This post is inspired by a writing prompt in the Worldbuilding Community - Worldbuilding Prompt #555 - Lights in the sky. It's a short tale from my sci-fi setting, and shows The Battle of Tharwell from the very different perspective of a simple observer.
Image created by AI in Wombo.art
Glung's tails twitched with worry, swishing from side to side through the murky water of his homepool. The earth had juddered and shaken for five days now as streaks of fire fell from the sky. Each day, the shaking had grown louder, the ripples in the pool stronger, and the streaks brighter.
His prime egg-bearer Aluglug surfaced beside him.
"Glung, you are our fertile-male. Can you not make this stop ? It is scaring the smallfry. If they get any more frightened, they'll all turn female and we'll have no males at all. Take up your net and prawnstick, lead the drone-males and make the world go back to being still !"
He shook his head sadly. "No, Aluglug. This is not a matter than can be dealt with by warriors. I spoke to Mlugg the exmale. He is our oldest and wisest. Did you see the twinkles in the sky and fire falling down to our swamps ? Mlugg told me it was the gods going to war. They had a great battle to decide who rules the heavenly marsh and has the right to breed there. We can do nothing except watch, wait and hope."
That was when the sky was torn by lights. It was like will-o-wisps falling from above. The lights brightened as they fell, turning from dim dots like swamp fire into bright searing trails across the night sky. Glung quivered and knew without looking that all three of his tails were lashing the water with fear. Aluglug, dived rapidly under the surface, taking refuge in the thick mud at the bottom of the homepool.
The largest of the fires in the sky passed close overhead with a roar, a fireball so white it outshone the dim red sun, with a trail that stretched the width of the sky. Glung felt the heat of it drying his skin, making his protective coating of mud crack.
There was a huge crash as the fireball abruptly terminated in a pond no more than a mile or two distant. The ground bucked hard, making the water in the pool jump and splash. Glung felt his cloaca loosening in a terror-response, filling the water with defensive faecal pellets.
It took several hours before he felt calm enough to venture towards the site. He took drone-males Hulupp-one and Hulupp-three with him, each armed with a sharp prawnstick and carrying a sturdy entangling net.
When they reached the site, it was a mess. What had once been a nice safe homepool was no more, it's welcoming mud splashed across a hundred feet radius. In the damp pond bed lay a cylindrical object, charred and smoking. It was mostly blacked and burned, but one section was still light grey, with indecipherable squiggles on it and the emblem of the sun, but in an alien yellow, not the proper deep red.
Suddenly the one end of the cylinder popped open. A figure climbed slowly out. It was utterly alien.
It only had two ambulatory limbs, and they terminated in black blobs not webbed feet. It had a wrinkly skin in the darkest of blues, except for it's face which was smoother but a strange pasty pinkish-grey colour instead of greenish brown. The head was topped by a dense mass of fine brown tendrils. It had two grasping limbs instead of the proper six, but they were of unequal lengths. One ended in an appendage like a foot but with no webbing. The other was half as long, ended in a stump with no obvious appendages or function, and seemed to exude a bright red ichor.
The two drones gripped their prawnsticks, frozen with fear, their defensive pellets building up uselessly on the ground behind them.
The alien moved uncertainly towards them, appearing to stagger on the soft ground. A slot in it's head moved and made strange croaking sounds, and then a few seconds later a box on it's belt spoke in clear Amphip.
"Help... me..."
That was all it said. Then the alien pitched forward into the mud and lay still.
Hulupp-one was the first to speak. "Well, it doesn't look much like a god should. I wonder if it's edible ?"