FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

An endless swamp of murky water stretched out in all directions, a stained meditation of slime and black dirt breaking the surface through a thick fog. The horizon was lost behind the haze with nothing but the dark shapes of skeletal trees floating by: black, jagged cracks in the air itself, branches frozen in exaltation of an absent, forgotten sun.

Ripples in the thick slime spread in slow circles, expanding and dissipating into oblivion. Their epicenter is the only source of movement in this morbid serenity: a small boat of ashen, stained wood piloted by a tall, dark creature standing upright on the craft. The pilot's broad shoulders pumped rhythmically, shoving a long wooden pole deep into the thick, ill water to push onward.

With deep

dull

scrapes

the pole propelled the boat across the shallow swamp.

The captain of the ragged craft was a man of monstrous complexion: his thick brow, accentuated by darker scales, was furrowed in a stern display of effort and concentration as his strong, clawed hands guided the wooden pole. His reptilian snout had the long, boney look of something truly prehistoric, the profile of an ancient predator, well-suited for silent stalking through primordial jungles. His tail, a serpentine limb of powerful muscles, rested upon the damp wood of the boat. His dark scaled skin was bare but for muddy, charcoal-black pants which clung to his hips; his back and shoulders were otherwise exposed to the bleak, sunless sky. The natural gradient of his plate-like scales were a gallery of scars and white tattoos. The long, curved claws of his feet would occasionally tap against the sullied planks below: the tick, tick, tick of some primal instinct in his blood that his mind had forgotten.

He was a monster, but he brought color to the gray world with red feathers that swept back from his head in a plume of bloody fire that draped down to his shoulders and eyes which sparkled like blue crystals out of ashy, gray skin.

His were not the only colors that had invaded the mire. There was the beacon. It was dim and distant in the thick fog, but it was there: a brilliant green light. He pushed towards it, towards the only color that had greeted his arrival. For now, it was nothing but a green haze in the distance, indistinct and vague, the only landmark besides the petrified trees.

His journey was slow and, as he drifted, so too did his mind through the puzzle of his memory. His past was a more impenetrable quagmire; the shapes of memories were bloated figures, some only just breaking the surface, the rest of them, the bodies deeper, were indistinct and alien to him.

He reached out for one such iceberg, meditating on the sound of the pole sloshing through water, stirring up the dust and shadows. Something stuck, he shut his eyes and he pulled.

***

Light.

The light was warm and bright on the back of his eyelids. How long since he had felt such heat? The rich orange of a morning sun filled a cozy metal room through round windows, painting the ribbed walls and thick arches of smokey steel with hues of reds and yellows. His bulky body was covered in soft synthetic fabrics, gently textured and slightly glossy. Sitting up, he had found aged, black-and-red clothes draped over a chair.

He recognized the room, knowing it to be a mass-produced chamber of a space station. He recognized the clothing, too. He touched it to remember the feel of the fabric, the cold of the metal zippers, the stiffness of thick, rubber patches of armor. Standing up, he found it matched the length of his nude body. In red lettering, worn and scratched from time, a name was emblazoned on the suit's left breast:

"SYDNEY"

Eyes shut, Syd held the suit to his chest. A memory within a memory, he followed the links down like the chain on an anchor. The suit had been tailored for him and fit perfectly the moment he got it. He recalled feeling it cling to his body, its interior layer so soft and smooth as it wrapped around his muscles. The simple pleasures of fabric against skin and scale, the warmth, the tightness of it.

He remembered how it wrapped around even his broad chest and thick arms, perfectly fitting his form.

He recalled trying it on for the first time: running hands over his chest, his thighs, down his hips, feeling every bulge and flex of muscle. Tight between the legs, where things bulged and strained the most. He had looked magnificent, he had flaunted it.

***

His crystal blue eyes opened once more to the familiar gray world. He took in a slow, deep breath of the endless fog, basking in the scents: water, dirt, rot, decay... On some instinct he turned right, then left, taking in the stillness of the swamp. Black trees, like wire-thin monuments, slowly drifted past. Then, in the corner of his eye, he saw something.

Someone was behind him.

He watched the figure's slow movement in the distance. Syd tried to keep his head still, for fear of driving this unknown person to action. The shape kept to the very edge of his vision, behind him, to the left. It waded through the water ponderously, making strong, deliberate steps through the mud and filth layer below the water.

Syd pushed hard into the dirt with the thick wood pole, gripping the sturdy shaft tightly with both hands. Scowling, he focused forward, focusing again on that distant haze of green light.

***

He did not know much about himself. If he had not found the flight suit waiting for him when he woke - if it hadn't fit him like a glove, despite being worn and torn - he might not have remembered his own name. The other symbols on the suit were not words: a snake on fire emblazoned on the forearm and a curved, three-pointed crown wrapped around a star printed onto the back of the suit. They provided no insight.

Everything before that sunny morning was blank and empty. No family or lovers came to mind, no history.

He stood before a jagged, cracked mirror adhered to a wall without a frame. The suit fit him perfectly, but the room he had slept in did not and he could easily touch the ceiling when stretching. He didn't belong in a room like this, and out of the vague shadows of memory came swimming images of larger, cleaner rooms of polished steel, smelling of gun oil and boot polish. Facing the fractured mirror, he searched his own body for clues.

He was sturdy and his body promised strength, though at this moment he ached, especially in the small of his back. This achy weakness was new, his muscles, large and clearly built up with great affection beyond mere necessity stood in defiance of it being the norm. His dark scales were marred by scars: old scars, he reasoned, as none of them were tender and all healed to a pale gray that stood out on his scales like chips in a coat of paint.

He recognized them as he recognized the white ink of tattoos on his body - a tangle of trees on his left bicep, geometric patterns across his chest, writhing tentacles up his right forearm that seemed to move when he flexed his fingers - but each was like how one might register a painting one walks by every day, never examined or given real pause. They must have had a meaning once, but to him, on that morning, no scar or decoration carried any memory or weight. They were just there, and had always been there.

After he got dressed, he was greeted by two people, two strange creatures he did not recognize. They were half his height and likely twice his age judging by their mottled, sagging skin. They had small, black, glossy eyes and too-few fingers per hand. Whatever Syd was, they were not it - they had not his scales, and he had not their errant patches of wirey hair that, ages ago, may have been lusciously soft fur - but they did not seem as surprised by the differences between them as he was. They fed him a warm, savory soup and explained that they had found him in an escape pod while they were salvaging for scrap.

A flight suit? An escape pod? He knew what these things were, but they existed in isolation and provided as much insight into the "why" of his situation as his scars. This had dwelled on his mind then and it still weighed heavily on him even as he trekked through the swamp; what had he lost?

Once the aches and soreness of his bedrest subsided, he joined his presumed saviors on their salvage job. The hum and vibrations of their craft was comforting and familiar. Leaving their home through a docking gate into the black void of space felt as natural to him as stepping through the electric doors between his new bedroom and the communal living space. The workshop for these short aliens appeared to be a small part of a large space city, a space station of disparate parts and repurposed spacecraft cobbled together in a sprawling network of airlocked corridors. Like everything else, it was unexpected and familiar, mundane and unpredictable.

Scraps of metal drifted silently through space. Dead starships, torn apart from the inside, disintegrated and exploded, had created a vast field of metal. This is where they found him, the old couple had said, as the long, articulated arms of their personal craft reached out to grab what must have once been the bulkhead of a large ship. In a matter-of-fact way that underlined either a hard-fought life, or perhaps some helpfully emotionally-devoid alien practically, they described how his pod had been nearly indistinguishable from the rubble, floating and spinning out here in oblivion. He didn't ask if they knew from what ship he had been ejected; as he considered, he recollected that he refused to hear of it at all.

Once they had loaded up on scrap and flotsam, they had uncoupled their workshop and traveled to sell what they had found at another station: they suggested that he might recognize more at a more commercial port, though he wondered if they did not also want to unload him before he might make any claims to the wreckage of his own ship they were selling.

This new station was a behemoth of brutalist metal, all vents and square ports and exposed pipes. It loomed over a desolate asteroid which drifted alone between stars. A myriad of small ships were ported to this haven of scrappers, pirates, and outlaws, and he found that he recognized many of them in the same way he recognized the insignia on his own flight suit. There were some small personal crafts, popular in the galaxy's inner core, and many more long, worn out freighters, surely 30 years old at this point. There were repurposed Venerator-class ships, a Nebulae Fish starfighter, and was that the Oasistar, off in the distance, just pulling out?

Why did he know the names of these ships?

Left to his own devices as his two companions bartered with their salvaged goods, Syd stared out the thick windows into space. He chewed slowly on plastic-wrapped food bought from a machine. The flavor was intense, and familiar, as if it was something he had eaten a hundred times before. He would have much preferred more of the soup from that morning.

As he ate his food bar, a ship he did not recognize slowly came into view: broad, circular, its metal a dark rust color. Behind it, towed by flexible robotic arms, was something he was shocked to recognize, even at a great distance. It was mangled, shot to bits, and he didn't recognize the striped paint job at all, but he knew the shapes_._He had flown one just like it, countless times, and was intimately familiar with the sharp angles and layered fins of this agile, dual-engine fighter craft.

His mind reeled at the memories. Standing alone by the window, it was like he was back there in that craft. He could feel the fabric of the seat behind and beneath him, the safety harness hugged around him in a loving embrace. Most of the ship's weight was in its engines, and they rumbled on either side of him, purring like a pair of massive predators in heat. He had tamed this predator of metal and wires, and after long, heated nights he had become its master. The joysticks jostled in his grip, fighting him slightly and emanating heat as he manipulated them, but it ultimately obeyed, nimbly twisting and turning to his will. He recalled the adrenaline of it all, the way his muscles flexed and tensed from the vibration of the ship's weapons, the roar of its engines, and the glow of fire and plasma from outside, flashes of destruction that spawned from the mere pull of a trigger.

Standing there on the quiet, peaceful station, he remembered the power he felt, the sense of control, and wondered if he had ever had that much control over anything before or since.

***

Blue eyes once again greeted murky fog. His wooden craft had come to a stop as the layered memory had flooded in on him, leaving him breathing heavy where he stood.

Remembering the more immediate danger, he turned around, scanning the terrain behind him. Nothing. No shadow, no mysterious figure. The world behind him was the same as the world ahead: gray waters marred by black trails of slime, a fog punctuated by barren trees. Were it not for the green light that had been drawing slowly closer, there would be no sense of direction in the slightest.

He inhaled, deeply, and briefly held his breath before letting the warm air escape his savage snout.

His journey resumed, but his thoughts lingered. Flexing his hands, he could still recall the touch of joysticks and buttons, the controls of a fighter. The control, itself a powerful and addictive feeling, could be felt like a deep heat. He remembered _needing_that feeling, sometimes craving it more greatly than thirst or hunger or - no. There was always one need that trumped all else.

There had been a woman.

They had been friendly from the beginning. She was a confident, happy mouse, very strong for someone her size. Her species was naturally slender and more than a foot shorter than Syd, but she could keep up with him easily. Her fur was a luxurious gold, short and fuzzy, with a fiery tuft of orange hair on her head, swept to one side. Her large, round ears were decorated in black metal piercings. She had been Syd's commanding officer, and though he had sworn to follow her through hell and back, he wound up following her somewhere much quieter and darker.

There was touch.

There was the taste and scent of another person. The warmth of her body, inside and out. Her soft fur against his hard scales; his soft compliance to her hard authority.

Casual compliments had led to gentle flirting, which led to secret groping, the mingling of tongues, the stroking and exploring of bodies. Curiosity. Appreciation.

Worship. Desperation.

They had wallowed in need, pressure, release. Claws against skin, deep penetration, their heat spilling over each other. A flexing. A stirring. A writhing. Skin stretching, skin pulling, skin ripping. A pressure builds from within, a swelling, something black, glossy - not his cock, which was deep inside her, but something bigger, squirming and writhing and reaching out from inside him, desperate for the cold air. There is a burst of fluid, thick and viscous. There was slime. There was... green?

Out of the mist, a lighthouse appeared

and it shone with a brilliant green light.

Its outline was faint at first, messily sketched into the distant haze. The source of the green glow was obscured from sight, protected under what must have been the hood of some cyclopian lantern. The glow was seen by the streak of light it left diffused into the inescapable fog, pouring into the vast and vague infinity on Syd's left. The shaft of the lighthouse was a jagged, irregular shape rising from the water in the distance. Syd pressed onward towards it. He tried to ignore the distant sound of slapping water behind him.

***

With some effort, he remembered leaving that kindly old scavenging couple to pursue the exotic ships he so intimately knew. He didn't _want_to leave them, and the generous pair seemed willing to keep him aboard their homely craft, if only as an employed guard, he was willing to admit. He didn't want to leave that simple life, but he felt he _had_to. There in the swamp, he could not ascertain why, but he imagined he must have felt so out of place - he, a scarred, rough, dangerous individual trained to kill, and they a gentle and fragile couple, deeply in love and living happily on the galaxy's fringes. Maybe he feared hurting them or outgrowing their hospitality, or maybe there was some subtle twinge of pain in their expressions when he had discovered how well the uniform had fit or how easily he could list the names of ships, each potentially responsible for hundreds of deaths.

He gripped the pole, the only weapon he had. He had been good at fighting, especially good at space combat, he appeared to have memorized every ship, their strengths and weaknesses and, despite having no idea where he had learned that from, he put it to good use. With his memory lost, his body found by scavengers, and the lovely golden mouse girl forgotten, he had become an independent pilot. He stayed on the outskirts and avoided the big names of pilot employment, most of which proudly displayed the three-pointed crown logo that he had quickly covered on his suit.

He could not remember _why_he did this. He had barely thought about it, he simply acted in purposeful obfuscation of his own self and history. There was clearly somewhere he belonged, and there was something big and powerful that held claim to him for years, but at the time, he refused to even think its name.

Jobs came easily to someone with his skill. He remembered smuggling goods, though not for whom; he remembered tracking criminals, he was even pretty sure he even remembered _where_that was; he remembered a massive ship, bustling with screaming people, hurtling into a barren moon. He remembered an explosion.

***

Syd found himself on his hands and knees in the boat.

An explosion?

He checked his surroundings: gray swamps, thick fog, mud undisturbed. There had been no explosion then.

And, just as suddenly as if there really was a charge set under the mud, a powerful shudder threatened to upend his wooden craft and spill him into the muck. He scrambled to his feet and spun around, holding the pole as a ballast to keep his footing like a tightrope walker.

The figure was there.

The large, lumbering creature stood upright, towering over Syd taller than he could reach. Although the diffuse sunlight was strong enough to see every detail of the boat, the creature defied the light. It was almost pure black: a shadow that had come to life and taken on a primal form. Its head was a gaping hole, a shapeless mound with no eyes and no teeth; its hands, jagged, irregular claws, gripped the stern of the boat, jostling it, dripping pure black slime onto the wood like burnt engine oil. As he backed away from the shape, right up to the squared off bow of the boat, he could barely make out subtle facets on the creature's form; in the dull light: its body looked to be made up of countless ropes of slime, or worms, or a thousand thousand pulsing, weeping veins.

Pole in hand, Syd jabbed desperately but the blow was glancing, blistering his hands as it struck the hull and then, as the creature began to push the stern downwards threatening to either tumble forward into the small craft or push the lip of the boat under the waterline, he aimed for its claw, hammering down hard enough to splinter the wood.

With a sad, deflating gurgling noise, the creature released the boat. Syd rushed towards the center of the barge and thrust the pole back into the swamp, finding purchase in the dirt and shoving as hard as he could, wanting to escape the shadow. The beastly figure was too quick and too close. Before he could build up momentum, it grabbed the boat again, twisting the wood like trying to wring out a rag. With an ill-timed shove of the pole against dirt, he and the creature worked together to raise the boat up on one side, and it capsized, throwing Syd into the filthy water.

He hit the tainted water mouth-first, sputtering and coughing into the mire. The lip of the overturned boat bashed into his upper back, driving thick filth into his lungs, before the strong figure pushed the upturned shell out of reach. Syd broke the surface, mud-caked as the shadow bore down on him with slow, staggered footsteps.

By some luck, the wooden pole was still clutched tight in Syd's hand, and as he rose to his feet, he swung. The wood failed from the force, exploding into shrapnel as it struck the side of the thing that was neither animal nor man. It stumbled back and gurgled forth a horrible, watery noise, spitting black bile into the silt cloud around them.

Syd stepped forward and thrust again with the jagged handle of the tool, this time piercing deeply through the wet hide of the writhing shadow.

Bile, tar-thick and steaming in the crisp air, spilled from the monster's formless, expressionless head and torn side, wordlessly bubbling with the sick gutteral sound of trying to draw water through split tubing. It reeled, seeming to drown where it stood.

Syd stumbled backwards as the creature thrashed drunkenly for him, but his bare feet slipped on the filthy mud and he fell back, submerged under the muck.

When he surfaced, pulse pounding, the figure was gone. Prone on his knees, his head was just above the swampy water as he coughed up filth and gasped for clean air. There was only a spreading oily spot where the beast had stood.

The displaced pilot rose to his feet, clawing muck and slime from his face. As he stood, clawed feet planted deep into the mud below, silence and stillness had once again returned to the foggy swamp. As the ripples in the water grew still around him, he let his breathing slow and his heart calm.

To his left, the boat had finished its descent into the muck and was no more than a hump of dark, aged wood cresting just below the surface of the swamp. The wood, already deeply stained and warped, looked as though it had been rotting there for a decade. The reliable barge pole he had clung to so dearly drifted a few feet away, snared in black ribbons of slime. A splintered, useless object.

Syd turned to face the lighthouse.

He could see his target more clearly now. The spire was a pale white, marble perhaps, camouflaged in the gray fog. Coiled all around the tusk of the tall white building were thick, black vines. Or maybe they were snakes? They glistened, catching the green light from above like polished metal. The light itself seemed housed in a round frame of some sort, from which the light escaped, projected into the indifferent smog. The vine-like growths all seemed to grow up towards the light, trying to choke the life out of the tower. They had begun to squeeze so tight that large cracks were visible in the white material of the lighthouse.

Step

by step

Syd waded closer.

His head was reeling: dehydrated? Hungry? His thoughts ticked slow, mired down, reaching out for his memories at a glacial pace, as if the thick slime from the shadow creature had dripped in and glued the gears of thought together. As his feet slowly sloshed through the mire, he gripped the gears of thought and forced them into motion.

There had been an explosion: a massive civilian ship destroyed, smashed against the rocky surface of a moon, its engines melted and ruptured by enemy gunfire.

_When_was that?

It must have been before he was saved by the old scrappers. It was _after_he put the uniform on for the first time and after he met his enchanting golden rodent of a commander. After ships, flights, dog fights, but it was _before_the salvaging, before mercenary work, before the crew of an exotic, alien ship welcomed him aboard.

He definitely remembered _that_ship. Of all his memories so far, that seemed like the most fresh, the most vivid. He had been invited on board the strange, sentient ship, a mobile factory in space, teeming with robotic drones both inside and out. Its small crew was an eclectic mix: its captain was a beastly scaled woman, not too unlike Syd himself; the stoic, feathered engineer often found silently stalking through the shadows of the lower decks; androids, holograms, and the wolf with those beautiful eyes.

Those intoxicating emerald eyes

that he swore shone bright even in shadow

as if glowing from within.

His muddled thoughts settled on that glow. He thought about the green light of the lighthouse. He was unsure if he had conflated the two - memories had a way of blending together, getting entangled like vines into twisting knots of association. He _had_seen that green before, he was sure of it. He could remember the glow reflecting off polished metal floors and blurred through clouds of smoke.

Eyes fixated on the light in the distance, full recollection finally unveiled the image of that light shining bright within the halls of a space station he watched be destroyed.

***

He had been sent to a rustic space station, an orbital farm attached to a great mechanical halo around a planet of ocean below, and the station was under attack by... something.

It was something large, something strange and starkly out of place against the cold, rigid corners of metal in the station. Information through his headset was conflicting, and he didn't know if he should expect hostile alien life, a massive, renegade synthetic threat, or a war machine let loose on civilians. It had rolled through the station without resistance. There were bright green lights, probing and invasive, contrasting the red emergency lights.

He remembered being told not to look at the lights as his captain, friend, and lover tugged on his arm, but they were so luminous, so brilliantly strong, that you could see them through the walls.

There was fire. An explosion. There were people screaming and... moaning? Wet flesh, dark and glistening, coiled together in delirious rapture. Screams turned into gasps, then moans; fear and pain became pleasure and ecstasy.

He got to an escape pod. _The_escape pod. The one the scavengers found him in. The station was destroyed in a brilliant flash. His pod was hit by the shock wave. His last thought was to remember--

***

Syd's leg was shocked by a sudden rise in elevation, snapping him out of it. Soft, muddy ground had given way to firmer soil.

He had reached the edge of the land on which the lighthouse stood: a wet, mossy island, desolate within the endless swamp. He looked up.

It was no lighthouse he had ever seen. The ancient, ruined column of marble, its vertical fluting worn down by the ages, was cracked to the core and barely standing. All across the surface, it was being simultaneously held together, and slowly destroyed, by the black "vines" that encircled it. Vines, he realized, was far from what they were: the thick, black, fleshy masses throbbed with a pulse, straining up across the tower like the arms of an octopus, glossy and dripping a viscous green slime down the cracked stone and its own coiled limbs.

The writhing growths had long ago burst up from the ground and slowly entangled themselves around the ancient monolith like ivy up a tree trunk, desperate to climb towards the sun. The thickest, highest reaching tendril had coiled all the way up to the cracked, jagged top of the column and terminated in a large, bulbous organ. The green light poured out from the organ itself, pointed away, scattering into the distance like a biological searchlight from a baleful eye.

Syd stood before the oddity, the thought of rescue, or civilization, melting from him, swamp water up to his bare stomach as he stood at the foot of the island. He was breathing heavily, hot breath steaming in the cold air. He had shoved, swam, waded and practically _crawled_through the filth. There was nothing but fog behind him, nothing but the same fog and swamp beyond the island.

Nothing made sense. His head was a jumble of confusing horrors and messy, displaced, memories: of pain and pleasure and fire and wet, writhing bodies. The frustration built up from his empty gut, he felt like he was going to vomit.

Jagged teeth bared, breath drawn in deep, he shouted. Roaring. Howling. A wordless exhale of deep, primordial frustration at the false lighthouse. For his suffering, he demanded reparations. For his past, he demanded answers.

Slowly,

the light

turned

towards

him.

The scattered beam of green light in the mist crept downwards and seemed to fill the still water of the swamp around him. It encompassed him entirely, a spotlit stage in the murk. He looked up at its source: the massive, glowing, green eye on the tower, atop the coiling black tentacle. Its pupil was a black slit, a fissure punctuating the pulsating glow of the iris which shone bright with swirling hues of emerald and neon: the green cascaded around him, shimmering and swirling with color like they did that slit pupil. Syd's blue eyes were open wide, washed out under the light, lost in the endless green glow, he felt like he was staring into the vastness of eternity itself.

He remembered now.

Memories fell together like gears snapping into place as the machine of his past suddenly and rapidly churned to life. His old life, his real life, unfolded like a map.

He had donned his flight uniform not with arousal, but with pride: national pride. He flew happy, or angrily, there was no _sexual_thrill, but a thrill of destruction, of fire and explosion. He remembered the bitter taste of destroying homes, helping an empire conquer entire planets: the guilty thrill he felt as he sent hundreds of civilians to their death.

His commanding officer was not sweet, not someone he bonded with or was intimate with: she was an angry, bitter person, controlling every aspect of her life, including him. They had no chemistry at all, outside of what he could do to advance her career, and what pleasure he could squeeze out of private fantasies of wresting control from her.

He remembered the attack on the orbital farm. Huge, squirming creatures of black flesh and green slime, their raised eyes on writhing stalks casting bright, green light. He remembered screaming figures being dragged across the ground, bodied ensnared by the same serpentine arms that he now saw squeezing the imposter lighthouse. He remembered, finally, the name heard through the static of his headset communicator: The Bal'kar.

The name of the creatures sent shudders across his body as he recalled the way civilians and soldiers alike fell to them: not destroyed but converted and assimilated, their bodies rapidly expanding and bursting into more tentacles for the Bal'kar, more slime, more of the intoxicating, glowing green eyes.

It had all seemed so terrifying at the time. It was a living nightmare to see people dragged off, expanding and distorting into more of these chittering, dripping creatures - and yet, as he stood there in the swamp, gazing up at the all-encompassing glow of the Bal'kar eye, its tentacles dripping thick green ichor, no fear seemed left within him.

He knew inside - perhaps he had known all along - that this was the same Bal'kar he had seen so long ago on that station because all Bal'kar were the same: the same powerful, contagious race, all linked by way of psychic thought. A species that had, slowly but steadily, crept through the outskirts of the galaxy, gradually beginning to encircle all of civilization. It was no wonder, then, what had happened when the species had breached the walls of that orbital farm.

The station had been destroyed. His commanding officer, the mouse he so guilty fantasized about, had condemned him and his whole squad (the squad whose patch showed a snake in flames) to die when she ordered the complete annihilation of the space station. He had barely climbed into the escape pod before destruction hit and launched the pod far from the station in a cloud of debris. The impact had knocked him out, scrambled his brains and disabled him for a long drift through space until he was discovered.

Thoughts of this betrayal did not linger. It was his own crimes that weighed on him. Innocents were killed, ancient cultures were ravaged, and the oppressive arms of a galaxy-spanning hegemony were given purchase in unspoiled alien lands: all with his help, all for the glory of an empire whose starry, three pointed crown was to be branded onto all it touched. Gleefully, and with pride, he had been a spear tip in the destruction of the universe, scorching everything in his path.

He was a monster. The weight of the memories pulled his knees out from under him and he fell forward into the mire, splashed with filth and mud. The beautiful light of that glowing eye grew blindingly intense and he had to look away, down into darkness...

...and the darkness reached up to cradle his tear-streaked strong chin.

Syd's eyes met a rising, pure black weight from beneath the silty water, a sprawl of dark limbs unfolding from the mud. The figure rose from the waters of the swamp: a hulking, bulky, dripping horror, glistening in the green light. It was the same lurking creature that had scuppered his barge. It gurgled up out of the muck gushing warm, black bile into the mire around his middle, holding his face in a facsimile of tenderness with warm, wet hand-like appendages. Syd was disgusted. His scaled brows knit into a scowl at the touch of warm rubbery flesh. His hot breath unfurled in the cold air as white vapour.

A loud crack drew his glistening blue eyes up from that horrible, gaping void of a face. The tower, the useless landmark that had dared him to hope for civilization, was beginning to snap and crumble around the bulk of the subterranean monster, threatening to tumble into the mire like a sunflower uprooted by its own weight. The black, oozing vines writhed and undulated around the unstable structure, reaching out into the air for purchase. The singular, giant eye stared unblinking at Syd with silent, uninterrupted judgment, indifferent to the destruction.

Syd was only aware that the lumbering mass had let go of his face when he looked back from the eye, only to see the rippling surface of the swamp. He stood and turned around. The shadowy beast was behind him, where it had always been: a long, black echo of his form cast along the swamp by the green light of that alien eye. His shadow squirmed in the rippling water, dripping as Syd's body dripped with the vile muck of the swamp, tethered to his thighs in the green light no matter how it tried to tug itself free with the current.

Syd turned back to the light. There was another thunderous crack of marble and a shower of white dust and shrapnel pattered down on the wet earth as the black _thing_strangled the pillar. Its stare was unceasing, its light unending, and it was growing loud. Its eye was fixated upon the smaller blue eyes defiantly gazing up at it and though it offered no judgment or answer to the smaller creature's demands, its light carried with it subtle whispers. Syd could almost hear them: a vast number of voices echoing from a distant place. He realized that, through this light, he was hearing the thoughts and voices of the hundreds or thousands that had been pulled into this creature's embrace. He stared and he listened, but he could not discern their voices. Their words were meaningless echos, so tantalizingly close to revelation. Syd's eyes were fixed on the singular glowing eye of the Bal'kar, and it acted as a portal into the collected mind of its entire race, a mind of near infinite scale pouring into his.

He stepped closer, feet finding purchase on the firm ground of the pillar's island. He inhaled and grit his teeth, preparing to yell again, to roar, to scream, not for answers but for destruction: freedom from this monstrous past he had uncovered. No roar was needed. The black tendrils heeded his thoughts, his deep desire, they squeezed around that old, ancient pillar, wringing stone into powder as it shattered, exploding into dust and giant bone-white shards of stone. The crack echoed out into the trees, rock cascading onto the ground and splashing into the soiled water. The glossy black tendrils coiled around themselves, piling up in a mound, but that eye remained raised high, held aloft by one lingering, monolithic serpent of a limb.

A deep, thunderous sound broke the silence of the swamp as the ground beneath his feet heaved and shuddered. Water churned and roiled; the sound, like bone on rock, only grew as the ground beneath the pillar opened up, swallowing cracked marble and mounds of earth. The pillar was gone, and as the ground caved in around the remnant shards of ancient white marble, something much larger slowly rose to take its place. The coils of tentacles unraveled and fell to the swamp only to be joined by more which poured out of the island's aching void, flowing out like snakes from a burrow until their epicenter was revealed, a massive, hulking, shining body of wet flesh. It surged upwards with a burst of water then sank back down, taking chunks of earth down with it into the inky depths of the mire.

Syd thought for a moment that the whole swamp might drain down into the opening, as if the stone was the last linchpin to some ancient apocalypse. Water surged, rushing into splitting cracks in the ground around his feet. The mossy island was quickly disappearing under the murky water.

Even as the distant trees joined the chorus of churning earth, the black cracks in the hazy horizon shuddering and falling around him, that great green eye remained above the chaos: trunk steady even as the body of the Bal'kar was buried under mud and water. It watched him, black slit pupil unwavering.

The ground gave way beneath him, tore open from the weight of his sins which he now openly carried on his shoulders. He gave no resistance.

He closed his eyes.

***

Syd awoke to the sound of a gentle wind tousling the trees. The ground that pressed to his back was solid and warm, not wet and unsteady. Grass tickled his neck, soft through the thin fabric of a suit.

He took a slow, deep breath. The air was warm and fresh, there were flowers somewhere near.

His bright green eyes opened, glowing softly against his dark scales. He stared up towards the night sky: bright pinpricks of white with the black void between them. He stared quietly, intently, a modest attempt to send the green glow of his eyes to fill the inky nothing of space.

He sat up and looked around. The wind carefully combed the branches of alien trees, causing their purple and blue leaves to caress against each other in soft, sensual communion. His slick shuttle was behind him, a scout ship made of smooth, gentle curves, a messenger ship to a much larger craft.

He stood, leaving an impression in the ground where his dense mass had compacted the soil. He put a hand to his chest and felt the warmth and light within, the potential energy of something much, much larger: compressed and coiled into the shape of a person. He smiled at the long, vague shadow he cast across the ground from the dim lights of his ship.

His emerald eyes returned their gaze to the sky, to the stars, where an empire continued to spread and corrupt. From the core and out towards the strained fringes of the galaxy it had spread, consuming all it came across - but the further it stretched, the stranger was its resistance. The Bal'kar was one such resistance, something just as ravenous and just as eager to claim each star for its own. As the empire spread, the Bal'kar encircled it, coiled around it, and had now penetrated it, pushing in like roots cracking through stone.

Syd had traded one empire for another. Born into a kingdom of death and destruction, he had engrossed himself into a kingdom of hedonism and corruption. The voices of the Bal'kar, an endless chorus of every voice ever consumed, assured his worried mind. They strove for pleasure and biological perfection. Syd did not care.

He had been born with a fire inside him. An empire of destruction breeds only more destruction. That was the only life he had known, and he would not rest until he found redemption. He would do this the only way he knew how: the way he was raised, the way he was trained. The fire he was born with would set its own empire ablaze.

He was a monster, and would cast his shadow across every star he needed to.