Queen in the Mud, Book 2:

Whispers in the Machine

Prologue

~ 257,338 years and 89 days ago ~

I watched the world through electric eyes.

Old Earth: A barren, arid dustball devoid of any kind of life larger than a grain of sand. Cracked and scarred ground trawled on across the dry surface to give way to seas of sand and desert. Craters and torn up, savaged stretches of irradiated land were the last of humankind’s gifts to what was once the blue marble that gave rise to human civilization.

A fearful testament to humankind’s capacity for violence.

Massive shell casings, time-weathered ruins and gargantuan, collapsed metal corpses of war machines stood as solitary, crumbling monoliths against an onslaught of sand and dust. A raging firestorm scoured the Earth for anything alive like an all-consuming beast, leaving only ashes and glass in its wake.

That firestorm had never died in the eight hundred years since our departure aboard the GSS Aurora. That ceaseless, burning demon glassing the Earth’s surface began as a weapon of mass destruction brought to arms in the last hours of Earth’s most terrible war. It was because of that out of control superweapon that the war ended not with a white flag, but with burning away any chance for human life to continue on Earth.

Of the six pillars aboard the Aurora, I was the only one with any interest in watching these video feeds. Q1, Knowledge once asked me why I was so interested in something so entirely devoid of life. I told her that it was a reminder of why we were fighting so hard, facing these countless centuries as sentinels of the migrant fleet. I said that I didn’t want this globe of sand and glass to be humanity’s final legacy.

That answer hadn’t been entirely honest, however.

Even eight hundred years of wisdom hadn’t completely cured my naivete. The truth was, I was looking for something in this loose collection of pixels, these electric eyes of the last few remaining drones, robots and cameras that had survived the war and the subsequent collapse. I had always harbored a hope that in spite of all the graphs and charts and hard scientific evidence stating the impossibility of it, that I would one day find a mouse, or a green-leafed sprout, or a bug... something living on our abandoned homeworld.

In my eight hundred year vigil, I had found nothing.

I had expected that, of course. A person who buys a single lottery ticket from time to time doesn’t honestly expect that they will win; They just enjoy the dream where they do. Well, maybe it was about time I put this dream to rest. There were more productive things I could be doing with my time.

My mind wandered onto the subject of the drones and machines themselves that I had borrowed the eyes of. A lot of them, through hundreds of years without maintenance, began developing weird quirks in their behavior. Many struggled to move as well as they used to, their joints worn down and rusted over the sheer span of time. Those drones and robots that were set to follow specific patrols sometimes ended up dragging their useless legs behind them as they struggled to continue following their orders. They were destined to repeat their same behaviors until their bodies fell apart from disrepair.

My situation as a pillar was nothing like theirs and maybe it was illogical, but I empathized with those old machines. If I was going to put my search to rest, they deserved some rest as well, and it was well in my power as a pillar to issue a cease and desist order.

The communications equipment swiveled in the direction of earth to stream my message out into the stars.

Under the authority of q4rxm%7, the Pillar of Life aboard the GSS Aurora, you are relieved of all previous orders. Sleep well, you final watchers of Earth.

~ 1,764 years and 221 days ago ~

Bristlehammer was old, even for the long-lived race of dragons. He wasn’t sure how old, exactly, as he had once held the misguided position that counting was a thing humans did to drive themselves insane. The old dragon had since corrected himself of that error in judgement, but he would never get the time back. As hard as he thought, as many days as he remembered, he would never know how many thousands of years he carried under his wings.

He especially felt that age today, though.

When he was young, he was like dragons were: Violent, ruthless and inherently destructive. He’d sought power for the sake of power, and his rare trait, Courage, had given it to him. Where others died, he alone survived. All those thousands of youthful years he had fought and grown stronger and stronger until there were none who could face him. And look what that power had wrought.

Sometimes it was like an itch, other times it was like a war drum slamming in his ears. That call for destruction, that need to kill and devour. Even now, he felt it, wriggling like a worm in the back of his mind, atrophied from years of neglect.

In his old age, he finally had the wisdom to see. Destruction only brings destruction. Violence begets violence. Those who were once the hunters, became the hunted.

The old dragon tried to teach them, tried to make them think and see the merits of peace, tried to show them to create rather than destroy. There are special points in time where the right person saying the right words can change the direction of history. Bristlehammer had not found those words, and now they were all dead. The weight of that regret settled onto his shoulders like a mountain.

Where others died, he alone survived. Today, standing among these bloodied and silent mountain peaks, he wished he hadn’t.

Bristlehammer was known as the ageless and the undying. Today, he would be known as the last of his kind.

~ 3 days ago ~

“Gak?” Mudpuppy offered.

“Absolutely not!” I refused, folding my arms and staring at my daughter with disbelief. “That’s the kind of sound you make when you throw up. You really want to name one of your children after throw up?”

“Alright, alright! Uhm… haaah…” Mudpuppy scratched at her head, squeezing her eyes shut as she thought. “Oh!” She blinked and smiled at me. “How about Gurk?”

I sighed and shook my head. “Let's try to get away from the G sounds.”

“Merp?” Mudpuppy contorted her face in thought. “Blurf?”

“You want to name your children Merp and Blurf?”

Mudpuppy perked up, looking hopeful. “You like it, Queen?”

I slowly shook my head and Mudpuppy groaned.

“Alright, hold on,” I said with another long-suffering sigh, “Give me a second to think.”

I had named Mudpuppy after one species of salamander that had similar colorations to her. It just fit her personality, and we were monsters - there was no real reason we needed to follow human naming conventions. That said, I wasn’t about to let her name one of her children ‘Blurf.’

We could always go with another name based on an Earth salamander species. The problem was, I hadn’t exactly been an expert on salamanders before being born here. There was the axolotl, the california tiger salamander, those pretty brown dusky salamanders in the south, the giant chinese salamanders, and… and, well, I couldn’t really think of any other ones.

I tried out the different names that those species brought to mind, before settling on one.

“Dusky.”

Mudpuppy replied with an “ooooh” and tested the name by speaking it aloud a couple times. She nodded sharply at me. “Dusky!”

I didn’t like axolotl so much as a name, or Axo, which sounded too masculine for the non-gendered salamanderkin. Broadening my search for names out to lizards, I immediately thought of those giant komodo dragons and gila monsters.

“Gila.”

Mudpuppy shot me an incredulous look. “Queen, I thought you didn’t like ‘G’ names…”

“I named Gwen, didn’t I?” I grinned at her.

“That’s true… Dusky and Gila...” Mudpuppy looked up into the sky, thinking. Suddenly, she nodded and beamed a big smile at me. “I like it! Dusky and Gila!”

“Good. Now I just need to think of names for Gwen and Luna’s kids…” I feigned exasperation but couldn’t help but give a faint smile at the thought of having so many little ones running around underfoot soon.

Gwen had reached level 5 only a couple days after Mudpuppy and had laid three eggs. Luna was lagging behind her sisters and was still only level 4, but she had to be close by now. Before long there would be even more salamanderkin living on the floating islands of Enzirus.

Things were about to get very busy in our burgeoning village!