WHEN THE SAINTS COME MARCHING IN//O, SWEET FEVER!
Etherlite Heart, Wandering Tower. Do you see them dancing? the future is indeterminate. 314 Eschatologies Corrected. 1.5 Remaining.
1.1: Dead End Dreaming//Bird of Hermes
There's nothing. All around her is black salt and ashen mud, sticking to her knees where she's fallen into it. It's a tar pit, she thinks, this and that place she crawled out of, and yet she doesn't care. perhaps it'll take her. Perhaps she'll be left to ossify in it, some ancient thing to be found and studied by those that come after. If anything comes after. After this, after the nothing that she became, she's not so sure. This world, this world, this world created something like her, knowing she would kill it one day. Only, it didn't, did it? That girl was made by idle hands, men and women who dream of being titans in their own rights, gods not of the new world but of the old one they've lost, so blind, so fucking blind that they can't see they're building new apocalypses every day. Every weapon is an ending, every machine is a calamity. And her, she's both. A machine fashioned into a weapon when she wouldn't work right, when they finally stole that glimmer of common sense to understand that they made a fresh ending, an apocalypse arisen.
Her hands form into fists in the dull sediment, and she thinks that no, she won't become a fossil. More than likely, she'll become fuel, a fire in the belly of whatever it is that they'll use to end the world anew, a cascading mobius loop of fatal errors. Perhaps that's a better use for her corpse. She can't claim to have had a part in whatever they do with her, at the very least. It's a small comfort, that only one of the eschatologies she'll invent is of her own doing. Let them play with her body. What's it to her?
Six bodies surround her. They stand in a circle, each one wearing a face a little different to her. They're all dead, save for the one that's newer than her, and even then she's not sure she isn't amongst the powdered obsidian that's left. They're dead, some of them dead longer than she knows, and yet here they are. Watching. Not judging. How could they? Her sins are theirs, after all. What she's done is nothing more than a result of their failures. Because the first one failed, the second one was built. Because the second one failed, the third one was built... it goes on like that, all the way to her. But her, she's broken, flawed, not fucking right, and that's the price of their weakness. How sad, she thinks. She wonders if they're disappointed in her, or themselves.
The sand cuts her fingers, red on black, and for a second she marvels that they bothered to fill her with real blood. Not the synthetic stuff, artificial nutrients and oxygen carried in a thick colorless paste, they gave her the real thing, made her understand how it feels to bleed. She wonders why they did that. It hasn't helped her, not really. Only made her feel sorry for the things she's not, the things she can never be. She won't ever be a human, not when her ultimate, unintentional purpose is to end them. But, at least she knows how they feel when they hurt. She wonders if that's a mercy, or a cruelty. She wonders who that mercy is meant for, who that cruelty is meant to sting. She wonders if it even matters. Probably not, she decides.
"Stop looking at me."
It's quiet at first, not directed at the five who stare blankly at her naked, bloodied body, but at the one before her, the only one whose sins aren't already hers to bear. The one who comes after her, the one on whose shoulders her failure has come to rest. The seventh of her name, and yet they both know she isn't a success either. That's the next one, the one she can't see but she knows is there. She's watching from some place far off, the empty red moon that hangs over the silent night like a kindly doctor, attending her patient as the life finally leaves them. The eighth of her sisters will surely save the world, even if it kills her.
---Hah. Seven. The irony of it makes her nauseous. Good. Saving the world, or ending it, not that there's a difference, that's a task that's meant for one person, she thinks. There's no point in making one's own siblings shoulder that burden, even if she's already carrying their failures herself. She looks up, and grimaces, because she's still fucking looking at her.
"I said stop!"
Her voice echoes across the desolation, for there is no one in front of her to hear her demands. Shaking, her hands scrape something amongst the ashes, hard and metallic. A different shade of black, gleaming and polished. Pulsating red, a hunger the colour of her blood. She smears some of that red across the oily, unearthly metal, pulling the familiar shape free. A weapon that's meant to kill her. A weapon that could kill the world, or its mother. A weapon that can kill anything. Can it kill her failures, the failures of those that came before, and the ones that will come after? There's only one choice. She cradles the Black Barrel in her lap. Half her body isn't there anymore, turned to shards of glass the color of night, but she has enough left to fire. Turning it away from her, she points the gun that shot down God at the moon, and murmurs a prayer for her sister she's yet to meet.
"Dead Count, two thousand and thirty. Spiritron Barrel loaded, Etherlite core.
--Black Barrel, Full Trance--"
The barrel begins to alight, coruscating with magic called 'death'. She closes her eyes, leans her head against the stock--
--And pulls the trigger.
----
You wake up with a shudder, the taste of salt and copper still on your tongue. it takes you a moment to realise why-- you bit it in the night, as the familiar paroxysms of your moribund consciousness assaulted your dreams. Not the first time. Not the last, either. You stare at the ridged plastic of the van's ceiling, a dull blue robbed of every detail by the night creeping in through the gaps in the blinds, razor-thin lines of sickly streetlight orange crisscrossing your prone body like veins, or incisions. The sun isn't up yet. You should try get some more sleep, you think. There is a... function tomorrow. Things will be expected of you. There'll be socializing. Networking. Pretending that you care about these people, like your very presence isn't a careless insult from your mother-- no, from your makers. It's not good to think of her like that, you chide yourself. It's dangerous. You understood long ago that you are only a tool to her, and a faulty one at that. What good is a gun that fires backwards, after all?
It's a shame. That was the first time you managed to break through the headaches and the melancholy into sleep's embrace, and look where it got you. Dreaming of an apocalypse you're sure you'll cause, just like every other time you manage to steal a little luck from Ole Lukųje, crotchety old bastard that he is. Heart racing far too fast for 4AM, with only the meaningless quiet of a cramped camper van for comfort. It's your baby, this rusty old Volkswagen, and any other time of the day you'd love to show it off, all the little things you've done for it, to it, but right now the silence feels like a grave-- though, it's one that fits you just right, you think.
Your name is Rani, you think. Rani the Sixth, though you're not supposed to call yourself that anymore. It's not like they gave you a replacement, when they replaced you.
Author's NoteWoah, it's a thing. This is an evolution of a lil something I wrote last year, one that I'm gonna try spin into something serious. Admittedly, life is a bitch, so who knows if it'll go anywhere? Even if it doesn't, I think it'll still be fun. Thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a comment.
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