Excelsior! A Logical World very short
Posted: 2006-02-24 05:01am
This is a piece I recently wrote in a class for descriptive writing. Though very short, it's an attempt to show you what the Imperial Commonwealth's capital is like.
Excelsior!
Terra! Jewel in the crown of the Imperial Commonwealth! Look at her shimmer like a diamond in the light of the sun; her surface is of unburnished silver, clouds swept into spirals by her mighty spires and the whims of environmental engineers. Even her bastion of orbital cannonry can be called works of art; impossibly graceful for weapons of such size and terrible power. Sweeping branches like the cresting wave pulling away from the great spike of the main gun thrusting out into the velvety endlessness of the cosmos like a blade thirsting for the throats of the waiting enemy. The light of Sol himself creeps across them like some sluggish liquid, trickling like syrup; lending them a warped appearance, like a slick of oil on the calm waters.
Past them now, and their thunderstorm cracklings, their placement more ordered and still than soldiers on parade. Follow the infinite streams of boats down past Terra’s guns and their three hundred kilometre lengths; follow those ships as they flow like water, a river into the waiting embrace of air and sound. They are like glittering birds, their hulls covered in colours that the eyes can see, and colours the eyes cannot. Gods and goddesses languid and liquid; great beasts tangled in violent embrace; landscapes most unnatural with vermilion skies housing chartreuse suns, turquoise seas lapping at pearly white sands.
Cross the terminator line, where day meets night and night meets day. Cross into the dark side of Terra, but see that even here she is anathema to the dark; her face adorned with laurels of radiance in gold and violet and jade and white so perfect as to make snow atop a mountain’s peak seem dull. These great tributaries of light weave massive concentric circles and vortexes.
Down now, descend unto seas of light that spread across Terra like the Atlantic and Pacific and all those other oceans once did in ages past. Look at the grand starscrapers of opalescent black glass reflecting the artificial auroras, projecting blooming roses of scattering particles like exploding stars. Thoughts and images stream across windows, while translucent hologrammatic living things hundreds of miles long twist and turn among the abyssal chasms between buildings. Music is playing, the music of a million million organic and mechanical sapients. It all pulses and throbs in time with the coruscating clusters of energy, lending the awesome city-world of Terra the appearance of a beating, living heart.
Excelsior!
Terra! Jewel in the crown of the Imperial Commonwealth! Look at her shimmer like a diamond in the light of the sun; her surface is of unburnished silver, clouds swept into spirals by her mighty spires and the whims of environmental engineers. Even her bastion of orbital cannonry can be called works of art; impossibly graceful for weapons of such size and terrible power. Sweeping branches like the cresting wave pulling away from the great spike of the main gun thrusting out into the velvety endlessness of the cosmos like a blade thirsting for the throats of the waiting enemy. The light of Sol himself creeps across them like some sluggish liquid, trickling like syrup; lending them a warped appearance, like a slick of oil on the calm waters.
Past them now, and their thunderstorm cracklings, their placement more ordered and still than soldiers on parade. Follow the infinite streams of boats down past Terra’s guns and their three hundred kilometre lengths; follow those ships as they flow like water, a river into the waiting embrace of air and sound. They are like glittering birds, their hulls covered in colours that the eyes can see, and colours the eyes cannot. Gods and goddesses languid and liquid; great beasts tangled in violent embrace; landscapes most unnatural with vermilion skies housing chartreuse suns, turquoise seas lapping at pearly white sands.
Cross the terminator line, where day meets night and night meets day. Cross into the dark side of Terra, but see that even here she is anathema to the dark; her face adorned with laurels of radiance in gold and violet and jade and white so perfect as to make snow atop a mountain’s peak seem dull. These great tributaries of light weave massive concentric circles and vortexes.
Down now, descend unto seas of light that spread across Terra like the Atlantic and Pacific and all those other oceans once did in ages past. Look at the grand starscrapers of opalescent black glass reflecting the artificial auroras, projecting blooming roses of scattering particles like exploding stars. Thoughts and images stream across windows, while translucent hologrammatic living things hundreds of miles long twist and turn among the abyssal chasms between buildings. Music is playing, the music of a million million organic and mechanical sapients. It all pulses and throbs in time with the coruscating clusters of energy, lending the awesome city-world of Terra the appearance of a beating, living heart.
