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A sleeping golem that’s been laying in the swamp for too long – half dead, pale, and undefeatable.
His eyes have been crusted shut many times over. Too many to know. Sewn shut by dusty dwellings and months of involuntary hibernation. In the years when he is awake, he opens the cloudy depths of his eyes too wide, and he never keeps them in one place for too long. Staring, as though to see through walls.
His skin is marred and stained from incidents he’s long forgotten, passing injuries he wasn’t fully awake for. He moves on autopilot most days, his brain overwhelmed with the expansive catalog of memories and emotion he has accumulated. The backlog clogged up in the pathways of his head.
His creaking joints make him move in slow and jilted ways, heavy body still dragged down by earth’s higher gravity, even after all these years. Thousands of years of humanity's new adaptation, fighting against the inherent nature of their old home.
He still strikes with an unexpected swiftness, in ways that leave his target dead on the first blow. But he moves slowly, a top predator. A force that comes from deep within, in a snap of unearthly speed, just to retreat the next moment, as if it was never there.
He’s a shadow in history, a shadow in people’s memory. A man on a fruitless mission. So he acts on instinct, on programmed reactions, without drive or intention. There is no hindrance to keep him from moving. No motivation to plow forward, other than the knowledge that he must. To keep searching. To find the needle in the haystack and move on. Move home. To return to greater heights, to retreat from the ground and sail back into the sky and breath once again. To pull himself from the mindlessness of death and resurface conscious and composed. Re-establish himself, and his planet, as present and filled with life.
Even if he has to destroy himself to get there.
He’ll lament, and grow hopeful, over his cowardly endeavor. A poor man’s grab for gold. A rich man’s grab for power. He grabbed at nothing and hoped for everything. A tiresome journey into the dangerous casino of wanderers and protofeilds. A gamble with every slice of his blade. An endless wheel of despair and disappointment is the only thing ahead of him.
Earth was the promise of a miracle cure for a desperate man in love. It was only poetic that he would be trapped in with it. Held back from getting it administered in time. But this is all he can cling to, so he continues.
He digs his fingers into the fruit he’s picked, rips it apart to get to the seeds that slip away like sand. He won’t indulge in the flesh of the seedless, and he’ll leave the trails of sticky juice on his skin for it to soak in and ferment. All that matters to the gambler, is the seed. It’s the only thing that holds meaning, for the future rides on it. His cycle of killing will keep the future from falling into the cycle itself.
He’ll sleep in the slums, where the shadows have eyes, and he’ll stare unblinkingly back. Marking his targets with dead eyes and motionless, unstirring, wit. He has no need for the chatter of claws or creaking of wood. He is aimless and reactionary. Striking without thought or warning. Pouncing down on wanderers he doesn't realize are there until they're dead. He is only there to cleanse the sludge that pools in backwater towns and dig through the filth for what he needs.
He needs it, the hitch of his breath as the beasts die. Before he has a chance to bare his teeth for another disappointment. It’s the only moment he lets himself indulge in fantasy, a small moment of endless hormones and dopamine to feed his starved body. He only allows himself brief glimpses of his past. A small taste of hope before the bones of his jaw clench down on the intake of air in his lungs. The closing of a grain hatch in times of famine. They squash hope between them, to make the letdown easier. They deprive him of sugar-coated dreams to keep him sheltered in reality.
It’s a sick man's game. An unhealthy, roving, derangement that’s parallel to obsession. But an obsession requires passion and heart. Too bad he can’t feel one of those in his chest. An occasional slow, weak thump is all he can muster. An endless search, an eternity of misery. One that shouldn’t feel as hopelessly long as it does. He has tied his heart to this one unending task and unintentionally sedated his mind into numbness.
He’s been alive six times the time he’s been on this dreary planet. And yet the mere century he’s been here has washed any, and all prior experiences from his mind. Locked behind bars of impenetrable apathy. He is banished from his roots and pulled across the ground in endless circles.
He’s detached himself from all that he was and all that he could be, just his programming and instinct is left inside him. They are the only forces driving him forward. He has taken the back seat in his own mind, and the controls have been surrendered to the same mechanics that served the dinosaurs.
He’s given himself over to emptiness, until even his body isn’t his home anymore.
Once humanity is no more, there will only be unanswered chaos. A cycle of death and rebirth without anyone to call it such, and give it its rightful place. Humanity echoes into the nothingness and gives meaning to the chaos. It breaks the walls of the echo chamber to clear the air and maintain understanding.
That is his purpose, his place, to keep humanity churning. And yet he doesn’t realize it. He has gone blind and senseless. Feeling around in the dark for a thing he’s forgotten why he needs.
He is the thing that comes in the night, a great plague of sudden and painless death to all that lurk beneath his feet. A thing of nature and brutal destruction. He thinks of himself as a man dooming himself to an insignificant end.
He has carved himself into stone, unbreakable, unfeeling, endless and without time to bind him. A wandering statue. A pillar and a symbol, a beacon to the institution of loneliness.
He has been removed from the scope of humanity, far removed outside the realm where he once lived and played. He has escaped from time itself. Slipped under the floorboards to be forgotten and looked over.
His mind has encased him in an impenetrable cocoon, bound him in on himself. Forcing him to dive deeper into his mind. He’s left to wander around in the crevices of his restlessness, and to gnaw at his own bones.
He is a machine. A hollow being with only one simple task to dictate his worth.
He has hidden himself from the light, marched himself forward, under self imposed orders, to capture what’s left of his sunny memories. The feeling of warm skies, and brisk breezes playing with his hair, is lost on him. He forgets the feeling as it happens. Forgets why he liked it. Kf he’s ankle deep in a cool stream, he isn’t refreshed. For his mind is full of knee deep sludge which is much more difficult to wade through.
The tail end of his purpose lies in his sword. His hands have molded it to his grip. It is the chosen tool to dig himself out of the mess he’s in. Mentally he has become one with the dull metal. And he will continue to fuse with it until he is nothing but a suit of armor.
A thread, a whisper of something to tie him down. If only so he can keep on swinging. And when the ghost of meaning escapes him, he lies down to shut his eyes for an unknowable amount of time.