Falling Fire and Other Sorrows

It blazed like a falling star

As it hurtled toward the hillside.

Down it flew

To the planet of the intelligent creatures,

Who called themselves Su’Aderyns,

Down it surged

To the surface,

And though the aquamarine sky was bright,

Flooded with the rays of its three suns,

The falling ball of fire sizzled

With stabbing flashes of lights,

A confluence of blues, greens, and oranges,

And even a pure, prismatic white

Burning their eyes.

“Is it from a moon like you?”

A chick-like, cherub-like, child chirped,

Tugging on the leg of the human girl’s suit.

“I’m from another star far away, actually,”

She responded,

Looking towards it intently

As she finished re-lacing her boots.

Watching as it fell

The crumbling ball of fire,

Raining searing crumbs down,

In streaks of incendiary vapors,

Watching

Amid thunderous firecracker bursts,

The mothers and fathers called out

The chick-children ran indoors

She gazed on

As the fire-rain settled in the valley

Burning the plants

Imprinting ash-filled craters,

As a series of explosions of blue and green

Shook the clearing

Radial shockwaves unleashed

Across several acres.

She ran out,

Towards that clearing

As fast as she could.

* * *

By the time she breathlessly arrived

There wasn’t much left intact.

Around it bled

Spread in the bottom of the valley

The ship that had brought Analicia Farnsworth,

Around it lay,

About its crater,

And there among the shattered glass cracked

And scattered by the energy of its fuel cells,

Mostly metal remains wrangled,

Torn, twisted, brittle and black,

Only a deluge of disparate ghosts of wreckage

Of the divested spacecraft,

Haunted it’s impact.

Clyra placed a pearly wing

Consolingly over her,

“The ship plunged towards the planet suddenly.

We couldn’t keep it in orbit, the controls were too destroyed.”

Her head rested

On her feathered shoulder

Their hearts rested in sync, sighing sisterly.

Sighing,

As Rykor tumbled there out of the trees,

His commandos there whooshing, landing,

Though the explosions had ceased.

Amid it all,

Her hazelnut eyes noticed a stark black box

A cubic safe

Which recalled bitter sorrow,

She found a necklace inside it with an amulet,

Embedded deep,

With a ring of sapphires

Gleaming a dolorous glow,

She gave way

To the flood of tears

She had locked away

* * *

Her thoughts fell back to home sadly

As she looked upon the pendant.

Before the darkness

Had wrenched her cold from the bosom of Mother Earth

From the embrace of those she knew,

Before the end

Of Earth’s inhabitants

When the city’s avenues were wading in smog smothered

And the mountains and lakes were refreshing escapes.

James had dug, sweat, and laughed

Whenever he and his uncle would unearth a new treasure,

It was rumored his uncle did suspect

Aliens species to return “either as allies or oppressors”

And other hm-haw blether

James, an archeologist,

No longer an apprentice

He long held in his hands the amulet

And all his uncle’s property

And was thus ready, as though by Fate,

On the day the humans lost

Even the last of their battles,

When the alien’s beasts did come

And prowled all the cities and forests,

He fought with the last camps

Of scrambling scattered humans hiding

Listening

As came the sounds, the bloodcurdling screeching,

The superior species battlecry

The sound of fear waked within

They broke through

As the door of the bunker clattered down,

“Heavy,” they thought

But instead it bowed to their villains,

As a platoon of aliens of cruel comportment

Seized them all there

Snuffing out the futile fight

Of the weak earthly men,

And they trapped,

Imprisoned them,

Struggling, groaning, stunned.

* * *

Their enemies found them there

They were captured, put into cells…

But he had a key:

He found to his surprise a glow in his pocket

That which his uncle unearthed decades formerly,

Forgotten alien magic...the amulet.

As it reacted to the alien environment,

He realized he held a secret of their skilled science in his hands

As their restraints clicked

As the restraints loosened

As they fell from them reactively.

“...Uncle Orville, you haven’t left us…”

He, his starved cellmates fought their way through

Brutally through the hallways

All galloping there through the cold chambers,

Like bellowing beasts unleashed at bay,

Towards the cockpit.

“...Don’t look back. There is no home...nowhere left but the sky...”

Assaulting,

He and his team moved to the front

Unlocked the controls and the door

With their magic amulet, electrified.

“...If we leave it all now, we might have a chance!...”

To her he shouted,

Leaving to her the amulet

To run on ahead quickly

As their enemy tried to rout them from behind.

“...Leave everything, all things behind...”

She swung the ship round

Back towards the southern sky,

Off from the mothership,

“Away…Up!”... Away, it raced off…“Away…!”

...Doubting,

They would have escaped from their aggressors,

But for an alien’s snarling warning

“A bomb was activated.”

But James lept

As he cast the bomb into an escape pod

Knocking a guard

Who dragged him inside before it detonated,

He saw he was helpless

To escape back to the ship,

So James flew the pod the other way

To avert Analicia’s bitter fate...

And he left her,

A resigned farewell bidding

On that spacecraft swiftly fleeing

And won her escape.