Flash Fiction: Warlord of the Chrome Glove

[This is the first in a hopefully long running series of flash fiction that I aim to write as exercises in writing daily. I will not post all of them, but this is the first, and thus feels important. This post, and I imagine many of the ones that follow, are heavily inspired by Caves of Qud (in my opinion one of the great masterpieces of science fiction of our time) and Vaults of Vaarn (which also draws inspiration from Qud). I am obsessed.]

Creice glanced at the severed head which sat on a metal chair in the middle of the room. It was only a couple of days since Creice had accomplished that goal, and the thought of it still made the muscles in his neck twitch, as though they were eager to leap into action now and do it all over again. The head, still leaking a bit of yellow sap, stared back in permanent shock. That sap made Creice’s clubbed tail feel sticky.

The room stank like age. Not dry, dusty, forgotten places but the decayed, moldering stench of a village abandoned after plague. There was no life here - not besides Creice, and the expired life of the scorpiock chieftain he had slaughtered this morning - but the room felt like it carried a history of death.

Criece discovered this room several weeks earlier, when fleeing from the same scorpiock tribe he had just returned from massacring. The sandstorm that had given him cover to flee had also revealed a narrow crack in the base of a towering rock formation. Squeezing his wide, overmuscled body into the crack, Creice found a path that led to a set of stairs, leading upwards into the spire of rock. The stairway ended in a single room, large enough to hold the feasthall of his tribe, littered with strange bits of cord, metal boxes stacked and strewn about the carved stone floor. One cylindrical chair laid on the floor at the far end of the room, a few meters away from the thing that Creice had come to believe was a god.

“APPROACH, PETTY BEING, AND RECEIVE INSTRUCTION.”

The words vibrated the room, but not through volume or force. They seemed to Creice to shake the stone itself, and his vision blurred at the edges. He found himself stepping forward unconsciously, then stopped. He deliberated. Something within him fought to approach, something intrinsic, something buried in his genetic memory, as though every one of his ancestors were rising up from their afterlife and pushing him forward. But he was also afraid. It was a feeling he rarely acknowledged, but in this moment he gave it its full berth.

In the end, that thing that he knew as his true nature won out, and he walked to the thing that spoke. It seemed to hover in the air, about a meter off the ground. It looked like a tangle of chrome pipes, knotted in impossible geometries. Three, maybe four meters in diameter. It rotated slowly - or, perhaps it was the tangle of pipes tying and untying itself repeatedly that gave it the illusion of rotation. The light of Creice’s glowbulb in his hand reflected pink-white off of the god-thing.

“BRING ME THE HEAD OF A MORTAL ENEMY, AND RECEIVE THE BLESSING OF METACHROME.”

Those words imprinted on his mind like a burning brand, and in the early, pre-dawn darkness of the desert morning, as he cut down warriors and elders alike on his way to the chieftain who had cursed him, he mumbled the words under his breath over and over and over.

The head of the chieftain, black eyes wide in fixed horror, strings of beads wrapped around chitinous spines, sat beside Creice on the cylindrical seat. The god-thing seemed to pulse, swelling outward, as though each of the chrome pipes were about to burst. The head next to Creice dematerialized.

“BLESSINGS OF THE METACHROME.”

Thus did Creice become known as the Warlord of the Chrome Glove. His reign over the inner desert lasted 89 years, until his death at the end of the Insutan Rebellion.