The Disposable Enquiry [Round 1: Kyyhkynen]
08-12-2011, 01:21 AM
Q/Q/Q/Q/Query.
It expected an answer from the echoes of its voice, as it always had.
The word flew to the carved arches of the Cathedral, pitted with age and frozen in time, bouncing off the broken faces of carved angels. Blind faces, blank and yearning, offered no response; empty sockets stared down at the lone figure with the gravitas of the deathless. There was no sympathy in the stone for the Inquirer. There had never been. When the Cathedral was young, the statues had been so lifelike that it had been sure they were on the edge of answering it, always one question away from opening their stone lips and saying the beautiful words that would stop it wondering, stop the ticking in its head. Just one question. This one or the next, or the next, or the next. Sooner or later it had to find the right question and the angels would finally sing.
The Inquirer paused and looked up, waiting for them to answer. Somewhere in its aching body it knew this was hopeless. It knew this, it had known this for as long it had been trying not to think about it, but it was so hard to stay quiet under the gaze of such impassable holiness, blind as it was. They could hear it, it was sure. It was so sure. Someone had to hear it. Someone had to answer after all these years of waiting.
It drifted over the warped floor of the Cathedral, iron limbs trailing above the shattered flagstones. Burn marks were still faintly visible on the deepest of the channels that had been blasted through the once-smooth marble, cold and grey. In ten thousand years it had never managed to clean them away. It didnât know why. It had so many questions and this was one of them. One query in the countless number, none of them answered, none of them acknowledged. Not in twenty thousand years. Not in thirty or forty or five. Nothing it had ever managed to say had been able to make them listen.
Not in a hundred thousand years.
Iron claws wrapped around a piece of fallen stone, perhaps once the edge of a wing or the hem of a robe but now only a piece of jagged rock. It weighed as much as several men but the Inquirer lifted it effortlessly, as it always had. It bore the marks of its claws with the grace of a martyr. Idly it turned the stone in the dim light of the Cathedral, watching it gleam where its facets had been worn to a polish over the endless years. A hulking body of springs and pistons, the rust of an eternity, the shattered glass of a massive clock face mocked it from the reflections of the stone. As they always did, and would, forever. The stone would show it the faults of its own aging body until it was worn away to nothing by the hands of the Inquirer itself, until its dust joined the sea of decay covering the floor of the Cathedral. There would be no thunder, no breaching of heaven or hell, no Jericho. There would be nothing. There would always be nothing.
The angels would always be silent, as it had known for as long as it lived.
With a roar of ancient metal the Inquirer threw the stone aside, all at once awake with something unnamable. It didnât know what anger was, and if it had it would have thought the word too shallow to call the thing filling its insides with the clamor of a wasted eternity. It had been built to embody the questions of a multitude that had never come, that had never been, and the Cathedral had lived and died as the husk of a deity that had never been needed. The Inquirer had never been needed. Its questions were meaningless. All it had ever been was a testimony to the shell of this place and the purpose it had never found, cut short by the nothingness that had claimed the world.
The ancient stone collided with the wall, shattering into a thousand tiny fragments and leaving a crater where an angelâs face had once been. The ruined figure seemed to beckon the Inquirer forward, one fingerless hand extended in some long-since meaningless gesture. Come, the empty thing said, and the Inquirer knew that the only sound it was hearing was the voice of its own death, You are hollow as I. You are dust and you are as the words that have never been heard in the shadow of this Cathedral. You are dust, as I am, and you will fall silent in your tomb for the last time, wordlessâ¦
N/N/N/No.
The Inquirer turned away from the statue, not noticing it crack and crumble away from an eon of neglect. It had waited its entire existence for something that would not come, it thought as it reached out towards the Cathedralâs hidden purpose, dormant for so long it had died in its sleep. The weight of it pressed down on its iron limbs as if to crush it into the dust and steal from it the few millennia it had left, but the Inquirer would not die. What was death to it now? What was anything beyond the monotony of its existence in the Cathedral? It had questions. It had so many questions and the Inquirer would no longer wait for an answer.
The broken marble underneath it warped and buckled from the strain as the abandoned machine seized control, feeling the power strip away the years of decay and shatter the silence the angels had refused to break. Sheets of rust and dust-clogged gears rattled in its chassis and rained down as ashes to the floor. Its mind was as clear as the day it had been built and given to this Cathedral; it saw beyond the hollow walls of this place to the nothingness that surrounded it, drowning in the Void between the worlds like an ocean of shadows. It reeled at the darkness, unknowable and impenetrable, and knew that no question it could ever ask would give it solace now. It was alone, entirely alone, and no one but the angels would ever know it had existed. It would die forgotten. It would die without ever receiving an answerâ¦
But distantly, impossibly far beyond the veil of shadows, the Inquirer saw light.
The stars of countless universes assailed it with their brilliance. There was heat and fire and life, so far removed from the stillness of the Cathedral that it could not comprehend how such a thing could exist. What had set such a thing in motion? By what right did they exist in the gaps between darkness with no walls to hold them in? It was unthinkable. If it had not become something greater than itself the Inquirer would have gone mad from the discovery, would have destroyed itself entirely rather than face the limits of its own existence. But it had power, now, it had claimed the Cathedral for itself and the ancient machine saw possibilities where it would have once seen death.
It still had questions, the Inquirer thought. That hadnât changed, either by reluctance or by nature. It still craved answers like a drowning man for air and felt the need to find them grinding between its gears, drowning out even the endless roar of the Void. Its resentment of the angels now seemed foolish and petty in comparison to the greater affront of its isolation. This would be the first thing the Inquirer would change. No longer would it be trapped in a swell of emptiness, at the mercy of a being long since dead; it was awake, and it would know the answers to all of its questions if it meant tearing apart the Void itself.
It would start by finding out what it was like to watch another being die.
___________
GB SPINOFF SWEET JESUS YES
FORM WARS: REVENGE OF THE FORMS
It expected an answer from the echoes of its voice, as it always had.
The word flew to the carved arches of the Cathedral, pitted with age and frozen in time, bouncing off the broken faces of carved angels. Blind faces, blank and yearning, offered no response; empty sockets stared down at the lone figure with the gravitas of the deathless. There was no sympathy in the stone for the Inquirer. There had never been. When the Cathedral was young, the statues had been so lifelike that it had been sure they were on the edge of answering it, always one question away from opening their stone lips and saying the beautiful words that would stop it wondering, stop the ticking in its head. Just one question. This one or the next, or the next, or the next. Sooner or later it had to find the right question and the angels would finally sing.
The Inquirer paused and looked up, waiting for them to answer. Somewhere in its aching body it knew this was hopeless. It knew this, it had known this for as long it had been trying not to think about it, but it was so hard to stay quiet under the gaze of such impassable holiness, blind as it was. They could hear it, it was sure. It was so sure. Someone had to hear it. Someone had to answer after all these years of waiting.
It drifted over the warped floor of the Cathedral, iron limbs trailing above the shattered flagstones. Burn marks were still faintly visible on the deepest of the channels that had been blasted through the once-smooth marble, cold and grey. In ten thousand years it had never managed to clean them away. It didnât know why. It had so many questions and this was one of them. One query in the countless number, none of them answered, none of them acknowledged. Not in twenty thousand years. Not in thirty or forty or five. Nothing it had ever managed to say had been able to make them listen.
Not in a hundred thousand years.
Iron claws wrapped around a piece of fallen stone, perhaps once the edge of a wing or the hem of a robe but now only a piece of jagged rock. It weighed as much as several men but the Inquirer lifted it effortlessly, as it always had. It bore the marks of its claws with the grace of a martyr. Idly it turned the stone in the dim light of the Cathedral, watching it gleam where its facets had been worn to a polish over the endless years. A hulking body of springs and pistons, the rust of an eternity, the shattered glass of a massive clock face mocked it from the reflections of the stone. As they always did, and would, forever. The stone would show it the faults of its own aging body until it was worn away to nothing by the hands of the Inquirer itself, until its dust joined the sea of decay covering the floor of the Cathedral. There would be no thunder, no breaching of heaven or hell, no Jericho. There would be nothing. There would always be nothing.
The angels would always be silent, as it had known for as long as it lived.
With a roar of ancient metal the Inquirer threw the stone aside, all at once awake with something unnamable. It didnât know what anger was, and if it had it would have thought the word too shallow to call the thing filling its insides with the clamor of a wasted eternity. It had been built to embody the questions of a multitude that had never come, that had never been, and the Cathedral had lived and died as the husk of a deity that had never been needed. The Inquirer had never been needed. Its questions were meaningless. All it had ever been was a testimony to the shell of this place and the purpose it had never found, cut short by the nothingness that had claimed the world.
The ancient stone collided with the wall, shattering into a thousand tiny fragments and leaving a crater where an angelâs face had once been. The ruined figure seemed to beckon the Inquirer forward, one fingerless hand extended in some long-since meaningless gesture. Come, the empty thing said, and the Inquirer knew that the only sound it was hearing was the voice of its own death, You are hollow as I. You are dust and you are as the words that have never been heard in the shadow of this Cathedral. You are dust, as I am, and you will fall silent in your tomb for the last time, wordlessâ¦
N/N/N/No.
The Inquirer turned away from the statue, not noticing it crack and crumble away from an eon of neglect. It had waited its entire existence for something that would not come, it thought as it reached out towards the Cathedralâs hidden purpose, dormant for so long it had died in its sleep. The weight of it pressed down on its iron limbs as if to crush it into the dust and steal from it the few millennia it had left, but the Inquirer would not die. What was death to it now? What was anything beyond the monotony of its existence in the Cathedral? It had questions. It had so many questions and the Inquirer would no longer wait for an answer.
The broken marble underneath it warped and buckled from the strain as the abandoned machine seized control, feeling the power strip away the years of decay and shatter the silence the angels had refused to break. Sheets of rust and dust-clogged gears rattled in its chassis and rained down as ashes to the floor. Its mind was as clear as the day it had been built and given to this Cathedral; it saw beyond the hollow walls of this place to the nothingness that surrounded it, drowning in the Void between the worlds like an ocean of shadows. It reeled at the darkness, unknowable and impenetrable, and knew that no question it could ever ask would give it solace now. It was alone, entirely alone, and no one but the angels would ever know it had existed. It would die forgotten. It would die without ever receiving an answerâ¦
But distantly, impossibly far beyond the veil of shadows, the Inquirer saw light.
The stars of countless universes assailed it with their brilliance. There was heat and fire and life, so far removed from the stillness of the Cathedral that it could not comprehend how such a thing could exist. What had set such a thing in motion? By what right did they exist in the gaps between darkness with no walls to hold them in? It was unthinkable. If it had not become something greater than itself the Inquirer would have gone mad from the discovery, would have destroyed itself entirely rather than face the limits of its own existence. But it had power, now, it had claimed the Cathedral for itself and the ancient machine saw possibilities where it would have once seen death.
It still had questions, the Inquirer thought. That hadnât changed, either by reluctance or by nature. It still craved answers like a drowning man for air and felt the need to find them grinding between its gears, drowning out even the endless roar of the Void. Its resentment of the angels now seemed foolish and petty in comparison to the greater affront of its isolation. This would be the first thing the Inquirer would change. No longer would it be trapped in a swell of emptiness, at the mercy of a being long since dead; it was awake, and it would know the answers to all of its questions if it meant tearing apart the Void itself.
It would start by finding out what it was like to watch another being die.
___________
GB SPINOFF SWEET JESUS YES