"Deluge"--Sketches

A hundred Andromeda suns fizzle under ether yokes. Gravity chafes, sends sparks flying into the long dark. Touches off nebulae and pockets of hyper-combustible gasses. Cataclysms send plasma tendrils deeper into the black: gnawing, hungry. 

They awaken. 

A bare and colourless body: blank eyes, an angular skull with no soft edges. Hairless cheeks, a slash of a mouth, a triple-folded grey loincloth. Ancient, but freshly minted. Only the youngest of bodies can house the god-tapped. 

A white plain soaks up starlight in all directions. No cover, no wind,no foliage. Silence, stillness.

A red dwarf is hungry. Corona arcs flip and loop in twenty-million mile chains, engulfing a delicate array of ice-moons. 

They blink. Ponder calculations never before sung or whispered or written.

Snap.

Engulfed and unshriven. Polar caps remain untouched. The coronas divert around an inscrutable cone, simmering into nothingless at the system's edge. A hundred thousand warrens under the ice flows and glacial lakes chitter in relief and offer fresh sacrifices. 

Reigning in the dwarf takes focus. Multilinear incantations struggle to refit the shackles of gravity and force. They blink. They sweat. Serene and slender fingers tremor, then tighten across the folds of a loincloth ragged with rips.

Done.

There is time to meditate before the next destabilization. 

They exhale: slowly. It rushes into a gasp and leaves them coughing. Hacking, on a lone conjuresphere overseeing the Andromeda galaxy. A freshly minted body is revolting against this pruning of the heavens.

Shreds of awareness refuse to unknot and retreat. Asteroids pummel a gargantuan desert world baked at the epicentre of three suns. Another sentient species overruns itself in hordes of murderous theorists. Nine suns fade out, cores disintegrating on the remains of their own solar wind.

Stability is nothing when awareness is uncompromising.

A moment. They grasp at last-ditch vector solutions. Throw a blanket of unvarnished gravitational force over everything. Turn away.

And inward, recalling.

A shimmering plain-world layered in strata of sand-crystal. Endless deposits, encasing a molten core eternally burning its way to the deposits above. The fatal flaw as artistic flourish and cathartic anchor. Miracles undo themselves, always.

Constructed with painstaking care. Decades of contemplating the geosphere,  articulating the planet's inner core, considering magma streams. Centuries of surface holocaust to burn a million pristine beaches to glass. Fifteen comets, aimed perfectly, to shatter the surface glass in all the right places. 

Life, if there'd been the patience.

They sighed and waved. Annihilated the asteroids. 

 Back to regular writing. It'll be online most days: a variety of genres, styles, and modes. Getting back into fiction after an unintended hiatus. This isn't planned or drafted, but it's what I have.