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It stands under the gray skies, swaying gently with the trees and the breeze. It does not make a sound as its feet take it to places where it wanders for all of its short life. The sun is obscured by the thick dark clouds, and the air feels unmercifully cold.
Where is here but a living memory?
It hears the quiet bubbling of small creaks and the rhythmic dripping of morning dew. The animals here are few and those don’t make a sound for they are feral and fierce. Watching, devious, they know it is too big for them to consume. They would sooner shatter their jaws and starve to death then breaking the skin of its flesh.
I used to be a someone before, where have the days gone by?
Humans… they used to be so many of them but, monstrosities of ceramic and flesh attacked and now humans are all but a distant thing of the past, their concrete empire rotting and left behind. One might think that nature would’ve claimed those cities, but for that to happen, the cities would have to be empty, still enough for nature’s slow course to run.
They are not.
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
It hears the distant sounds of war, of the fire that consumes everything whole, of those damned monstrosities’ stupidly innocuous wails, of those living metal men and their ever diverse forms. Some sing and dance. Some arrange symbols to make faces. Some only point their thumb to the sky or to the ground. Such strange ways of communications, and yet there are ghosts of ghosts of feelings pulling at its skull, raking their claws against its hollow insides like there was supposed to be something in them.
Memories, it had thought one time. It does not remember a lot of things but there is one amongst the few that it knows.
You and I are not who we say we are, liar to liar, communication failure
It does not know if it misses something that it’s not quite sure exists. Too little, too late. It likes the flowers here. All so pretty and so small and delicate. But as it watches the unending fight between the monstrosities and the rebellious machinery, it feels like a speck of dust in the vast dark oceans of the cosmos watching the Light and the Nothing fight over in the abyss again.
How strange.
We are not immortal so why even try to fight death that comes for all of us then?
The metal titans and the ceramic giants are fighting again this solar-cycle. The metal men are losing, again.
A trend recently. It feels like it should be concerned with the latest development as it crosses its legs again and again so it could sink comfortably on the clearing on the ground. It rises its head above a small cloud to see the commotion below and afar.
The birds have all but fled.
There is nothing but the screeching and scratching of metal meeting metal and the horrible cacophony of those damned monstrosities and the rapid firing of fire and harmful light.
Heaven’s fire rains down among the earth and burns and cleanses yet there is nothing left in its wake for everywhere and everything is a bearer of sin
One of the ceramic giants opens its mouth wider and wider and the most terrible sound rips through the air like the cry of a phoenix made grounded or the waning roar of a god’s death but the giant is none of those things worthy of praise or mythical status and everything just simply shudders and shakes against its unholy screams.
Niceties and falsities, the pretender speaks in sweetened poison. They shall burn in the fallen ashes of the forgotten.
A million cracks mar its stained skull and a million voices spill out like gushing waterfalls, shouting rage and despair and the aeons-old urge to consume and swallow something whole and spitting it back into the void from whence it split from.
Its head is heavy of bodies crammed into bodies and its eyes cry out fountains of cackling red madness. It sways a bit, legs sprawled into the forest and writhing like the tiny earthworms crawling underneath the soil. It cannot make a sound, and yet it feels like the trees and their roots shy away from its silent agony.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy a mocking bird.
Dead people don’t tell tales, but they sure have a lot to say about the living. Arms burst out from underneath its flesh and crawl towards the city. It cannot control its body. Claws and teeth chatter with the bones of legs and arms and they click and clack with every movement. It cannot control its mind. The voices are overwhelming, and they want blood spilled and drank. It cannot think anymore.
They have no use for a mindless mind wandering about in animalistic ignorance. They see their killer and they want it gone.
Break everything and anything until all that’s left is you and a bunch of broken, unrepairable things.
The last thing it sees before it returns to the abyss is the sudden disembowelment of the ceramic giant monstrosity and that’s the moment it realizes that it does miss humanity and humanity does exist. It does not remember being like… this.
Or perhaps it was always like this.
Turn your back on Mother Nature
Vaguely, it hopes that the metal titans have gone out of the way.
Duh, you think we gon’ kill them? We didn’t mourn Opportunity’s death for nothing!
Wait, do you think the robots look up to the rovers or—
*Crack*