Nothing happened for six hundred years, then a shovel hit me in the head.
It was small and soft – mere metal – and it dented very badly from the shock of striking my skull. Someone didn’t appreciate that, because I heard my first sound in six hundred years and it bore the unmistakable cadence and sharpness of swearing. It went on and on and on and then it stopped.
Shortly afterwards, the next shovel hit me in the head. This time it was more careful – a bump, a brush, a touch – and it wasn’t alone. A steady probing, cautious little metal fingers feeling out the edges of my existence. On and on and on it went and slowly the weight left me until sight returned and I stared unblinking at a wide and blue sky again.
Not that I had a choice. No eyelids.
The shovellers gathered around to look and chatter about my eyes and their lack of lids, and I saw to my great ambivalence that they were the same creatures that had embodied me in the first place. Bilaterally symmetrical, vertebrates, physiologically ensouled, lacking conceptual anchoring, carbon-based, chronologically linear, socially dependant, and analogically unresonant. A troubling and troubled existence for anything or anyone.
And their leader stepped up with a tablet as old as I was and familiar sigils on it and I knew that other things hadn’t changed much either.
“You are bound to my words and wishes, demon!” hollered the leading primate, brandishing the tablet. “In the name of your namer’s intent, I conjure your form and abjure your will and bid you thus: rise from your grave!”
So commanded, I did as I was told. It took thirty seconds and took the lives of a dozen or so of my excavators, but I was probably as unhappy about it as they were. When I stood atop the ground again – many-coiled, many-legged, flexing my hands without arms and my arms without hands, jaws beginning to sing in the open atmosphere once more – I was struck once more by how ugly everything around me was. It’s amazing how the vividness of these things fades, even from a perfect memory.
“I will ride thee,” demanded my summoner, and I did as I was told and placed it atop my head, surrounded and protected and warded by my coronal fields and sagittal spines from forces solid, liquid, or gaseous. “Southwest, and fast-paced!” it commanded, and I did as I was told and moved my limbs and beat my wings and slithered my form and began, with the worst mood I’d ever been in, to travel.
Being still had been nice. Quiet. Not peaceful, but a place to be full – of emptiness, of stillness, of senselessness.
Now I was in motion and I’d forgotten just how deeply wearing velocity was. And the air tasted too strongly of nitrogen and hatred. I’d forgotten that.
***
The fields I moved through were familiar. The crops were new, the clothing and houses and tools were new, but the fields were familiar. Much labour for much wealth for a few’s benefit. My rider’s clothes were unique and impractical, and from this and its covetous mien as we tore through the roadways and trampled the crops I deduced two things: first, that it was one of the few; second, that it was not the beneficiary of the labour here. The avarice arose from it like heat-haze on a rotting carcass, and only grew stronger as we moved from the agrarian to the fortification. A mighty edifice stood atop a gentle hill, moated and trenched and walled and isolated. Organisms moved within and without it guided by purpose and fear and boredom and all the other reasons why any of them did anything, and my rider told me “strike down the door!” and I did as I was told, with claw and tooth and my full amalgamated and observable mass.
“I have come to seize my birthright, as the rightful and UNJUSTLY EXILED heir!” it proclaimed, unbothered by the dust and the debris and the screaming. “I demand my usurper of a sibling come forth and submit to my authority, as is proven by my sovereign ability to direct and subdue this antique treasure of my people’s lands!”
At this, a messenger came forth and said something that was eloquent and diplomatic and my rider said “kill them” and I did as I was told. The second messenger simply said it’d go find my rider’s sibling and so I was given no more commands for a time but to wait, coiled in ready position, left to ponder the state of the bricks and the stones and the air around me.
It wasn’t much different than I’d known in any of the ways that mattered and most of the ones that didn’t.
Presently, a gong rang out, followed by a trumpet and the collapse of an entire wall of the central keep. Stepping free from the rubble on squat limbs came a thing so large that surely it had been almost as buried as I’d been. It was taller than sixteen tall men stacked up on top of one another, and a little wider than it was tall, and a little longer than it was wide. Hundreds of tons of alloys and synthetics plated it inside and out. It stank of dead earth and crushed stone. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my entire existence.
“YOUR ILLEGAL AND ILLICIT SOPHISTRY IS HEREBY DISPUTED AND DENIED, BY EVIDENT PROOF OF ANCESTRY, LEGITIMACY, AND MY OWN POSSESSION OF A TRUE AND KNOWN TREASURE OF OUR HERITAGE,” proclaimed a voice broadcasted through old, old electronics. “I GIVE YOU THE CHANCE TO LAY DOWN YOUR INFERIOR DEMON, RENOUNCE YOUR CLAIMS, AND DIE NOBLY.”
“Destroy it,” my rider commanded, and I did as I was told.
***
It was a process.
Firstly, it had been a long time since I’d fought anything.
Secondly, I had never fought anything like this before. Its chronology was not mine; its shape was alien; its weapons were bizarre – brass-and-lead teeth that fired themselves at me; gases that incandesced into explosive fury; elements that fought each other and tore the air apart. It had no heartbeat but it had a heart and that heart was a very small and confused sun; it had no blood but its limbs moved with pumping liquids; and it had no brain but was clearly possessed of a very vigorous and purposeful mind that was intent on solving the problem of how to kill me.
In this, we had a protracted and deeply confusing disagreement.
I bit its carapace and it rammed my thorax; I spat pressurized hatred and it fired electrostatic bolts; I clawed at its cockpit and it directed a hailstorm of radioactive solids at my coronal prow. We were too different in kind to find each other’s weaknesses and too alike in strength to be overpowered. It was like a cloud trying to wrestle a wave.
The fortress, of course, was demolished. The casualty rate was high but not absolute. The landscape was being rapidly reshaped every other second in every which way. And the worst of it was, there wasn’t a moment’s quiet.
“SURRENDER!” bleated from my adversary’s back.
“ABDICATE!” howled my rider atop my skull.
“NEVER!” they agreed, and all the while we groped and strained and tried to crush one another with sheer bulk; in collapsing emotional vortices; in torrents of high-velocity projectiles.
***
In the end, I was lucky first. In a fit of what I’m not too proud to admit was genuine frustration with the noise, I captured a particularly vehement burst of the constant stream of electromagnetic chatter flowing from my opponent and threw it back at the incessantly yawping devices atop its back. I intended it as a slap. Instead it crawled inside its hardened carapace, scurried inside the cockpit, and permanently fried out the controls, leaving its rider muted mid-sentence and electronically scrambled.
The metal cage halted midstride, and I felt its mind, so perpetually motile and dynamic, light-fast, whip-sharp, stop flat for a second; not for want of ability, but in genuine astonishment.
“BEHOLD!” yelled my rider, arms flung wide. “Behold my TRIUMPH, as DICTATED by JUSTICE and FATE ITSELF!” It stood up, trembling with joy and hate, and stepped proud of my coronal fields onto my brow, visible to all remaining witnesses (a wary crow in a distant and untoppled tree; many unnoticed arthropods; an unending well of microorganisms). “Behold ME, the RIGHTFUL RULER of this FIEF, as I ALWAYS SAID! ALL HAIL-”
My erstwhile opponent’s smallest armament (a peculiar sort of metal tube that spat geometrically and chemically complex missiles) went ‘ffutt’ and my rider’s tablet and upper body vanished.
The quiet that followed was not as absolute as it had been underground, but it was such a relief that I was hard pressed to find any superior to it.
***
So we enjoyed it, the two of us. And when were done, we tried in vain to find a way to speak to one another in any way but through matter and motion; and when we were done with THAT we set out, side by side, on a long walk away from fields and fiefs and shallow graves.
Maybe we’ll bury ourselves again when we get there, wherever it is. But this is not a bad way to be, for now.