Nilly Robot

Hello! Time sure... times, alright. Here's some more of my collected microfiction from the past couple of months.

(CW: Horror, mentions of death, monsters)

— Radiation

From its hill, the tower sprayed a grand radiation into the night, a signal flare that hit in waves so dense that even the trees glittered and crackled with its passing.

Where once concrete laced the town with dull gray ribbons, rivers of quicksilver ran into the storm drains, trickled into the cairns and sewers, bringing the tower's mind electric message like an ignition sequence to the roots below.

— Shallow

He nudged the bundle into the river with the tip of his foot. No need to ruin his sneakers, not that it mattered. Not that he couldn't get new ones, go on playing house and pretending that they hadn't ruined a lot more than a pair of shoes.

Well, the less there was to remember the better, he supposed.

The river was shallow but it swallowed her body up with little more than a ripple.

— Warm

The lights flickered once, twice.

It was getting worse.

He pressed his face to the console, warm, almost hot to the touch and listened for a while to its rhythmic thrumming.

How many were still running the machines down there, toiling away with their minds blown out and their bodies soon to follow?

He let his thoughts pour through the metal, pushed down through the dirt and the miles and miles of cable.

Thirty-seven left. It wouldn't be enough.

— Radio

He never listened to the broadcast. The headphones lay discarded under piles of damp-ruined papers where the last of the radio operators left them decades before.

Why listen, when he could feel its delirious poison course through him, feel the trees crack and the hills shudder with the passing of the carrier wave.

Why bother, when the very air came alive with a hundred minds sparkling through the static, a hundred voices screaming out as they bent to the tyranny of his words.

— Thread

The asks started small. An edit here, a redaction there, the presence compelled him to ever bolder acts of vandalism.

At the time, he cared only for the euphoria filling his head, the kind that had once come from violent things done in secret. He spent his days grasping for that gilded thread of satisfaction, reasoned the texts in his care were a small sacrifice to make to placate the monster he'd let into his heart.

Of course, it would never be enough.

— Bone

The thing was leaking something on the floor, dark and tacky like molasses.

A sight he would always remember, broken legs curled around itself like a wounded spider, no flesh, no bone inside, merely endless black pitch bubbling from its mouth, its nose, its empty chest.

When it looked up at them from the table, its eyes were filled with such burning hatred that their bodies should immolate on the spot.

— Tome

There was salvation somewhere in the books, no doubt. Some tidbit of knowledge, yet overlooked, misunderstood, forgotten. Something that might have saved them all, or at least delayed the end.

But the time left for study was long past when the sky burned and the students fell upon themselves with cruel and gruesome fervor. In the end, the tomes were cast aside, left to rot in the quiet damp with the rest of them.

_____________________ Hello! I'm Nilly. I write stuff and draw stuff. You can also find me at mastodon.art.