Green sunlight flayed the once-verdant soil. Baking the mud—this was a ceramic world. This was a ceramic world with an atmosphere like a bottle of water in a hot car, hung low and sick and lukewarm. Would have held bacteria, would have been a swamp, but the very air was a fever. Nothing should have been able to survive. And yet, life, such as it was, "found a way".

Towering. It was a towering thing, baked gray at the feet with a thin layer of once-mud (now more like sand, the same stuff that baked and made up the whole inedible crust of this damned planet.) Those elephant-club feet, radiating, barely dragged along the husk of life. Stumblingly, they churned, one over the other at a time. To our eyes it was a shamble, but in the creature's mind it was sprinting efficient (operating on a machine scale, too overarching in scope to live.)

Most of its bony-tree-trunk legs were covered by numerous flowing sheets of tissue (a gown skirt cast of lank sacs). it was here, and not in the emaciated thorax, where the organs were stored. Now, though, even the soft tissue was running on a skeleton crew. The stomach and intestines were atrophied (ran together into a single, lengthy digestive pipe)

In more prosperous days, its hide beat slickly amphibious; now, it was all the creature could do to beat (or more likely flog) its heart to raspingly throb. Respiration was left to the ragged mess of gills like moth-eaten plumage (rotten millinery about its mid-section, sickened fleshy fascinator). Like feathers off a dead bird, the gills held a waxy flatness about them. Where they ought to have held a healthy sheen, they were now flat and cloudy with bowl after bowl of hot dust, long since nursed for all the moisture it was worth. Ingrained into the vulnerable open wound of a lung. And open, it was; a set of auxiliary limbs branched out, tipped with soft masses of feather-flesh, the underside gills of a mushroom turned inside-out.

Its final set of limbs were single-fingered spines. Scythe-shaped, but dulled by a frosted membrane the translucent white-pink color of some blind cave fish. These things—likely once avian wings, stripped of plumage (plucked by years of flightless weight) served no real purpose, now, besides repulsive display. (Display, to what? The empty sky? Others of its kin?)

Beyond the collapsed shoulders (monuments to atrophy) the creature's spine made itself thornily apparent. The core of its form was a contradiction, extremes of flesh soft and drifting, as smoke; while the bone interrupted the animal impression with its woody structure. Vertebrae made hating, thorns on thorns; emaciated acacia. It was as if the beast grew from out of the wood itself, a perpetual maggot arrested in metamorphic stasis. Dry bark cloaked in smoke, still there to contain the flame (belching out smothering coat woven of sap and young wood).

At long last, and the peak of atrocity, the head. Starving, gaped mouth perpetually open, displaying the absence of prey while gasping for sustenance. Eyes, just as empty, empty of iris and pupil and vein (unseeing, perhaps) and yet so empty white (even the blue tinge of fish-death was absent) that to call them "milky" would be a misnomer. Marble, perhaps, a more apt comparison, little chunks of flash-frozen perfection from out of a statue. Twin twitching antennae, the only sign of life above the neck. They at once resembled moth-horns and moth-eaten millinery (slain glory, mating signal in vain, cast to rot in a hat-box), and moved like ants on fire. Frantically searching for a something without, unable to question their function as cogs in a self-destructive insect war machine (furnace for chronological charcoal, spewing nothing but busy smoke. Occupied to no end.)

As a whole, this creature's species seems to be doomed. Doomed to bake on a dying world or perhaps work itself to death scrying scorched skies for something besides empty heat, something that just isn't there anymore. Maybe the white-hot sun will wick it to light, a final contra-entropic mercy; although in this arid world cold bodies are about the closest thing to a true mercy. OK, scratch that. Fiery death, a final insult.

(We'll call this pained thing a Praying Mantis, the way it stands in unending praise to the deadly hot fish-eye-in-the-sky.)

END LOG