5/17/12

Art
By Richard Paul / Peculiar Richard





We love them as we destroy them. We love the beautiful spectacle of their terror which then turns to fury, we savour their mingling hatred of us and love for their burning home which begets such delightful madness. They fight to remove us from their homeworld, to drive us away from their families’ doorsteps; those things which matter most to them; they are driven to delicious heights of emotion as those things are taken away.

It started with the colony worlds, a paltry seven in all. The first was virtually unguarded, in the vicinity of the planet we saw only trade vessels and enfeebled frigates providing a flimsy semblance of security. It was a display of complacence and an ideal starting point for us to put our brush to our canvas.

We destroyed it, left no one alive and ensured that the other worlds of our new canvas saw what we had done, this gave birth to terror, then fury.

Naturally, they fought us. We patiently awaited their reprisal in the debris encircling that colony world, known to this indigenous species, the Vanatharlan, as Banrosar. Our gallery-council had sent nothing but an expeditionary force to this region, but to the tiny fleet that came from their homeworld to confront us, we must have seemed to be a veritable Armada.

There were so few ships, all ancient, all underpowered. This was a small nation with no neighbours, we had had to travel a great distance indeed to reach them. Their navy must have been ceremonial at best.

There was little beauty to be found in that battle. They tried to speak to us first, their quivering voices imploring us to abandon our art. By the time they accepted that we truly intended to destroy them all and started to act appropriately, they were all but dead already.

The only sliver of beauty came when their flagship attempted to ram one of our vessels. It failed, and it’s communications systems were too badly damaged for us to see inside and behold the impotent rage and delectable despair within.

No matter, we saw plenty to appreciate on the remaining colony worlds, and now we’ve come to the final show on the surface of the Vanatharlan homeworld of Metanlonna. The remnants of this species have truly come to despise us now, and they fight with the passion of the doomed.

They watch and shriek as their world is torn down around them; more satisfying to us than all else here are the 9,000 year old houses of the Grand Marquises, obliterated in all seventeen capitols. Intact those houses oozed insipid peace and misdirected patriotic pride; as rubble they offer these stagnant people a true glimpse of the universe’s ultimate glorious fate for us all.

We rejoice in the beastly beauty of the horror we cause. We strip these people of their fear and inhibition; as we destroy their world we shape them into the purest form that any species can achieve. Before they were wasted, so many lived content and died as dross but now they achieve perfection through the purity of their feelings and the force of their expression, they are as alive as they can ever hope to be as they charge at us to meet their doom, their race dies perfect.

I envy them.

We record this for the delectation of our people, every second, every morsel. This exhibit shall join the ranks of hundreds of others in the great gallery palisades and the name of this species shall join all those we have crafted beauty from; Linaw, Faehar, Jarnaj, Human, Slanmena; (to name but a few). In the fullness of time we shall fill our palisades with the beauteous demise of all life everywhere.


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When not scurrying about in the dust at his workplace, or procrastinating in some form or other, Richard partakes in writing, game reviewing and more recently producing dramatic readings of short stories. Both of which can be seen on his linked tumblr account.