In The Deep

“Who is inside you?” Jemin demanded, his chest tightening as the cold aura of the machine began to frost his collar. Tears formed in the ducts of his eyes as fate stared back at him. The echoes of his voice ringing through the endless caves and crags. A shadow, unmoving stood faced away.

The shadow stayed but turned to look at Jemin. It slowly extended its massive, iron-rimmed arm, its heavy fingers curling open to reveal a handful of cold, grey mountain ash.

“There is no inside,” the collective voices rasped, the violet light behind the glass pulsing with a slow, agonizing heartbeat. “The armor crawled through the crust. The armor found the marrow. We are the stone that remembers the forge, human. Go back to your flammable houses. There is nothing to kill here. We have already been spent.”

The arm dropped back into the dust with a heavy, hollow thud. The silver dome tilted back down, the purple glow within the core fading back into a dim, dormant twilight. The machine returned to its static waltz with the stone, leaving Jemin standing alone in the freezing mountain wind, his sword still sheathed, entirely paralyzed by the realization that some monsters are just monuments to a tragedy that has already concluded.