FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Quick Time Sequence: The Terrible Thing

On the Cliffs Above Crescent Moon Bay

The last bit shuffles itself into four segments, like something written on a piece of twice-folded paper, an origami snapper waiting to happen. Try as he might he can't remember it the correct linear order, despite the fact that there definitely is one. It's just something that has to be chalked up to what finally happened. It's been broken into leaves.

~*~

Around them, the shoulder-mounted devices that all of the sethura are wearing, at least all of the ones who are still alive or conscious, start to sing with an urgent shrieking tone that falls entirely in the wrong range for normal human ears; they raise their eyes, look for something they can't see and neither can he, but that's just because it's too easily lost amidst everything else, the shattered clouds, the drifts of ash.

Time is up.

Cleos arms reach out yearningly toward him from the living pyre of flames she has become, as the imminence of death starts to unbind her magnificent powers at their full glory, but he does not reach out, does not take her hands as she is swallowed by the fires. He knows exactly what moment this is. The very bad thing is about to happen.

He sniffs, there's no other word for it, trying to trace the faint scent of modified reality that comes from the mounted armbands, their elegant illuminated wedges showing a color, he is certain, that to sethura eyes is a warning of danger. The tang, like the aftermath of lightning, is strictly local, just wide enough to surround an individual, but they are the opposite of something else, something up in the sky high above, which is warming up and opening up and getting ready to ensnare and engulf them all in the limp-petalled dry odour of dead orchids that is the terrible terrible thing....

~*~

He turns, carefully, in the moments that remain to him, and begins to run, making sure that he is pointed directly toward the cliff edge. As he turns, he stretches into the full Dragon form but is cautious not to use his powers to speed him on his way. Purely physical actions are less likely to be disrupted.

His path takes him neatly past two sethura who have been spat out by the fight, covered in cuts and blade wounds. He drops the long dagger-swords he is holding - he can forge new ones, after all - and as they tumble from his hands and are left behind, heading toward the ground at their own leisurely pace, he opens his palms and blades of plasma briefly flicker into existence, resisted in a grinding spray of temporal sparks by the suppression system that they still never took down.

As the two sethura try to rise to meet him, he slices completely through their outreaching upper arms in a temporary cauterisation and hot smell of scorching that is in no way enough to stop the resulting slough of spraying blood, so red, just like all the other creatures of this world, and on the backstroke he grabs both of the amulet-armlets, tearing them off easily across the severed flesh. As the sethura fall again with a howl he clasps them in each hand, completing his steps, and dives off the cliff.

Something that is not light blossoms. Two may not be quite enough, yet he has no choice but to figure that it will be.

~*~

The Dragon has a much broader temporal cross-section than some scrawny sethura, and so the buffeting from what is about to happen will be far worse. The wind batters against him as he falls, clutching the devices toward his centre of mass.

The field effect device goes off, and weird blue electrical discharges like lightning begin to play around the blackness of his armoured scutes as his own temporal integrity begins to clash with the field cast out by the device as it destroys itself above, rewriting the timeline and spraying out purely incidental electromagnetics across the entire spectrum. The illuminated orange wedges on the bracelets grow brighter and brighter as they become sacrificial anodes for the effect, seeking to absorb and counter the charge, then short out in a trail of blackened smoke as the glass cracks, the surfaces shatter and whatever components are within them burn out.

He discards them in trail of soot and small free-flying ball lightnings of charged electrical fragments worked briefly to white heat.

The initial shockwave tears past and the remains of the amulets disappear, torn away into some other history, another possible moment of the past or future. But he continues to resist the change and he is still there.

~*~

For a few fractions of a subjective second, he witnesses the construction of the depth train and the geometric layout of the city around it, made by its builders, and he tries to take mental notes on what he sees but it is difficult to concentrate when you are being hurled downward by a gravity you don't particularly believe in, and the encompassing temporal shockwave of whatever esoteric weapon has just burst in the sky above.

As he continues to fall, bits and pieces of the surrounding timelines are torn and shredded together, like shrapnel in an action movie hitting a thick cheap book stood open on a sellers stand. Pages that were never meant to be together interleave in strange ways, stretching into one another in a series of uncontrolled angular transforms.

The city of the builders must have been at the outer limit of the temporal shockwave, because there are no more towns, only wilderness, desert, beach, and then the half-moon circle of the bay, the wound in the world, and he is caught by the shockwave again as it catches up with the now and he flatlines as it slaps him into the water like a hammer.

~*~

"I've got her I've got her! Pass the-"

Memory Error

Attempting To Recover Your Data

There Has Been A Partial Sequential Overwrite Of Shared Memory

Reloading Next Memory Sequence

Please Wait