Shadows Out of Time

There was a city of vitreous purple rock in a cavern that gave the impression of being huge — immense — even though I had nothing familiar to give me perspective. It must have been formed by stone flowing like melted wax, and great eruptions of gas bursting through it as it congealed. The buildings lacked roofs, needing none, the walls were massively thick, with pylons and courts leading one into another. I saw friezes cut into the walls. Grotesque, alien, nonhuman, they still conveyed a sense of art and the ceremonial.

A chasm cut harshly across the middle of the cave, dropping a mile or more, with a river of churning red lava at the bottom. I couldn’t judge how wide. The cavern’s roof was lost to sight in the distance above, and somehow I could see above me as well as all around.

There were beings moving about. Stony, made of mineral, they seemed hot enough to be plastic to a degree, and their limbs moved slowly, by increments. They walked on massive legs that ended in rocky, graceless hooves, and except for a number of globular eyes their heads were featureless.

Other beings, segmented and flat, with rows of flipper-like legs, moved in the same jerky way as the bipedal ones, and carried burdens through the weird courts and plazas. Maybe they were the equivalent of domestic animals. I couldn’t conceive how they had ever evolved naturally, out of molten rock and raw radioactive ores, out of primeval flame, and perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps some other race had designed them, formed them, and put them here for unknown reasons. Perhaps they had been left in possession of the planet ages ago, having served their creators’ purpose. Exploration? Geological research? Mining?

I saw one of them approach the burning abyss, step indifferently off the edge, and levitate across. Drifting safely to the secure rock on the other side, it began its stiff, clumsy walking again. They could ignore gravity. Only for short distances, it seemed, or they wouldn’t need legs. Probably they kept that talent for emergencies. Without it, in an environment so elemental, so everlastingly shattered and riven, I could not see how they’d survive a year.