Issue 94 – Alien Fronds

strange fractal flowers
mesmerising explorers
death on a far world

By Aeronwy Dafies

Lianus Astros
By Harris Coverley

vines of quantum strength
creeping through the galaxy
weaving about worlds —
sentience helpless to stop
whole universe entangling

Pitcher Plant
By Jay Sturner

Met a fellow botanist today
in the amber swamps of Teegarden b,
deep in Valley X.
Now we’re together, trapped
in the iridescent belly of a pitcher plant:
Swapping photos of home worlds and loved ones
            as our spacesuits slowly dissolve.

Originally published in Star*Line (Fall 2022).

New Planet Landscape 1
By Ken Poyner

Beware the flowers.
They look drearily inviting;
In demeanour they seem the soul of hospitality.
But when they change display
Through any three competing colours – then
Shimmer hypnotically and deliciously,
Delirious and futilely un-maternal –
The pressure in their stems builds erotically,
Calling come hither, be suspended in joy:
They are about to refine your alien passion
With their thanksgiving of having found
You,
All of you,
Their sudden, ignorantly confident prey.

New World
By DJ Tyrer

Lost colonist
Far from settlement
New world, barely explored
Comms malfunction
No help coming
Starves, surrounded by food
Belly full
Alien plants indigestible
Satiates hunger
Without any nutrients

The Language of Plants
By Nieske den Heijer

“I need to warn the governor! You have to let me through!” I wave my papers in front of the guard’s face, but he does not budge. “Please, she is in grave danger!”

The only movement in the guard is a subtle rolling of the eyes, and with his genetically enhanced muscles I am no match for him. My only hope is my words.

“The governor has requested an hour of complete isolation to contemplate the peace deal with the Mimicians, I am under strict orders not to disturb her. You can go in later today, make an appointment.”

Again, I wave my papers, pointing at the words I circled: “That might be too late, I have reason to believe that the plant they gave her is a trap!”

Again, the guard rolls his eyes: “The top experts have examined that plant, it is just an ugly orange piece of plastic. Get back to your translations and leave science to the actual scientists.”

My subsequent angry shouts attract my boss, who puts a hand on my shoulder and quietly says: “Calm down, you know we scanned that gift from top to bottom, it is harmless. No chips, no gas, no technology. Just plastic, so what are you so afraid of?”

Hope flickers within me for a moment as I explain: “I just translated an article in their language on living plastic! It grows all over their world, it can seem to be plastic but it can come alive!”

My boss shakes their head: “No, we just had hours of peace talks, we must assume that they mean well.”

That is when we hear a scream come from the governor’s chamber. Everyone starts running, we open the door and I am shoved aside by more burly guards. But I do catch a glimpse of our beloved leader, wrapped in orange vines. A purple flower with large petals, which was previously not there, covers her head and seemingly smothers her. Two guards touch the vines, snapping off some vines, which seem brittle and hard. But suddenly in one fluid movement streaks of orange envelop their bodies and two more purple flowers appear. After that everyone steps back, looking at each other for ideas on what to do.

Weak movements from the bodies seemingly make the plant grow, and from beneath the forms wrapped in vines a pool of blood begins to form, spreading rapidly. Then green vines begin to grow, twisting within the liquid as if to feed on it. With a final shudder both the bodies and the plants stop moving and everyone’s gaze is drawn to the floor where the green vines have formed themselves into: “We decline your offer of peace”

Ends

New Planet Landscape 36
By Ken Poyner

I thought at first the grass looked
Suspicious. The wind blew,
The grass did not wave. When
Clouds formed, the yellow rain
Rained up, not down: the soil
Squeezing itself into cracks and dust,
Its tears fouling the atmosphere.
Still, all of us have seen the
Bizarre and dis-ordinary. We categorized,
And moved on. The grass, however,
Plotted. One day it was a field;
On the next it was eight.
Our star craft sat at first resting on
Innocent soil: a site selected
For its access and simplicity, a place
Approachable through all modes.
But in came the grass, and around
Our retreat the fields
Collected, divided, renewed, pledged
And grew. How the grass understood
A maze could stand between men
And sheltering machine none of us knew,
But we wonder who is testing whom,
And if the last categorizing is nearly through.

Issue 80 – Ancient Horrors

Eldritch
By Harris Coverley

an eldritch menace
hatched outwith the blackest stars
haunting the aethers
relic in the frozen wastes
lurking in some ancient swamp

this is the nightmare
beyond all of the unknowns
beyond truth itself

Mythos
By Simon MacCulloch

“Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” – H P Lovecraft, The Festival

There used to be dragons asleep in the hills
Their smouldering belly-fires charring their dreams
Alive to their treasures but dead to the schemes
Of Georges swift-circling to make them their kills.

There used to be giants and ogres and trolls
Abroad in the forests, a-prowl on the roads
But since all the princes have turned into toads
The monsters have dwindled and died in their holes.

There used to be aliens come visiting Earth
In spacecraft like saucers with kidnap in mind
But now that they’ve finished dissecting mankind
They’ve found that the trouble was more than the worth.

So now little humans go walking round tall
A plague on the Earth and a plaque on the moon
But wait – for the Old Ones are coming back soon
And walkers will once again learn how to crawl.

Atlantean Secrets
By DJ Tyrer

Once grand temples, palaces
Now hidden in deep ooze, mud
Remnants of a civilisation
From the dawn of human time
Built upon the ruins
Of a civilisation older still
As old as time
Identity obscured, forgotten
Perhaps never truly known
Mankind no longer dwells here
No longer walks streets millennia drowned
But the things that came before
Remain, waiting
Twisting and curling
Hidden in secret chambers
Sleeping, dead yet not dead
Awaiting the day they shall awake
And rule the world once more

Originally published in Outposts of Beyond (Alban Lake).

There’s a Hole in Our Town Again
By Marcus Whalbring

It appeared this time in the field behind Home Depot.
We go about our day at the bank, at the store, driving to work.
It’s better to let the singing happen as long as it needs to

because that’s usually all that happens,
hat constant knelling of what sounds like distant bells
deep below the earth, dissonant voices dwelling in the ears.

We don’t talk about it. We don’t ask the teller,
So how far do you think the darkness goes?
Instead we say, Have a good day!

Ignoring the fact that there is no ‘day’ to have right now.
We know our town is trapped in another kind of night,
the kind that was here before the first day formed.

So what if we don’t know when to sleep.
So what if, when we do, that namelessness of space
fills our dreams, its hand-shaped shadows

reaching around inside the darkness that’s already in us,
making a hole in who we are until we’re mostly sick
of who we are, bored with ourselves.

We don’t know who to blame for this. Not God.
We feel it: whatever watches from that black absence
gave us God, taught him to bore the light forth

by boring a hole in what wasn’t there.
At least, while we wait for the hole to fill back in,
for the day to come back, after we can’t keep pretending,

we can look at the stars and pretend again
that they’re little holes in the darkness
letting the day that’s still there shine through.

Or maybe they’re sentenceless periods, spoken
by someone else who means to put meaning into the void.

Maybe the someone is us and we’re not just pretending
that, when the stars flicker, they’re fighting the light they are
so darkness can, in its own way, shine.

Azzazzoth
By Cardinal Cox

Imagine two circles touching. They touch at a point and as you focus in the point remains infinitesimal. Now imagine not circles but multi-dimensional spheres containing whole universes. The pressure at that point in incalculable. 14 billion years ago – beyond the past horizon – at the point where two or more universes met in the foam of existence – a point that had no in/of itself space/time scrunched into its non-existence through a multitude of dimensions. Space with no space. Time with no time.

Then time. Ten to the minus forty three seconds later. Temperature of ten to the thirty two degrees centigrade – though there is nothing to be that temperature – temperature without existence.

Space ten to the minus twenty of the diameter of a proton. All force is one. Space/time expands in all dimensions. Not just our four of the cause/effect universe but also backwards into what would be/was the anti-matter effect/cause universe. Gravity becomes a thing of itself though there is no matter for it to be a function of.

At ten to the minus thirty seven of a second space/time expands faster than the speed of light for there was no light. Within this expansion the energy has no intention – awareness but without comprehension – referred to in the Nag Hammandi fragments as Azzazzoth. The energy that is Azzazzoth cools by a factor of one hundred thousand.

At one ten to the minus thirty sixth of a second the nuclear force becomes a thing of itself though there is still no matter for it to be a function of. Somewhere between one to the ten to the minus thirty three and ten to the minus thirty two seconds the inflation of space/time slows. Azzazzoth expands into it and it sleeps – sentience collapses into stupor. In the wake of the expansion the vacuum cools the temperature and it is spun by micro-dimensions into the building blocks of sub-particles. This is the lullaby that the pipers play to the sleeper.

All the energy in our universe comes from this point. Matter in our universe and anti-matter the other side of Azzazzoth in the effect/cause side of the inflation. And our existence is made of the sleeping bones of Azzazzoth. The energy of our atoms is the sleeping energy of Azzazzoth.

And we pray Azzazzoth does not awaken.

Ends

The Old Gods
By Simon MacCulloch

A god with a bulbous brain
And lightning bolts in its claws
So the others obeyed its laws
Though its eggshell eyes were insane;

A god with the power to frighten
With the growl of the sea in its breast
And its fangs and its lizard crest
And the grin of an angry triton;

A god with the tusks of a boar
And the snout and the temper too
With its hide glowing orange and blue
And its hooves caked thick with gore;

These gods were my childhood friends.
Now I think of the roaring sky
And the fires where the futures fry
And I wonder when childhood ends.

Belch
By Jay Sturner

The planet hasn’t been this warm for millions of years. Jungle is the new skin. A spinous beast of flesh-and-stone comes along and gnaws on the dying cities, swallows all it can manage. It meanders along the blossoming curve of earth, coughing up guns and concrete, art and cell phones, machinery and bones. Now it bays at the indifferent moon, its belly fat with the lingering screams of monochrome souls. Its gut swells, heaves, rumbles like an angry volcano. And before curling down for another million-year nap, it drops its forest-covered jaw and lets out a putrid, roaring belch—expelling the failed god of a thing called Man.

Originally published in Space & Time Magazine (2012).

The Eye in the Darkness
By DS Davidson

A single great eye
Unblinking
Staring out from the darkness
Of that abyssal void
Far, far below the surface of the earth
Wreathed in a mane
Of twitching tentacles
Grasping towards the light
Older than humanity
Older than the Earth
Older than time itself
It waits
For what, no sane mind knows

Originally published in Cyaegha

Submerged Nightmares:
Unearthly Terrors of the Hidden Depths
By Betty Ann Rohlic

In shadowed depths where darkness thrives,
Ancient horrors stir, their nightmares alive.
Beneath the waves, where moonlight fades,
Unearthly terrors, serpentine shades.
Voices of doom, forgotten lore,
Sinister secrets, forevermore.
Monsters of old, their hunger awakes,
Young hearts shiver, as fear overtakes.

Submerged nightmares rise from the deep,
A chilling dance, their secrets to keep.
Brave souls beware, the abyss’s breath,
For hidden horrors beckon, heralding death.
Beneath the moon’s pale and trembling light,
Eldritch whispers weave a haunting plight.
hrough ancient wrecks and coral’s embrace,
Unearthly terrors, a chilling grace.

Screams unheard in the watery tomb,
Lost souls consumed in the shadows’ gloom.
Submerged nightmares rise from the deep,
A realm of dread where secrets sleep.

Lullaby
(based on a classic Dutch song)
By Nieske den Heijer

Sleep evil sleep
Please keep on counting sheep
With tentacles or oozes,
So sweet Cthulhu snoozes
Sleep evil sleep
Our souls aren’t yours to reap

Sleep evil sleep
My mind I’d like to keep
R’lyeh is where he is dreaming
His lullaby is us screaming
Sleep Cthulhu dear
This is the end I fear

Undead G’harne
By Harris Coverley

some unnameable
chthonian deity
of a lost city –
dead heart of an engulfed land
pulsing to rise up again