost of our mother haunting our damaged minds now is only laughing, blinded by an all engulfing faith about our path.

I don't know if we will save the world for its possible future demise, but we will do everything in our power to try...

For the future of all known life...

~

Ahhie's skull has fallen along the path. We're losing him and it breaks what is left of our cooling hearts.

He's not dead, but doesn't look anything human anymore. We can't pretend any longer...

All was melting as we reached these shores that didn't exist here in other times.

Reaching the sea where it shouldn't be, hundreds of kilometres away from where we thought it could be, along this still vivid pilgrimage to assess the tool of the end of times.

And still painfully behind our fleeting hallucination of a goal in the distance. While nearly all other perception of reality was slipping and eroding from us...

I felt my body dislocating further and thin appendages we never had were now sprouting along my back.

These two filaments in my back like thin locks of hair, they're absorbing more of the dripping lights left along this wet trail.

I felt somewhat more steady after they sprouted out of me, but that made me one good step less human having extra limbs, no matter how discreet they are.

We crossed path with other wilted ghouls that once likely had been humans.

The parasitic strains now inhabiting them as simple vehicles and tools to propagate themselves, they followed their unintelligent instincts.

We screamed in fear, really taken aback finding ourselves as targets of feeding hunt for the first real time.

Something not human nor wolf. Only some colonies of bacteria or yeast that found ways to use remaining muscles and bones to move around faster.

Aïssheah felt scared but still stepped in front of me, feeling painfully useless for too long. He thought shielding me from harm was his only way to find meaning and value in his remaining days. Oh, brother...

I'm sorry I made you feel this way little brother...

Even though my voice will no longer quite reach you as wholly as it should, even though I will eventually forget you.

I held onto him as his body deformed.

Aïssheas stepped in front of us as well, with a little more of a fiery will, and she also made things change between us and the foe.

Her body coalesced in a more coherent pattern than our brother, into odder shapes and instincts nonetheless and momentarily.

Some of her individual lingering fires were expressed like pent up feelings of injustice against reality.

She screamed in sounds sharp and violent we could no longer recognise.

Heat in bursts of scalding air were felt, as she released something she had accumulated like bile all this time.

I couldn't really say what I saw. It was as if she spat accumulated phosphorus, causing heat to the air in a chain reaction before her. Her will coursed like electricity through her remaining cells and fluids.

Muscles spontaneously formed reacted sharply.

And then, the rippling wafts of this heated potential in the air, they interfered not like static electricity, but either chemical reaction I couldn't see, or constructive electromagnetism.

All I saw as I felt the sudden rise of heat in the air, were some red light and sparks before her. Her finger tips had glowed red maybe.

Did they heat to a visible degree?

As the shaggy puppets in front of us were turned from threat to cinders, they scattered into pieces and burnt, but I still couldn't tell what happened.

Before us, Aïssheas was changing in different ways, her slim silhouette now a grey and darkening abstract figure.

She looked back at me as we both shivered in concern, and neither of us could any longer say what we were becoming.

Her hands were now something of uneven shape with something of damascene looking patterns settling.

Meanwhile my back lines of early horns or wings had grown longer, and now fed me like roots to the other form of oxygen in the air.

~

We needed to know...

Whether the story was already over, with an impossibility for another eruption to ever occur.

Whether this world had simply irreversibly changed to meet a higher form of equilibrium.

Some species would go extinct but things would stabilise, and other tales of branching life would recover and take over.

If this extinction event was not bound to anything past or future anymore, and our instinct pointless, that would be fine.

The moment we would face that reality, we would likely take our last breath in relaxing collapse.

But if more remained... As we floated through time.

As we and everything else lived on.

As we withered away from any obvious sight of god.

Aïssheat coughed older parts of her away. We didn't realise then.

Her hand fell at the time, and we lost our little brother behind.

His body turned into something even smaller, even thinner, crystallising all that was left into a condensed material.

Without voice, with evaporating memories, we left him...

We moved on, never quite realising what we had just lost.

~