Author: Koi Lung Fish
Disclaimer: Based on characters and situations from The Transformers (© 1986 Hasbro, Ltd). Used without permission. Lyrics © Edlund, Iwers & Nissen, 2002 Magic Arts Publishing. Text © 2002, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved.)
Subject: Shockwave character vignette.
It makes me even stronger, boosts my will to fight
Tiamat, "Spine"
Sleep, soothed the stars.
Sleep, sighed the skyscrapers.
Sleep, sang the slumbering shapes of Seekers entombed for aeons in stasis berths, an army regimented in repose; vaults of living death.
Barren and icy is the void of space, chill and wasted as the hands of Death; Cybertron rolls there as a marble on the gaming table of Destiny, tumbling tomb guarded by the sleepless sphinx; the faceless mortuary priest robed in the colours of an empire now stardust on solar winds.
Shockwave, insomniac on a greater scale than the collapse of civilisations, overseer of the everlasting night of Cybertron, sacristan of a dying planet's dreams, sexton of crusaders, chaplain of corpses; he is the keeper of the last secret. He is beyond the grace of madness, forever barred from the embrace of Morpheus - strengthened by the arms of memory he dares to outstare unblinking Father Time.
Alone is unhindered by other's concerns; alone is untouched by the tides of life; alone is immolated in internal furnaces, an infernal cremation in the flames of lonesomeness. Shockwave, solitudinarian in the ossuary of god's bones, dying of dreamlessness, is martyred by isolation, blinded by the soothing stars that sing Somnus, Somnus, Somnus.
He dreams of sleep; on black-fugue tides come memories of rest, engulfing as to consume, to bear him down into the depths of slumber, to join with the heart of his world in bleak undeath, to sleep, sleep, sleep, and never to awaken. Shockwave dreams of sleep, and shakes himself awake with a shiver for the chill of the void; for the stars are motes in the eye of Death, the grim abyss into which he falls, as his world falls, deeper into the grasp of the omega. One tiny fleck of life, one smudge of light in the bleak bourn of Death; he is a one-eyed trespasser in the land of the shut-eyed; one eye to see the future, one hand to grasp it tight.
Eternity: uroboros night, serpent dusk swallows the phoenix egg of unborn dawn. Time is no longer sliced into shreds by clocks, no longer cut and weighed like flesh by butcher metronomes; now is the long silent night of the afterlife, the sunless land without border; the black marsh land where living things throng yet nothing is alive.
Now is the riot of the stars, now is the carnival of nothingness, now is the end of time.
The tomb-keeper buries himself in the ephemera of life; old light splashed bright on cold walls by remembering machines, new theories excavated by ceaseless, nerveless toil; the sovereign of silence builds Babel's tower between the stars, a finger of light, as if he could reach out and touch something living. Into his sky-blinded sight, remembrance casts membrane skeins of light: the golden spires of bygone cities; the kaleidoscope colours of a crowded concourse; the lisping whisper of water glistening 'twixt canal banks, sluggish fluid in the veins of Cybertron; the sheen of pride upon a city built of crystals, a million reflections of ego and smug Autobot satisfaction; no grief for the passing of a stifling gilded cage. Warrior-priest, hand in hand with Death, Shockwave mourns for the loss of the fire and the frenzy, the red rage of life ripping free from ancient chains: the imperial firework display of a preliminary bombardment, the bloom and wither of time-lapse fire-flowers, parasite blossoms sapping the stability from ivory towers; the crash and crumble of broken skyscrapers, Goliath-citadels rumbled into wreck by a Lilliputian outcast; the cries of fear and pleas for mercy savoured from the smoke-strangled air as peace is disembowelled by pandemonium and left to die in the cinders of conquest; the sharp and savage splendour of a Seeker flight cutting victory rolls through the fumes and the fetor of a city bombed to ruination; the seething energies of a cabal of champions upon whose shoulders is borne the weight of destiny, and he as one of them, a telamon of their triumphs; the endless flame that fuelled them all, the divine madness of a soldier raised to emperor upon the bow-wave of chaos and conquest; the ardour of ascendancy voiced in the howling pride of an army as the phoenix pennant rises amethyst-masked above the shattered shells of isolation's enforcers.
[Those whom rejection has made small rise as giants beneath the glorious banner; Zeus overthrows Kronos and claims his dominion of the skies.]
Memories prized like stars fallen from the frozen firmament, like diamonds ripped from the crown of God by nine-named Satan returned as ruler to the vaults of heaven, cherished through the long and lonesome night as if their light could sustain life and bring on the dawn once more; preserved in cold amber, Shockwave staggers through a washed-out world stranded between death and dream, a ghost-world filled with spectral memories as spirit smoke rises from blackened carcass-cities and the screaming sky is star-swept by Seekers dreaming of flight.
Sleep ye, warriors, dream ye deep; dream echoes of the thunderous world that is yet to come.
Does the sphinx speak, when there is nobody to hear but the ghosts of yesteraeon? Aye, he speaks to them and promises them the skies once more; a list of dead names, chaining him to the golden past, they parade before him in the glory of their deaths, arrayed in the lushness of the grave; the burden of their safekeeping, cold white fog, rolls from the warrior's graves and binds him in chains of iron promise.
He has placed them in the hands of Death for safekeeping, laid them to rest in coffins until the resurrection comes, until a sun rises on the endless night; until golden light scourges the blackness into bright bleeding, until heat lances the shadows and cracks the bonds of night, until dawn breaks the back of darkness upon the spine of the world.
Shockwave - cold fusion of iron will with arctic patience into one edifice of steel, one monument of patience, one last bastion against the whipping waves of timeless slumber.
He is the last survivor of an epidemic of sleep, the hanged man suspended head-down over the abyss of madness yet never falling, never slipping, never sleeping, for looped around one ankle, holding fast upon the brooding rocks of isolation, is one frayed cord of hope.
Shockwave - keeper of the secret; the dream of dawn.
Author's notes & addenda:
With thanks to Jakob and Lunatron, for the excellent beta reading. Feedback is excruciatingly welcome.
Kronos: (Greek, kronos , time) The youngest of the second generation of the gods, the children of Uranus and Gaea; overthrew and castrated his father, then swallowed his own children to prevent them from overthrowing him in their turn; overthrown by Zeus.
Morpheus: (Roman) Son of Somnus, god of dreams and, later, sleep.
Telamon: (Greek via Latin, telamones ) A male figure used as a pillar or architectural support.
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