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    The Sky Mother's Gift
    The Sky Mother's Gift
    The Sky Mother's Gift
    Ebook41 pages34 minutes

    The Sky Mother's Gift

    By Thomas K. Carpenter

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Earth lies abandoned.

    When the Makers left for the stars, civilization descended into ruin. Asp, one of the last remaining sentient cities, fights against the ravages of time, but his resources are dwindling. When at last he swallows his pride and seeks the help of the primitive peoples that remain, he learns the true meaning of courage.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Carpenter
    Release dateMar 12, 2013
    ISBN9781301462926
    The Sky Mother's Gift
    Author

    Thomas K. Carpenter

    Thomas K. Carpenter resides in Colorado with his wife Rachel. When he’s not busy writing his next book, he's out hiking or skiing or getting beat by his wife at cards. Visit him online at www.thomaskcarpenter.com, or sign up for his newsletter at https://www.subscribepage.com/trialsofmagic.

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      Book preview

      The Sky Mother's Gift - Thomas K. Carpenter

      The Sky Mother's Gift

      By

      Thomas K. Carpenter

      Copyright Information

      The Sky Mother's Gift

      Copyright © 2013 by Thomas K. Carpenter

      Published by Black Moon Books at Smashwords

      www.blackmoonbooks.com

      Cover Design Copyright © Rachel J. Carpenter

      © Rolffimages | Dreamstime.com

      Discover other titles by this author on:

      www.thomaskcarpenter.com

      All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

      CONTENTS

      The Sky Mother's Gift

      Copyright

      About the Author

      Other Works

      Start Reading Now

      The Sky Mother's Gift

      As the last sentient city on planet Earth, Asphelana sunk into a sunless melancholy.  Communications to his oldest friend Xinchi had returned as meaningless gibberish, half-formed symbols and other degenerated abstracts. They had not spoken in some time, but Asp couldn’t imagine how his friend's logic-matrix had failed so completely.  

      For a while, Asp thought the wires between them had been cut or damaged somewhere along the way and had been prepared to send a search party.  But after running the messages through a noise filter, he realized that Xinchi’s grasp on reality had faded to that glooming derelict region of propped-up sentience, too far gone to contemplate revival.

      Fearing that time near, Asp used the remaining wires to catalog the remnants left of his kind.  When he completed, the tally made his furnaces belch cold uncertainty.

      If there was a time to act, it was now, even though the window had squeezed thin.  He couldn’t wait for the makers to return to the lost planet. Asphelana would have to revive civilization himself.  

      #

      Asp reviewed his former greatness and considerable boundaries. There he sat, hunched on the eastern seaboard, astride over lakes, rivers, and crumbly ashen roads; filled with skeletal buildings draped in strangling vine; run through with lightless tunnels bound in rusted tracks.

      All these were considerable assets for a world long ago faded from disuse, and had once been a source of great pride. Now they were bloated bulk, filled with ghostly electric memories, sending addled cross-signals into his brain center.

      Asp measured that his will to survive was great, but the means to affect his surroundings had diminished. He had few remaining servants. Most of his maintenance robots, the ones that kept him functioning, had perished on errands in the dangerous wilderness, until he had only enough to respark his furnaces and patch troublesome wires.

      The tribes that hunkered down in his girth were scattered and warred occasionally. Asp had taken little note of them for they had not been his chief concern.

      The people that had left had been his masters, not those that remained. He'd often wished that he could have left, too. All the artifices of his existence packed up and stored on the giant spacecrafts that had floated around the

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