Monday, November 27, 2006

Crimson Flame

Tell

The monster resembled a giant lizard. It stormed through the city, breathing flame and burning thousands. Its huge claws picked people off the street and threw them into its colossal jaws. Its muscular legs toppled smaller buildings as it continued its dreadful march through the crowded city center.

Show

The terrible fire lizard towered over the streets of the doomed city. Men and women scattered, screaming, before the great monster's inexorable approach. It opened its cavernous jaws and breathed forth an immense gout of blinding crimson flame. The dreadful conflagaration scorched the asphalt, gouging and crisping the hardened tarmac. One man, not fast enough, was caught in the terrible path of flame and burnt like a torch, screaming in purest agony. But worse was to come. The massive bulk of the creature bore down on the streets. Its claws flexed and clenched, grasping one woman like a vise. Her helpless screams did not avail her. The monster, ravenous, brought his prize catch up to his massive jaws and consumed the woman with a snap of those powerful muscles. Satiated, it roared a stentorian evocation of satisfaction, shaking the metropolis to the core; then it extended a huge, muscle strained leg and, with all its might, struck an old building with blinding speed. The structure collapsed in a damning crescendo of terrible noise of falling men. The dust cloud was infernal. Satisfied, the monster lumbered triumphantly on.

Purple

Only the Titans in their halcyon days could have availed the doomed city, its terrible fate having been foreordained by the tragic circumstance of inevitability. The scudding clouds dotting the empyrean above provided a stark counterpoint as the monstrous abomination ravaged the shaded avenues of the once splendid downtown. Hither did it approach on reptilian legs, its coming the dilatoriness of one who is aware of the inexorability of its terrible, absolute domination. The grand play of circumstance was thus begun, as the dread monster elected to release Hell itself in the form of a great, sweeping crimson cataclysm on the hapless populace, fleeing in blinded horror and panic. The molten heat of the consuming inferno scorched the veritable essence of the thirsting ground, sending up great bouts of smoke, black as the darkest shadow. The imitable torch caught an unfortunate soul in its fiery clutches, electing to consume him in a burst of ravenous flames. The mammoth beast was the instrument of blind desire. Its ravenous hunger now dominated its attention. Bending its considerable bulk, it thus reached down to clutch a woman in its vise-like grip. Slowly, the onrush of anticipation, unaffected by the woman's screams, bore down on it, and casually he tossed his impending snack into his jaws, a world of darkness and agony in the ribbed innards of the furnace of being. Roaring its saturnine satisfaction it reached out a leg and unleashed his murderous power onto the nearest structure. The hapless building held for a moment, then collapsed in a vast symphony of dust and death, the screams of those inside echoing the melody of Fate. Its aggression vented on a victim, it trod on, victorious but uncaring of the role that Fate had provided him.

Abstract

World of heat, sensation of restraint undeveloped, need and want blurred into unified symphony with the will - alien. Alienness. Assailed of speculative hunger and wanton devastation of artifical agony. Therefore the horrors, whence the crimson light of destruction. It burns and is satisfied. It its and is revenged. It unleashes strength in all its simplistic harmony, strength against cowardice, and turns, desiring to be sated to be hungered to be sated to be -

2 comments:

Trebuchet said...

And Lord of Light has all four, sometimes to disconcerting effect. Even in the very first chapter.

The Arbiter said...

I suppose most great books do, at that.