TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
8-14-2022
As the forest gave way to a wide field, Endor saw a loping brown upon the shit of the prairie. Within the rust-colored grass, Dungburner coveted, filthy and wounded in a bloodied pilot’s jumpsuit, his hands scurrying to catch himself from the movements of his dragging knees, jangling a glinting flash of metal.
“I have to keep it wound, I have to keep it wound.” He barely noticed Endor, speaking to her, jangling a watch back and forth “I have to keep it wound, I have to keep it wound” between each particular exertion. With each inch forward, a careful dance of his hands and his knees and the watch kept on, the hands swinging wildly inaccurate, at no even pace nor direction.
“Where are we?”
“Death.” Dungburner said, and spat between breaths. Endor shimmied slightly to catch up with him. The tall grass curled behind him, repairing the path he cut.
“That’s not the case. You know it isn’t.”
“Are you stupid? This is a graveyard. Look at this. The sky is orange. The ground is black. I failed. I failed at everything. There’s nothing here, no metal, no targets - there’s no beauty. The whole of the world has deserted us. Look, Endor - this watch. This is all I have. I have to keep it wound. I have to keep it turning. Or the sun won’t rise again. This is the last gasp. I have to keep it wound.”
“You dedicated your life to death.”
“I dedicated my life to purity. Targets and triggermen are replaceable. Ideally I’d have them be machines too. Now look at me. My consort is gone and my courtship produced nothing but filth. And this - look! Look around! This isn’t what I could do. I could never make a hell like this. The air stinks like shit. All I see is fire. This - no. The river is the wrong color. Please. I need the desert. I need purity. It’s so humid here, look, look! Droplets! There’s droplets beneath the sapphire! It’s all over. It’s going to stop once I stop winding it.”
Beyond them, the smoke of smoldering fires rose like enormous trees, their plumes stretching from grand trunks into the Heavens, a second black canopy obscuring the sky. Someone grand was burning. The smell of bodies hung in the air, hastily cremated in their clothes and waste, the bullets left embedded, pressurized cavities popping like logs. Tents had been in a constant flux of erection and dismantle, trash blew across the open areas and the fields became ugly bald patches paired with the scorched-out wounds of artillery. In the far distance, the chatter of the army moving on - in the wind, the sounds could be heard barely, of marching and gunfire, shouting and collapsing. Beside them, the wreckage of a helicopter, ruts fresh flooding with muddy water in the dirt road Endor walked on. Dungburner was wet with tears, the dirt and ash on his back shaking atop his twitching, coveting posture. The watch wound run out one day. Endor heard a story once, of a mother who starved to feed her mewling baby. The child wasn’t hungry - she fed it near-constantly, fattening it to the size of a cow. Yet still it cried. Yet still it begged. The constant pain of the child was unbearable and she rent her own flesh to feed it. Yet still, it could only look back to her in hate. She failed it. She was the evil one, and died condemning herself for her inability to sate its pain. The watch will wind down one day, whether because the mainspring loses all ability to hold tension or Dungburner is rent by his flesh to be unable to rock its mechanism back and forth. His only child will miscarry and he will awaken and condemn himself. There will be no steel on the horizon and he’ll close his eyes for the last time, weeping he didn’t die back home, at the hands of his children. Years later, Endor will know the site where the skeleton of Dungburner lies rotting in field strewn with cut-fences and rust-saturated puddles of runoff & rainwater. Irradiated animals will chew flowers in the ruin. A nearby factory will still be running at half capacity of old men and young girls (these second-tier devils-in-disguise called from the reserve after the sacrifice of the precious). Dungburner’s initials will gleam in the brown fog of the sunless afternoon, in the bones scriven by the razor shreddings and solvent splashes of his product. So it goes, so it goes.