701. Beyond the stars, 8
I feel a shiver.
A shiver that shakes all the nerves and muscles of my neck, shoulders and back.
The ground is shaking.
Seemingly opaque clouds eclipse the sun.
Kosmos is rising its enormous head and wings, visible from possibly a hundred kilometres around cleanly.
I gave all my artefacts to fuel it. I want to see it.
I want to witness that moment.
The shivers don’t stop coursing through me.
As before us in the distance, the first shockwave blows the air around.
Apophis raises its head toward the sun. It’s dark as rocks, because that’s what its outer layer of skin is made of.
But inside, it’s warm. It’s boiling hot even. It’s alive, and carries all the power and knowledge of life that my sister had.
The most powerful god on Earth now.
Her long pelt of hair flutters slightly as she gazes intensely at her work over there.
She’s releasing the veil that kept Kosmos under her control and slower metabolism.
Kosmos awakens... It’s a majestic and mostly frightening sight.
The snake rises as tall as a peak of an alpine mountain. Its immense wings would collapse under their own weight if they were of any known human material. But they hold, and they stretch, casting shadows dark as night below them, eclipsing all sky light.
It’s even darker than night below, as the wings absorbs all reflected and ambient lights from most of their surface, as their power is activating.
You can’t ship a billion ton of rocks out of Earth’s gravity well with just exothermic and expansive chemical reactions. You need an order of magnitude more efficiency.
You need the power of a god, like her.
The air darkens around this spot of land. A cloud of dust scatters from its bottom part, too heavy to rise entirely in one go after the head and rising neck.
But slowly, the titanic snake now opening its mouth is raising its body slightly higher, as if crawling against an invisible wall of the world.
Its wings fight off gravity without flapping, only burning T.I. and sunlight, as much as they can absorb.
It’s a struggle, a matter of weight, energy and work from where we stand.
But it’s a real physical struggle for this giant suffocating beast that is Kosmos.
It’s unable to breathe in this pressure down here on land. Unable to move nor stand higher under its own insane weight. Struggling painfully, physically with all its given might to now escape, to birth itself away from this suffocating atmosphere.
The instinct to live in this painful rise to awareness, Nightmare played it cruelly well.
The giant beast clearly suffers its condition here, and gives it all it can to escape.
The open mouth to the star above is gasping in pain. The wings are vibrating in other painful tremors, turning the sky noticeably darker around them.
And little by little, the snake lowers its consequential weight, and rises another segment of its infinite body above the ground. Another pair of wings stretches open slowly as the segment leaves the ground.
The thing is visibly drowning in dire pain, but winning its struggle slowly.
Gravity on Earth for it is almost like being underwater for us. You have to swim up and fast lest you soon die...
A cloud of dust is carried with it in its whirlpool of T.I. consumed to reduce and oppose Higgs field all along its wings.
An exhausting and immense consumption of energies, of everything, forcing its flesh to go against the well of Earth.
Fighting to escape the well of Earth.
In order to live...
I’m shivering, taken by the moment and sight. Taken by all it means, for me, for us all, for humanity past and for poor struggling Kosmos itself.
Its creator was not kind to it... Because to succeed in such a huge ambition, they needed to make the maximum, to optimise it to its limits. Using the wind of instincts to live. Forcing it to overcome this cruel challenge of being born in an environment where it could not survive, to make it give everything to sail away.
Painful but successful...
Kosmos suffers what no beast ever has.
Its hatching out of its egg and flying out of the nest are one and the same, from the boot of her cold creator now kicking her out. Fly away to survive. To live. You must!
I can’t see its mouth anymore, it’s already kilometres high. But I can tell this quaking snake slowly flying off is in terrifying pain.
The shadow of its tail leaves the ground at last. The strong winds scattered and blowing around don’t match its very slowly rising speed.
The struggle of Kosmos will ease as distance away from Earth’s surface grows; but for now it’s still as if it was mostly at the start of its struggle.
I really sympathise with this strained monster, so big it’s like a scar in the celestial sphere.
Nightmare gave it everything.
And Kosmos is making it.
Nightmare gives a final order to the majestic bird, now that it left the ground properly behind, managing to reach an overall weight just below zero.
A last impulse from its creator courses like thunder through the air and its entire body.
The giant snake slows its ascension, and its countless reactors activate.
Pulsating flames, quite loud, sparkle all around the lowest feathers of the wings.
Another biological engineering wonder from my sister. They will lower the strain on Kosmos’s breathing of T.I. and give more push to its body from traditional chemistry instead. And as the consumption of fuel from its glands will also lower slightly its weight, it means the hardest part is actually behind now.
Flames push the wings up and strain the shoulders a little more, changing Kosmos’s posture slightly.
The ruckus is far up and away in the sky already, but still so loud I hear it loud. The multitude of little fires all vibrating or pulsating together make a strange song.
The immense snake now burning its pockets of spirits, oils and all wastes, its lift gradually accelerates. It begins rising faster out there.
It grows smaller in the sky from our perspective, Kosmos also deviating eastward in the distance.
A few stormy minutes later, the distant thing is barely visible anymore. The line of dust and then smoke that followed is thinning and dissolving.
The rocky valley it had lied in is left as an oddly colourful spot of earth surrounded by still mostly dark and drying swamps.
R - Good luck Kosmos. Safe birth and flight to you.
N - It will make it to Luna. It did very well.
Nightmare felt her own shivers of success, witnessing this hatching of a kind, and only flight away from the nest. It worked.
Her work, her ambition... My goodness the ambition...
R - I am... Really impressed...
It’s an understatement. I’m still having goosebumps.
Nightmare is looking up toward the disappearing spot up there.
How much must she feel right now. She’s not answering me now, lost too deeply in her thoughts.
In a week or so, Kosmos should reach the moon. It’s a safely visible objective in the void of space. You can’t really miss it. And the flight will be much easier onward.
The first step for the higher magnitude of life is out there.
~
