February 2024 – Tyrant King Press

[Fiction] Aliens in the Field

A while ago I read an old short story about two kids who found some aliens, with the big twist that the “aliens” were actually human astronauts stranded on an alien planet, so I decided to write a really stupid version that gives away its twist immediately.

…Now that I think of it, a worrying number of my ideas are just deliberately terrible shitpost stories.

“Paw! Paw! There’s aliens in the field, Paw!”

Horace Greebley rose and turned to his son, forming his mouthparts into an expression of paternal indulgence. “Now son, what did we tell you about making things up?”

Mort skidded to a stop on the kitchen tiles, waving an upper limb at the back door. “But I aint, Paw! There’s aliens crashed in the field, I seen ‘em!”

Horace sighed and ruffled his son’s cranial integument with a cluster of manipulator digits. “Okay, okay, Mort. Where are the aliens?”

The ship was indeed crashed in the field, right where Mort had said it was. In retrospect, Horace wondered why he hadn’t heard the impact from the house. It looked like it would have been rather loud. “See Paw?” Mort said, pointing as though his father needed the scorched, twisted metal hulk currently sitting in the middle of the burning remains of his field pointed out to him. “See? It’s aliens!”

“Well now son,” Horace said, stopping at a safe distance, “that sure is a sight. Could be a satellite, though.”

Mort shook his head violently and pointed again. “But look, Paw! Look in the windows!”

Horace stepped forward and peered. Though they were badly scratched and blackened with smoke, there did indeed seem to be windows set into the object, and inside he could see faces peering back out at him. Ugly, hideous faces. Faces that could never have originated on this world. “Well,” said Horace. “Aint that somethin’.”

Inside the ship, Captain Jim Smith stared out at the horrible jointed, tentacled monstrosities that stood outside their downed ship. “I sure hope we can get back to Earth from here,” he said.

[Fiction] A Once in a Lifetime Event

This little piece was inspired by an article I read in some magazine (I want to say Scientific American but don’t quote me on that) back in high school about…what would happen if a white dwarf star hit our sun. It’s set in a space opera ‘verse I’ve been playing around with off and on for the past decade or so. The nature of the setting is constantly changing as I repeatedly fail to decide on what sort of vibe I want for it, but I think this is short and self-contained enough that it works with pretty much any of the ‘verse’s various incarnations.

B-3-K watched the last of the transport ships rising into the midmorning sky on a tail of fire, a feeble prelude to the brilliance that was yet to come. They were doomed, she knew; them and any other vessel that had not yet entered Transit when the destruction came to this system. They had waited too long to leave, and they would pay for their procrastination with their lives.

This did not concern B-3-K. Their own fault for settling on this doomed world in the first place. She had known this day would come since before this race had even left the surface of their home planet. It had been written out for anyone to see, foretold in the endless movements of this galaxy that the inhabitants called the Spiral. One only needed the eyes and the patience to see it, and the Cluster had both. For thousands of years it had known this would happen, an event that for any other race would be trumpeted as a once in a lifetime event, an occurrence so rare that most considered it all but impossible: a stellar collision.

B-3-K looked up at the sun, then turned her head to the right. Though it was still invisible to the limited senses of the beings upon which her current appearance was modeled, she could see the approaching white dwarf clearly, shining brightly as it hurtled toward its fateful meeting. She watched the smaller star as it hurtled through space, and then the moment came. The sky flashed white as the two stars met. The dwarf passed right through the larger yellow sun, causing it to violently shed its outer layers. A vast wave of destruction rippled out through the system at the speed of light, a million years’ worth of sunlight all released in the blink of an eye.

B-3-K felt a hot wind rise about her, and then the valley below her was burning. Her protective shield flickered and snapped as she watched the ocean boil away in an instant. The very air around her was burning white-hot as the ground itself buckled, cracking and melting under the merciless onslaught. The hill beneath her liquefied and flowed away in the furnace wind, leaving B-3-K suspended in the air. Within seconds, there was not a single thing left alive on this planet; within a few hours, the entire system would be scoured clean.

B-3-K’s shield would fail long before then; next would be her body’s containment field, scattering her volatile component particles across the molten landscape. The destruction this would cause was negligible in the face of what was already occurring around her. This did not concern B-3-K. The destruction of a Cluster construct’s body was of no consequence, and in fact it had happened many times before over the four hundred millennia of B-3-K’s existence. At this moment B-3-K stood on hundreds of worlds; the loss of this body was nothing to her.

As she knew it would, her shield failed. For the briefest fraction of a second she felt buffeting wind and intense heat, before her body’s containment field was obliterated and B-3-K was destroyed, disintegrating in an instant into a cloud of glittering exotic matter that annihilated everything it came into contact with.

Across the Spiral, B-3-K blinked.

[Fiction] The Capris Herder

Murgha Durandeet was up before dawn, as usual. She got ready for the day by the light of a single candle, shivering in the cold of the early morning. Though at this hour the sun was only a faint glow on the western horizon, outside the thick walls of her family’s mud-brick house she could hear the chirping of birds layered over the rasping grunts of the livestock in their pen.

[Fiction] The Beasts of Kulig County, Chapter 10

Dawn crept across the Samara as the remaining tawala lifted his head and yawned, his breath steaming in the cold morning air. He stood then, stretching muscles stiff from sleep, and took in the morning’s scents. There was a herd of grazers not too far away, but they were prickly and aggressive, not worth the risk. There were other animals even closer in the other direction, but with their thick armor and clubbed tails they definitely weren’t worth messing with. There was something promising intermingled with their scent though, and the giant groundbird strode off to investigate.