[ Editors Note: As I was so mournfully reminded a few moments ago in a review, I often write with WAY too many adjectives and flowery language, like to make the reader whimper with the overdose. Therefore - have some more poetic incomprehensibleness! I feel like being cruel this evening.]
Life is a machine.
All of the pieces within it have purpose, have function, designed as they are for continued motion of the whole. The systems that drive it forward contain redundancies saturated at every layer, but all strive for the completion just as they are programmed to do. Infinite complexity towards a goal that none know, save perhaps the One that built it in all its parts.
Life is; for no other reason than it knows it must.
She sits on her bed braiding wildflowers into a wreath. The blooms have wilted in the intervening hours but she doesn't mind, pressing the petals open with careful, pale fingers. Hair as fine as moonlight shades her face, casting both shadow and light in equal measure. Fingernails stained with the blood of the stems scores yet another line as she threads one into the next, heedless of the fact that the flowers are dead, that she is mutilating corpses.
Because funerary scent still clings to them and she breathes it in for the memory. Crosslegged she sits and weaves secrets into the circle she builds in her lap. She pricks her thumb and has to suck the pain away.
Yet when she places the crown on her head, it is with defiant joy. Across the room, another smiles.
"That looks beautiful, Aura."
Goddess of Spring, he told her and for that one moment, against everything else she knows, she believed. Still, the flowers are covered in death, coated in it, bowing their heads in service to the thing that she is. Just one tiny piece of the machine, that's all, moving at once towards and against a purpose she Saw once and not again.
Because the light in her answering smile highlights the bruises under her eyes. Faint darkness that speaks silently of a system fragmenting under strain.
The machine cares nothing for the individual gears that drive it, which is as it should be. The redundancies exist in their hundreds; in their thousands, in their millions for a reason. Sidereal potential forever poised to become actuality at any failure of relentless purpose. Life will continue.
As it must.