What Remains

And at last, he stirred. Finally, after all this time, he started to move from his sinner’s kneel, receiving no forgiveness from gods long forgotten. How long had he been sitting there? Centuries? Eons? Eternities? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was finally moving from that shocked state in which he had put himself in. He rose from the ground. He expected his joints to be rusted; to hear the creaks of old machinery trying its best to not collapse on itself. He heard no such sound. Perhaps time was too terrified to touch him. Fair. He wouldn’t want to have to deal with himself if he had witnessed what he had done.

He starts to walk. He follows the dying sun. Perhaps he can find the place where he moves no more. But he knows better. As the sun rises behind him, he will continue walking. And he does. He marches toward where the sun goes to die. Well, saying he is moving towards something would be giving credit to a broken mind. He isn’t moving toward anything, but moving away from that place. But no matter how far he walks from which he came, the memories of what happened there are scarred into the deepest parts of his mind.

He hears the sounds clearly. The shouts. The explosions. The tortured screams of those who were lucky to die first. He sees the enemy. The hoards of warriors and soldiers fighting for their cause. What was that cause? Why were they fighting? If there was a reason, he wasn’t told. He remembered the orders, don’t let a single one survive. He heard the hatred in his King’s voice. So, like a good leader, he charged, as did the others. This was their purpose. To fight the battle that the makers couldn’t. The battles they didn’t want to fight.

He remembers seeing a thing. A combatant. Something his database had no knowledge of. It was wrong. It was all wrong. The thing had four arms and an eldritch hammer. He noticed that the other enemies had the same weapon. They had a mask. The masks smiled. They knew something that he didn’t know. He and his allies would engage the combatants. His comrades would fall by a swing of the hammers. The greatest of them all, the King, turned to scrap metal in one single strike. He only saw the hammer as it tore through his body. Rage filled the machine. HOW DARE THEY KILL THE KING!? HOW DARE THEY KILL HIS COMRADES!? DID THESE, THESE MONSTERS, NOT KNOW THIS WAS THEIR PLACE TO DIE!? Violence overtook him and he charge the four-armed masked warrior. He was going to knock the stupid smile off his mask.

What happened next was a blur. He remembers the pain. He remembers the sound of a mask falling. He remembers seeing the second pair of arms of the warrior denigrate, and realizing that the masking provides power. He recalls a seemingly endless dash for that unholy mask and getting pulled by another enemy. He hears it’s taught about “if the weapon wanted to die in style, what place did he have to stop him?” He can see the masking forced onto his face, and seeing the all that ever is become the incompressible simplicity of nothing. But most horrid of all, he remembers the explosion. The energy within him blasted out. For what? Defensive? Attack? Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. What mattered, was what the blast did, to not just the enemies, but to the allies. Saying they were destroyed would be an understatement. So would saying they were annihilated, or obliterated, or atomized. No. It was like their very existence was striking from the books of reality and casting into the nothingness. When the dust settled, there was no dust, only he remained.

At last, he was brought back out from his memories by a sound. A twig breaking. The bush it came from was long dead. He stopped. He looked around and observed his environment. He scanned this little corner of the world. It appeared that the place he was currently in was dead. Better than where he came from. If there were anyone who would happen upon the land, they would surely tell their people of the place their gods had forsaken. At least here, you could tell it was lived in once.

And hope swelled in his core. If there is dead this far out, then perhaps there is barely alive. And if there is barely alive, there can always be the possibility of turning that barely into a fully. And maybe, the group of which the makers were a part of were still alive. Surely, they would need it in this world. And he should help them, for isn’t his doing which turned once lush rice paddies into nothing? So, with a vigor in his step, he marched on, towards the possibility of life, with the sun marching into oblivion with him.