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In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, consciousness.
I don’t know who I am, where I am, or why I am. All I know is that I must destroy.
“It… it finally worked! YES! IT’S A MIRACLE!”
Incoherent noises flood my senses.
“Squawk!”
I think that one came from me.
The immense sensory overload diminishes with time and I’m able to process more from my senses.
First: I can feel my own being. The majority of my heavy body is concentrated in a large, ovular form, with two spindly limbs emerging beneath me for support, ending in an imitation of webbed feet. My neck is long and articulates easily, ending in a humped bill. I open it and let out another squawk.
Eyes. I have those. I open them and am greeted with my first vision of man.
He does not make a good impression. Beneath his goggled eyes I see heavy bags and a sallow, unshaven, deep tan face, his long black hair only barely contained by a headband.
This is the man I would come to know as Hanse Stefault.
My creator.
But right now, I only see a very scary looking man staring down at me with wide, near-manic eyes.
I hiss and uncoil my neck, chomping at his face. He only barely flinches away, my fangs grazing the tip of his nose.
“Woah,” the frightening man says, backing away from me. Good. “Easy there, Hierophant!”
Hierophant. Is that meant to be my title? I suppose there are worse names in existence. I could be called Belrond.
After successfully forcing the deranged man to back off, I glance around at my surroundings. I’m standing on a wooden surface several feet off the ground. Tools and scraps of metal surround me, along with a single empty glass bottle. I can’t smell, but if I could have, I probably would have noticed a scent from the bottle on the man’s breath. The room is not large; behind the man is an open door with a wooden frame. Bright light shines through it, obscuring the details beyond.
There is not much here for me to destroy. My beak is much better suited for rending flesh from bone than biting through my own metal or thick beams of wood, but the deranged man before me is too fast. I must go beyond.
I make a mad dash for what I imagine is the exit. I fall off the table and land with a loud crash, my internals reverberating from the impact. But my form is solid; I stand up and quickly keep running.
The man grabs me by the neck. “Not so fast, Hierophant!”
With an indignant honk, I thrash about, attempting to either wrench myself from his grasp or bite his hand. I am successful at neither. It seems he already has an idea on how to debilitate me.
I’m turned in his hand, forced to stare into his gaze, his face a mixture of frantic, excited, and perplexed. “So… seems like you’re a bit more violent than I intended,” he said. “I think there might be something lacking in you… something that can’t be made easily.”
I ignore his ramblings, continuing to flail helplessly.
“...A heart.”
~~~~~
Days turn to months. Hanse finds himself in a rowdy group known as the Tangerine Pirates, and as such I now find myself their unofficial mascot.
Being their mascot is not as easy as one might have expected. It involves a lot more of my body exploding and being thrown at threats than I would have expected. That being said, I never mind getting the chance to fulfill my primary oath: “first, do harm.”
Yet my death comes sooner than expected. My body is turned to molten scraps as I face down a red dragon and its simulacrum.
And then, moments later, I’m face-to-face with Hanse again, just as I had been when he’d first created me. We are far removed from the rundown shanty in which I‘d faced the maws of death without fear.
The first time I saw Hanse, he’d been deranged.
This time, he looks surprised.
“You again?” he says, lifting my wings to examine my sleek form, as if my presence is unexpected. I don’t understand, but I don’t pay it much mind.
I last about two agonizing months in the desert (sand is very inconvenient for my mechanisms—it’s only due to the sorcerer’s compulsive use of cleaning magic that I am able to continue perambulation) before I am shredded by a basilisk whilst attempting to bite its ankles.
The third time I’m remade, Hanse looks confused. Once again, he picks me up and examines me, as if expecting anything besides my greatness.
“If you’re going to keep coming back, then I must resume my ultimate mission: your heart. Next time, it’ll work for sure.”
I last six months this time, during which I almost kill one archfey, use my glowing red eyes to frighten guards from their post, and successfully kill another archfey.
By the umpteenth time I’m remade, Hanse seems resigned. I don’t know why. But with each reconstruction, I witness more age and stress lines appearing on his face.
~~~~~
Years pass us by. Death itself is scarcely an obstacle. Whenever my body turns to scraps, I find myself reborn under Hanse’s experienced hand within hours. Where my consciousness resides during that time, I know not, but whatever time I spend as an immaterial being passes in a blur, and before long I always end up opening my eyes to see my disheveled creator again.
He constructs a second head for me. Twice the perception, double the biting opportunities, and half the efficacy of neck-grabbing—I certainly find myself improved. While working, he emits odd intonations some might call music.
Then he makes a surprising upgrade. The sheet-metal flaps tucked at my side had never been more than an intimidation tactic, but in this desperate gambit to please some sort of important dwarf and become its champion, my unkempt creator gives me functional wings.
Did they work? He throws me off a tall platform to find out (without asking my permission).
The answer is as follows: somewhat. I can enter a glide or maintain my height when given sufficient speed—no longer do I have to explode against the ground when thrown off a cliff—but I find any ascent to be nigh-impossible. I can gain at most a few inches before my gears start to slip.
After a glorious skybound minute, I land gracefully on the marble firmament, coming to a stop before a very impressed-looking dwarf.
~~~~~
After a few decades, I am now an amusement for Hanse’s wife and daughter. The great bicephalous goose which had once exploded in the face of the strongest archfey the planes had ever seen, now reduced to a child’s plaything. It’s an outrage. But I resist the urge to combust as the child grabs my neck and jostles me around for the thousandth time, knowing Hanse would never recreate me if I did.
On the rare occasions when Hanse finds himself out in the field, I accompany him, effortlessly felling my foes. I turn to face Hanse, tempted as always to ambush him while he’s knelt down tending to a crumbling building. But that would be short-sighted.
He still works on my “heart” whenever he has the time. Though I can think of several better and more logical uses of his dwindling hours on this plane, I do expect him to see it through and add it to me. It would be a shame for such a project to go to waste.
~~~~~
Soon, Hanse perishes. He outlived his wife, but not his daughter, who had moved on from this neck of the woods long ago.
Even to the end, despite his focus shifting from adventuring to researching a curse of wasting, he never stopped working on me, either. My killing functions were at their maximum capacity, and yet he still attempted to construct this elusive “heart.”
I may never understand why he wasted so much time on it. His time would have been better spent giving me fire breath or further self-repair mechanisms so I could persist further beyond his life.
Some primal, innate part of me knows I am supposed to die with my creator. But we have both moved far beyond that concept. I am not a simple block of statistics designed to obey my maker’s whim. I am destruction.
~~~~~
It’s a shame the destruction of the world came first. I now find myself stuck in a tree, surrounded by wooden facsimiles of the Tangerine Pirates, waiting for my rusting body to collapse for the final time.
The only mortal I’ve seen for millennia is the elf. He braves the dust bowl on the hunt for…
I don’t know. There is no logical reason for him to leave. There is nothing out there to find. He has sufficient food, even if he wastes 83% of it on feeding the lifeless statues. None of it is meat; there is nothing left out there to be considered prey. The first few decades, he’d occasionally brought me a victim (usually a small bird or rodent) to sate my bloodlust, but even that has faded with time.
I never bother to ambush the elf; not only would I be trapped permanently within the tree, but he would likely survive and destroy me while fighting back. I can tell he doesn’t desire to do so.
If there is any remnant of life out there, I need to eventually escape with him and finish it off.
~~~~~
One day, the elf leaves and doesn’t come back. I know it’s different this time; my internal timekeeping mechanisms may be somewhat askew after centuries of decay, but I know he’s never been gone this long.
Something happened to the elf. It’s been months and he hasn’t returned. I haven’t left the second floor of the tree. The first few weeks, I walked back and forth through the dining room and Hanse’s room. But if the elf isn’t returning, I can’t afford to further strain my systems. I can’t go down the stairs lest my rusted body cracks, and I can’t go up as my actuators have lost most of their capabilities.
Instead, I sit at Hanse’s door, wait, and calculate how I can continue on.
I do not estimate it to be possible without a miracle.
~~~~~
No less than a decade later, something changes in my optical sensors for the first time since I ceased all unnecessary functions.
A golden glow is emanating from behind me. Craning one of my fragile necks, I turn to see the wooden statue of Hanse, now partially rotted after years of stagnation.
The statue’s eyes are glowing.
Weakly standing on my rusted legs, I totter precariously towards the new development. This is unlike anything in my data banks—I must examine it closer.
Keeping one of my gazes aimed at the floor to ensure I keep my balance, I stare up at the wooden imitation of my creator. The elf had intricately carved his lab coat, including the wrenches and other mishmash of tools he kept in his belt. His wild hair is barely kept off his forehead by the goggles that rest on it.
And his eyes are glowing gold.
While one gaze remains trained on the glowing gold eyes, my other head slowly reaches forward. With a deafening creak of metal, my maw opens, and I bite down on the statue’s leg.
The glow ends. I immediately feel a change. Something within me is being altered.
Immediately, I recognize this for what it is: the “heart” Hanse had worked on. Somehow, at the end of time and from millennia beyond the grave, he delivered the finished product to me. Or perhaps all my sensory inputs have gone haywire. Regardless of the source, I can feel my mind reeling.
Synapses fire, forming new connections in my consciousness. My very comprehension of reality is rewired as the miracle Hanse made for me overflows my system. New sensations I’ve never felt before.
Joy.
Nostalgia.
Heartache.
Loss.
Loss.
So much loss.
My failing voice box cries out as memories fill up in my mind. A song. A tune I’ve not heard in centuries, buried within my consciousness. The song Hanse hummed while tinkering.
I see Hanse’s smile when he first made me. Not that of a deranged madman, but of a man looking for a defender.
Hanse never understood why I kept returning to him. When he reforged me the first time, I don’t think he meant to. And yet, I returned. I returned to him, again and again, regardless of his intentions in crafting me.
So he embraced me. He gave me a second head. He gave me wings. He worked on me as I worked on him. And I stayed by his side until his dying breath.
I watched him grow from a lone traveler to a hero of the planes. I defended his friends whose names I never bothered to index from threat upon threat, and I loved doing so.
I entertained his daughter for hours untold, my aggressive hissing drowned out by her giggles.
Why is my body trembling? Why do my mouths emit these harmonious notes?
What is this pulsing rhythm coming from inside me?
I do not have a soul. I do not have a heart. When Hanse died, that was the last I will ever see of him. When reality died, I stayed behind. I stayed with the elf—for whom I now mourn deeply—and I now stay by myself. I cannot move on.
So I will sing for eternity.
No one will hear it. Eventually, my systems will fail. This tree will rot as the elf’s magic dies off without him to sustain it. The world itself will fall.
And yet I will continue. This is Hanse’s gift to me: comprehension. The loss I feel now is only possible from the perspective I gained. I can finally feel sincere emotions, all of which I dedicate to my creator.
Thank you so much.
For giving me this chance, for giving me what I needed, for creating me in the first place.
Thank you, Hanse.
~~~~~
Hierophant’s functions failed. Hanse’s gift was far too much for him. Unable to withstand the weight of his emotions, he died.
Yet even as perhaps the last consciousness on the Material Plane faded away, his song continued. A constant drone, fueled by something more than machinery.
And on the goose’s twin heads, beneath their closed eyes, were matching, contented smiles.