Read Online Crap Kingdom by D. C. Pierson - Free Book Online Page A

magnificent, something that must have been garbage from a special effects studio.
    Standing just outside of the nameless kingdom, its eyes staring straight into Tom’s when he looked up, was a replica of a fantastic creature. It was a sort of a dragon-dog, just a little bigger than any dog he’d ever seen. Its skin was a rich purple marbled with blue, and its dark green eyes were a thousand miles deep. He wondered what movie it had been in, or what art exhibit, or whether it had simply been in some lunatic sculptor’s basement for years, the guy going down every day to work on it just a little bit. It had been worth all that time, he thought.
    Then it blinked.
    It was alive. Tom ran toward it. He felt he had to. There was something in its big green eyes that said,
Get here as fast as possible.
    He’d been trailing behind Gark, who was talking so fast trying to sell him on the Rat-Snottery that he didn’t notice his Chosen One slipping away. Tom covered the patch of dirt between him and the edge of town in seconds and ran out to the beast. It was so still except for the blinking. It didn’t have fur or feathers or scales, but skin like liquid glass holding in a churning sea of purple and blue. There was a storm system inside of it, with little rivulets of blue electricity that would become visible every so often, like if the veins on your arm were constantly shifting beneath your skin and were also made of lightning.
    Magic,
Tom thought.
    The beast flared its nostrils and reared up on its haunches, exposing a belly criss-crossed by the same blue streaks as the rest of its body, with one long yellow interior stripe running down its center. Standing on two legs, it was easily twice as tall as Tom. Tom was aware that he should probably be scared, but he couldn’t find fear anywhere inside of him. He just felt awed and calm. Then it started to fall forward, and its front paws landed on Tom’s shoulders, and the force would have driven him straight into the ground were it not for what seemed like some graceful weight distribution on the part of the beast. Its mouth was big enough to bite his head off, but he still couldn’t find any fear, any survival instinct. He was filled with a totally un-Tom-like certainty that everything was going to be okay. He looked into the twin translucent planets of the thing’s eyes and all of the sudden, he was somewhere else.
    He was high above an unbroken layer of cloud that stretched on forever in every direction, and he was falling, or rather not falling, but gliding down, fast as anything, and he saw something small breaking the cloud layer the way a boat cuts the water. Through the V-shaped break in the clouds, Tom could see a crystal kingdom on a jagged mountaintop, a thing of insane precision and daring and beauty. The sun glinted off the cloud-parting spire that crowned the kingdom, and Tom was fully enveloped in the glare.
    Then he was down there, circling a network of structures cut out of diamond, connected by sky tunnels, built into the side of a hellish and inhospitable mountain. He saw strong men in crystal armor filled with colored cloud, gorgeous girls in long dresses that were half vapor. They lived in homes that were like bubbles, their transparent walls filling with a rainbow of swirling gases when they needed some privacy. Smoke and flame of every color shot through the city’s heart. A void howled at the center of it all, and a huge orb of glass like a miniature gaseous planet hovered just outside of this void. He saw ten thousand crystal-clad soldiers marching in a bowl-shaped parade ground. As he descended toward the ten thousand soldiers, he realized these weren’t just images flashing before his eyes, he was a part of this: the soldiers began looking upward and hailing him. A hero’s welcome. A Chosen One’s welcome.
    “Tom! Tom!” Could it be the men greeting him? No, it was a single voice, coming from very far away, struggling to be heard over the fierce wind