It wakes in the storm, having nothing, having accomplished nothing.
The cold chills it to the bone. It has a hole within itself tying time into knots. It feels the pressure of past and future selves layered atop it, pushing it onward, though the base animal desire is always there: to lie down, to sleep forever, though even if it does it will still wake. The journey has no end. But it must be made.
It shivers violently. Again, the storm has almost reached its apex. The wind shears straight through it. Flakes of snow guttering through the sky freeze in its fur.
It has only a little time left. It swings onto the nearest pole, tasting the bite of frosted steel. Steadily it climbs, grappling from ravaged wreck to ravaged wreck, the motions long familiar. Around it, frozen pillars shudder in the driving wind. Ice and snow encrust spires of jagged metal. Desolation abounds here. There is not much left. There never was.
Echoes of a dream, a half-remembered past or future shuddering through its memories, remind it to pick up the frozen seed kernels that have fallen to the ground. It stuffs them into its mouth, tasting the numbing chill of frost. Cold has leeched away the sweetness of these seeds, but they are nourishing enough. It knows well the agony of hunger. It cannot let itself starve.
Once done eating it presses forward, driven by something unnameable that demands it continue. Half blinded by the snow it crawls, clambering upwards. Buried in the snowdrift, sparkling in dim light of the storm, the lantern stone is known to it. It presses the lantern close, the orange glow shining through its fur, and savors the slight warmth.
It hurries into another ruin, a hollow space with icy walls shuddering from the storm, and sees the shelter where it can rest. It sleeps, knowing this cycle is not the first or last, and will never be.
It is only one step in an unending series of steps. A continuation of nothing.
The pilgrimage is familiar to it. The steps are barely worth remembering. It follows them as if in a dream.
It traces the same path over and over again, across the world.
Past ruins and abominations.
Past frozen fields: bleak, barren.
Past the overgrown innards of ancient machines, where steam hisses from the air and catches on its fur. A brief respite from the cold. Hot springwater bubbles here, dredged from rusted-out pipes. A panoply of flowers bloom, bright and lucious on flourishing vines.
Past the exit, back out into the snow. The wind tears at its fur.
Past countless creatures living out countless lives, an infinitude of life sprouting across this abandoned wasteland, a mausoleum writ large.
It visits eight echoes from the past and is recognized as something akin to them. It feels their ripples spreading across the skein of reality, and feels its own self resounding with them as it reaccumulates bit by bit the power that was lost to it. Until the eighth echo departs, and it feels something settle. Golden light flashes into its veins. It leaps off the tower, and it flies.
The wind rushing past its fur feels almost like freedom.
It finds a collapsed construct, the ruined interior exposed to the bitter cold.
Piles of rubble loom over it, carving deep shadows into a shattered landscape. Freezing water accumulates in deadly pools. It soars above them.
It ascends higher and higher, to the highest reaches of the cracked machine, where the wind howls mercilessly and the cold presses against its fur. Even communing with the distant part of itself tethered to a higher plane does not deaden the chill. The slight warmth of its lantern is pitiful against it. It clutches the lantern to itself and glides through billowing snow, through clouds glittering with ice crystals. The wind beats at its bones.
Congeries of broken machines stretch low and level underneath, fading into snow and fog.
At the top of the world it sees a living corpse, half frosted over, pitted with holes. With slow creaking motions the corpse turns to regard it, dislodging snow that has piled onto frozen joints.
Little... green thing...
It cannot reply, because speech is beyond it.
Nothing here...
A pearl hovers before the corpse. A distorted song plays, barely audible above the wind. But the melody is longer quite there. It is only an echo of an echo, a fading imprint it can no longer grasp.
It cannot reply, but it can pad across the snow and huddle close to the machine body, pressing its head into tattered robes. The corpse strokes stiff fingers down its back. The cold metal hurts. But it stays there, deriving comfort from a rare touch, knowing the other is doing the same. The age of ice is one of isolation and solitude. It wonders how long it has been since this corpse has seen a visitor. There is no longer any reason for creatures to pilgrimage to this husk. The shrines are ruined and empty.
No warmth is provided by this other's presence. But to stay and know it will not be harmed, that its company might bring a small measure of solace, is a comfort. It feels the stiff fingers petting its soft fur. It curls up in the other's lap, clutching its lantern, and wonders if the machine can still feel warmth.
It rests there for an unknowable length of time, as the lull in the storm fades. The snow swirls frenzied, the winds grow, and the blizzard howls its ever intensifying howl. It knows what it must do. Envoy of an inviolable law, beholden to something greater than itself, it can only repeat the same pattern over for all eternity.
It opens its eyes and lets the light burn through it and plucks the corpse's soul from its body and sends it spiraling outwards beyond the cycle into a distant unreachable eternity.
The machine slumps down unmoving, and it leaves behind the still body as it returns to shelter from the storm.
It walks and crawls and swims and glides.
Past places without names, because nobody remains to name them.
It dips in and out of an enormous body of frigid water. Cold soaks through its fur. Flakes of snow spiral down through the air. Wires sprout from wrecked machinery like plants wilted and forgotten.
The second machine hovers in a white chamber, her body draped in white rags. Everything here is bright. Frost reflects frost. The silver glitter of metal catches on each falling snowflake.
Gravity is weak here, and as it splashes through the water, the drops rise and fall in slow motion, gleaming as they catch the light.
What an unusual being you are, muses the machine in front of it.
She is familiar, though it is not sure how. Fragmented recollections of dreams and deities echo through its head, and vanish in an instant.
It watches her and it watches the lights floating around her, the small remnants of a something once far greater. It lets her descend and pet its head, softly, licking her face with its long tongue. Tastes like steel and frost. Overseers crowd around, shooting curious sparks onto its fur.
You remind me of an old creature who used to visit here often. The passage of time has since taken them away, of course. That was a while ago.
Her touch is gentle. She has the feeling of a reassuring presence, who might have held it and stroked its fur and provided peace and comfort.
Stay as long as you'd like. But not too long. This chamber is not very well insulated from the cold.
It knows what it must do, and wishes it could stay longer.
But it finds itself getting up, with the knowledge of necessity. Outside, the snow is falling. The wind roars. It opens its eyes fully and with the wrenching power imbued in it lets the golden light pour out and dissolve the machine's soul into the place beyond the cycle.
Her body falls to the floor with a clang. Frigid water splashes. The antigravity whirrs and shuts off.
While the overseers crowd around the machine's still form, it glides away, feeling the bitter chill of the air.
An end is near. Golden light radiates through a subterranean ruin. It descends, through the wreckage of abandoned things, through an ancient labyrinth crafted by numerous hands more advanced, all gone now. It descends towards an end that is never an end.
Down, down, down. The tunnels are tight, and squeezing its body through them makes the metal rub against its fur. Harsh, warm. It feels the tunnels shudder and shudders with them. It remembers the right paths and follows them. Through twisted pipes and passageways, it evades the sounds of predators winding their way through the darkness, shivering at tunnels lined with the musk of lizard scent.
It reaches a platform hovering suspended above a black abyss. The air brims with fire and golden sparks. All around is a complete and total darkness.
It jumps off the edge.
Gravity propels it down, to do something it will do over and over again, the last stage of one cycle among many. It falls into the void.
Distorted memories flicker past it, built of light and shadow. Seething golden fluid and distant fire. Heat wavering upward, and the sensation that its soul is being pulled to something now far above it. The desire to return.
It relives again a desperate strife. Vicious creatures emerge from the shadows and it glides above them, working the light, cutting their souls from their bodies. It dodges by inches the jaws of hungry beasts. Not true lifeforms but fragments conjured from nothing, their golden iridescence shining in the dark.
It sees guardians hovering implacid, waving long spindly arms, blocking its way with luminous chains. It rips them to pieces, their clockwork souls torn out of the cycle and dissolved.
The past and future swarm through its head and coalesce into one interminable mass. It remembers places it has never seen but still knows, through instinct and something deeper. It navigates up, up, up. It climbs battered transistors, wires bristling with satellite dishes, and conglomerations of shattered machinery. Reality vibrates. The world takes on the tenor of a dream. It delves deeper into the dream and swims in golden light. It feels itself dissolving. It feels the world fracturing into violent shards.
It sees itself reflected, swimming down to a destination it can never reach.
It hears strains of music from other realms, which are forever locked away. It feels the other side pressing down on it, there but unreachable, a gate that will never open.
It sees and is rebuked by two it tried to save.
You need to wake up.
It swims through separate layers of reality, through space that ripples like water, disturbed by the reflections of higher-order beings. Swimming up, past the light, to the world it tried and failed to properly return to.
It rises above it all. For a moment it sees the sky, endless, stretching up and above in a vast reflection of that glowing abyss it loses itself in, again and again. It falls, the wind rushing in its ears, the cold having more and more of a grip on its increasingly physical body. The moon shines its merciless rays down. The snow reflects moonlight, caught and glittering. It plunges, returning to its sleeping self, in a cycle without beginning or end.
It wakes in the storm, having nothing, having accomplished nothing.