Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Swarm

"What did I tell YOU!"

A chorus of shushing came from the humans pressed against the side of the hill watching as the massive creature unfolded itself from the yellow smoke.

A hand clamped over his mouth and his entire body vibrated with anger as Admiral Vir pressed him further down against the sulfuric dirt.

His glower went completely unnoticed as the human looked forward staring at the massive behemoth as if finally revealed itself fully to them. The deep moaning stound continued as the one before them lifted it's head as if to trumpet like an elephant, but the sound it made was so low, it shock the rocks beneath them. Krill couldn't hear anything at all, but he could feel the horrible vibration. Sunny clapped her ands over her ears.

The humans lifted their hands to their heads trying to hold their brains in their sockets as the vibration rolled through them and into their eyes.

The creature lowered it's head taking a step into the great boiling lake.

It didn't seem perturbed by the heat as the water bubbled and boiled at it's ankles.

The creature, whatever it was, must have been at least thirty or even forty feet tall with four massive legs in the shape of tree trunks with large flat feet about as wide as you average tractor tire. It had the body not dissimilar to that of a rhino, very compact and very muscular, but also stout. It's head is where it almost completely diverged from any sort of human animal. One might have compared the face to some sort of hammerhead shark with large protrusions out to either side, though weather those were some kind of horn or some kind of eye, It was hard to tell

It's snout o the other hand was comprised of a tight spiral of thick corded flesh, and as it walked out over the mat of orange and red algae, part of its snout unfurled, trailing almost twenty feet to the ground where it dipped into the water and slid along the stone, coming back up covered in the red algae before curling up again and receding back into the mouth.

Other of these same tendrils began to break away from the tight spiral, until at least twenty of these massive filaments were scraping along the ground trolling for algae. Then there was the creature's tail, if they had thought the rest of it was large, than the tail itself was oversized even for this creature, trailing out behind it for almost twice it's body length.

When the tail swished from one side to the other part of it would vanish completely into the mist. As the creature walked, it dragged it's tail through the algae picking up the stuff as it went. With that behavior, the back half of the creature was partially red with the growing algae, as were it's feet and much of it's face.

Running along it's back, were massive ridges covering large holes into the creature's body. As it breathed these holes flexed, puffing out large gouts of yellowed steam.

It was, the strangest thing to watch.

Water spilled from it's tail and extremities, falling down onto the edge of the lake where, what they had thought were rocks and gravel, began to open up into tiny brown and red mushrooms, or mushroom like things. Their little stems glowed with a reddish bioluminescence turning the fog above them orange. Below their bodies, the rocks began to twist and move and wriggle, and they looked down to find the mushrooms opening below them too despite being crushed into the ground by the weight of at least 8 humans and one Drev.

Their mouths were open in shock and delight as tiny pinpricks of glowing blue light drifted out from inside the mushroom canopies.

One of them landed on Admiral Vir's hand winking like a firefly.

The humans crowded in to take a look and found a small bug like creature, with miniscule wings and a glowing body sitting on his hand before up and flying away still glowing blue against the overwhelmingly red background behind it.