Wild 9

The monster in the darkness. Fearful swarms of biomatter scurrying around the primitive planetoids became used to a symphonic dance of its crushing, maiming and killing. They saw the delight in simple murder. They saw the growing tension in it, as life grew scarce and finite.

It had begun so simply, floating through the black void of space, evaporating planets and pulling them into the swirling, angry mass, like a fizzy pop drink through a crazy straw. An anomaly, a gap in the scientific explanations astronomy offered and covered up euphemistically with ‘dark matter’ and ‘quantum energy.’

The reign of Karn was so beautifully… subjective. Nothing to bog down His spirits. Nothing to stand in his way. Malice was eternal happiness, with a universe at His proverbial feet.

Orthodox theorized that Karn was a projection of prime evil. The scripture told of the ancient city of Annapolis, The City of Graces, and how it had used high magic and technology to separate evil from the soul, and outcast it into the darkness of space. They told of how that malice, rather than breaking up, coalesced nebulaic into something larger.

That is, conceptually larger. There was a fundamental problem, with Karn, in that He did not, even at His most murderous, seem to possess a physical body, or presence. His existence as an effect without attributable causes was, at times, wholly disconcerting, so much so that His name was uttered as a reverent curse word when the unexpected happened.

Karn.

Uttered in hate and begrudging piety. If Karn cared anything about its followers, there were no illusions of love or devotion. It required obedience; and adherence, now, to a plan. Even those of Resistance, who doubted the origins attributed by Orthodox, did not doubt the sincerity of the plan that had formed in its aftermath.

It was not so easy, being a god. To have trillions worship at one’s feet.

Not that He had feet. Or that He could stand. The problem, said Orthodox, was that this was very, very frustrating. It was what had moved his thoughts to more complicated desires than inhaling whole atmospheres and gobbling up stars.

What is certain is that after some time, the worlds began to rearrange themselves around the absence of whatever had been lost. The absence took on shape. The shape took on hunger. Hunger took command.

In the planetary cathedral of Castle Karn, a dyson shell blotted out the stars with the digital prosthetics of His hideous, red eyes, projected across the skyline in a twenty-four hour confirmation that His Omniscience was watching everyone at all times. There was no Resistance here. No doubting The Plan.

Orthodox maintained the revelation that what had allegorically struck Him – after a millennium of mindless eating, allegorically and purely metaphorically struck Him and made Him proverbially hiss with surprise – was that He saw the end of the universe, and understood it was finite.

Karn was a very large monster. The more He ate, the bigger He grew. The bigger He grew, the smaller the universe became. The smaller the universe became, the closer He was to starvation, and death.

So Karn slowed down enough to consider the problem of size more fully. He travelled back through the fiery hell of supernovas and the swirling glass splinters of nebulae, past a million planets spinning like grand buffets with ‘Eat Me’ plastered all over them, and went back to where it all began; to the planet where He was born. There He saw His many mothers and fathers skittering about on the great green planet beneath His (purely metaphorical) bloody red eyes. He saw how they greeted Him with open arms, gesturing to the sky with thoughts of love and kindness, of compassion and warmth.

And He squished them with a thought, every last one, into bony purple paste.

And perhaps, Orthodox mused, that had been a little too hasty. But staring out across the thousands of planets before Him, He was permitted hatreds. The old civilization had been so annoying. All that fawning. All that happy reverence.

In the absence of their genius, Karn was left with a conundrum.

How does one make oneself smaller?