Why do I listen to Monster Magnet?
Why does the Sloar root beneath the charred trunks of the stonewood trees after the summer fires? Why do the tusks of the Sloar become hardened by the smoldering ash, and why do the men of the steppes harvest the tusks of the Sloar for their siege engines?
Why do those men celebrate their victories in ancient verse, calling in vain to the daughter moons that braid the Worldrings with their fickle orbits?
And why, in forgotten chambers beneath the polar mountains of those moons, do the waiting godlings slumber in tanks of crystal and titanium, submerged in life-sustaining fluids that chill them to numb immortality?
Why do we wait for the third moon to fall burning into the sea, boiling away the watery veil that obscures the trench-dwellers, casting those atavistic shapes shrieking onto shores unprepared for such unevolved ferocity?
Why do the hill-tribe smiths work the meteoric steels shed in the desert by that fallen moon? What secret works do they wrest from those strange ores?
Why has the great crystal bell in the temple been left un-rung for millennia? And then why do the monks now paint with blood the great suspended ram which will finally strike that fragile bell, releasing from its form the toll that is its own death-knell?
What will wake upon hearing that sound? For how many eons have they rested in primitive beds of stone and ice? Across how many galaxies have they traveled? How many of those galaxies have swallowed themselves in perfect annihilation? How many suns have been flung into the deep wastes, trailing dying worlds peopled with doomed races?
When those sleeping gods rise, and take up the tusk of the Sloar, and shatter the gates of the temple, and crush the monks' skulls, and wield the great mithral hammer to unmake the cryogenic palaces of the fallen astronauts, and sing again in victory, will they ask,
"Why do I listen to Monster Magnet?"
--Steve Kilian
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