Category: Skwibby fiction

T’lakdo looked up at the massive stone archway, shadows playing with the light pouring through the broken windows, and felt an intense melancholy.

It was his second trip to the planet that its inhabitants had once called Earth, and the place had changed. On his first visit, T’lakdo had found the third planet from the sun a charming, if barbaric place. The dominant species, who called themselves human beings, were intriguing to T’lakdo. He’d been to many inhabited worlds, but found few that were so absorbed by their own mythologies that they had devoted most of their resources to celebrating them.

An archeologist by training, T’lakdo had been able to see that since the species had developed an agricultural society, they had been creating amazing structures. Monuments to their gods. They used whatever technologies they had, and pushed their limits. The structure called Stonehenge was already thousands of years old when he visited Earth the first time. And at that point, the humans had advanced enough to create soaring buildings, also out of stone.

They were called cathedrals, and they were magnificent; he’d never seen anything like them before on any world.

But they came with a terrible cost.

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