This was a short piece I started last year but lost interest in. I've always wanted to do the story-told-through-letters thing, but haven't quite found the right inspiration yet.
Dearest Beloved,
Consider this a follow-up to our previous correspondence. Reports from the university astronomers indicate that the creature is, in fact, dead. It is, certainly, a creature— that is, a singular entity, but thinking of it that way has never been productive. It is an environment— much in the way a bacterium would consider a human body. I am writing this to you, my beloved, wherever it is that you are. Somewhere, I understand, that the ordinaries of this world are foreign to you. A place, I am sure, would seem alien to me as well. And yet, as it is a place, I understand, where the enormous otherworldly arm that has dominated our sky for one hundred years is absent, I do so envy you.
The magnitude of this being defies description. The bulk of its arm intersects the path of our earth more and more every year. It has caused perturbations of our orbit, not not as much as one would expect. It seems that our magnetic field has some sort of effect on its flesh that carves into it. The moon, however has not fared well. It was long ago thrown into a strange orbit, one that has been growing more distant each year. That would be more concerning without the looming flesh that fills the sky each autumn.
Our earth is like a swinging pendulum blade, carving further into the arm of the beast each year, the flesh parting gracefully as though there were a tactile edge to our ionosphere.
And this brings me back to my main point. The creature is dead so the astronomers say, but the arm is not. The immune system of this beast will be our ultimate end.
When the first reports of the creature's death came to the emperor, the state psychics were put on private trial almost immediately. Their claims of communication with the creature were clearly fabricated, in an attempt to stir up some sort of insane cult among the populous no doubt. It has been well established that supernatural telecommunication does not adhere to the natural principals which restrict the speed of all things to that of light-waves. Funding from the Emperor's predecessor provided for the construction of a new, sophisticated lens, which has allowed the astronomers to peer for the first time at the body of the creature with enough resolution to determine that it is very dead. The central body, where they have discerned that the sensory organs are located, and there for, the center of whatever constitutes its nervous system, has been gorily damaged, as if impacted by something incomprehensibly large. From the spread of the viscera, and the presence of what could be called decomposition, it was estimated to have happened many eons ago. Additionally, the light that has traveled from the ruined corpse of the beast to our eyes began its travel thousands of years ago itself.
Even still, it is clear that the beasts nervous system is either distributed, or acts considerably slower than light-speed. Alternatively, it is possible that for a beast of this size, the extremities must be somewhat autonomous, not unlike an octopus. Government paraxenologists have suggested that the creature would have used psychic telecommunication to control its limbs, though relativity would have still limited the speed at which it could have moved.
Ultimately, this information is no more relevant than theology. The arm is here, dead or not, and this year, it may engulf the earth completely, raining its horrid antibodies down upon us. My associate in Brussels, a leading biophysicist there, claims that the math he has calculated for the arm's trajectory, indicates that it is rapidly shifting to entangle itself with us completely. He claims that the pull of the sun- which, he supposes, brought it in from the outer solar-system to begin with, will pull "der Tentakel" as he calls it, into the earth's orbit in a ring. Our orbit will be completely engulfed, and we will be swimming inside of its flesh for the next million years. This knot around the sun, he claims, is a stable formation, balancing the strange forces that work on the flesh of the arm with the sun's gravitational pull.
He says we are, perhaps, lucky— if one has an abstract definition of luck. Initial calculations indicated that it would miss the earth and wrap tighter around the sun— an unstable situation, but one that would take hundreds or thousands of years, during which time the earth would become a frozen hell, deprived of sunlight.
The theologists claim that the arm is, in fact, hell itself, and has been set upon the earth as punishment for our endless list of sins. Its an idea that rings some truth— the... things that rain on us, the things that the paraxes call antibodies, they could certainly be described as demons. Ironic, as it should be angels flying down from the heavens, wouldn't you imagine?
-With love as always, your Lewis
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