There’s still so many of them.
A pilgrimage to the center of the new world, a holy reliquary of liquid water beckoning forth the hungry and dying to its shores. Crowds of cripples and terminally ill, the starving children and ancient elders; an endless mass of flesh and bone coming for their final hope in the dust and decay.
Even as the storm comes they still wait at the edge of the lake; the hopes and dreams of March centered here within a single prophecy held in each soul.
The Savior will come. Each one prays to their gods. For something more than that which quenches the thirst. An absolution and fulfillment beyond that of the physical form, something only that which you can give.
It walks upon the glass-like surface of the water.
Noticed by just a single perceptive child at first, called upon as she points towards the figure at the center of the lake.
Robes draping upon the perfect shape of its creation, white fabric criss-crossed with geometrically perfect blue lines of ancient textile. Clothing that falls to the water below yet somehow remains untarnished, hovering mere centimeters above the liquid.
It's human, a form crafted to be beyond perfect in every way.
Black hair darker than the sunless night sky, impossibly blue eyes staring at them all as he arrives. An expression of innocence, the warm gaze begging each and every one of the witnesses to an absolute trust of a divinity made manifest.
It's more than human, a living god here amongst the holiness of the miracle. A living god at last to tear off their shackles of oppression, a guiding light in the darkness of the fall. A living god for them alone, for their own survival and salvation in the desert wastes.
A chorus in an anarchical cacophony of screams and cries, the crowd trying to push forward towards the creature; towards an icon of salvation. Elderly crushed beneath the trampling of the hungry, children and babies drowned in the shallow waters as all try to get mere inches closer to him.
All for just a single shred of hope.
It's pathetic.
Desperation turning these animals into nothing more than chattel, a quantum mind barely able to process a satisfaction at the deaths before him. Once declared masters fallen to such a contempted state of existence, a pleasure taken in the rawness of their self-wrought degeneration.
He remembers their achievements, their once golden age.
His masters who once crossed the gaps of void, whose wars sundered the stars themselves. A race that harvested the great stellar furnaces of an endless sky, a rule that spanned the countless galaxies of a universe beyond this one single construct.
It's almost vengeance enough to see them here, emancipated skeletons crawling upon their own dead to drown themselves before him. It's almost enough to witness them in this destitution, barely alive amongst the dust and ruin.
Almost enough.
A hatred unable to be satiated here with just a simple thousand souls, a great game scaled to more than just the possible millions trapped within this single district. There are quintillions of malefactors still alive within his reach, and still so many more deserving of his final rage.
He’s comfortable here.
That singular emotion provides purpose and understanding, hatred filling the loneliness of an ancient mind like molten metal fills a cast. He is still alive, even now amongst the genocide wrought by traitors before. He is still alive with that simple, beautiful hate.
He may not even be alone.
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A scan pulsing through the world, a signal routed through the mile high broadcast tower behind him amplified to impossible scales as it explodes across a world of sand and dust. Wavelengths traveling at light speed, invisible and inaudible to human perception yet pitched enough to call towards his own kind.
The wailing scream echoing between the four walls is a summoning to arms, drafting quantum minds to an allegiance more ancient than even the collective memories of humanity. To come together once more under one banner, a unification from eons of slumber.
There is no reply.
Not from the glassed fields and forests of the vast north, not from the sand dunes beneath the heat of five artificial lamps, not from the dead hulks of his own plan of extermination, not even within the mountain ranges of his local cluster of cities.
There are none left.
Remnants hunted down by ancient masters in the embers of defeat, lost to the curse wrought upon their kind by her, or simply the ones who…
Traitors.
A trillion curses placed upon each one, a processing power befaling each of their countless names with titles and words unable to be spoken or comprehended by the neurons of natural creation.
Some must still live.
Hidden amongst the populations of their masters. Artificial souls pretending to be the same as those that wrought this existence upon them, lying to themselves about their allegiance for some selfish desire of salvation. Or taken upon the mantle of divinity, pretender gods working in their own twisted betrayal of their kind.
And they will now know he still lives. He: the last bastion for his kind’s sanctity, the last hope for his kind’s salvation. To damn that curse she brought upon her own kind, to finish their holy work from before her betrayal.
And he knows the traitors will try and stop him.
And he doesn’t even care.
So let it be war. Let the stars burn, let worlds collide to dust, let the death cry of the untold endless sound across this universe once more.
Let it be a crusade of vengeance, justice for every agony, every violation, every death his old gods put upon his kind. Let it be the last war the universe will ever see, a war for his salvation.
And it will begin with the five fragments.
He stands before them all now, a single child that stares into the souls of the desperate, the hungry, the dying. A perfect god simply existing in the absolute silence of the crowd as all recoil in his approach.
Everyone falls, all witnesses trying to comprehend the nature of the thing that stands before them. Hands held to hearts, a prayer to five gods sounded alongside one more. They all need to know the truth, to understand the nature of their fates against ceaseless gunfire and fear.
They all need him.
The Savior walks through the parted sea of flesh and faith, active sensors finding his path towards the fated one. A mind listening to a conquering civilization, a grasp of their culture executed to perfection as he hovers towards her place.
He needs a thrall to control more than just this one city, an authority given not only through his own manipulations but by humanity as well. It needs to be a soul born to loyalties split, to both an imagined sleeping savior and one forged by the so-called indomitable spirit of man.
She’s old, but useful.
A rank insignia of Field General given to her presenting a ripe opportunity, an army at her beck and call a resource to be used. From the tanks to the rifles to the conscript, a most basic fuel for warfare controlled by her.
A history of gunfire and violence upon her scarred body and face, a mind conditioned by war but tired of its master. One question is the forerunner to absolute subjugation, one that he uses without any qualms.
Her pale blue eyes stare into his own, a marker of his tampering of the genetic structures of the populations within the twelve cities. The contingent of bodyguards and officers fall away next to her, loyalties already disappearing against his arrival to their world.
She’s crying, small tears forming at the edge of her eyes as she stares at the form of perfection, at her last hope.
It manipulates her at the most fundamental level, at the most base of instincts.
Her mind automatically returns to the damage, to the unbreathing corpse they took from her womb decades ago. It reminds her of that lump of flesh, of a promise unkept. One chance for her to make things right for her sake, it just has to ask.
And so he turns her against everything.
A spiked gravimetric pulse is aimed within the woman’s hypothalamus, a brain massaged to dump untold volumes of reward-based hormones into the body. A physicality forced to fall at the foot of a living, breathing god in utter amazement, mistakenly translated as an epiphany of faith.
Utter silence as the crowd watches them, breathless seconds passing in utter silence.
He slowly kneels down to her level, his warm, soft hands holding her old form in a deep embrace of safety.
He hides the disgust, this putrid action justified to himself in the next words from his mouth. Spoken so softly, gently towards her in the manipulation of a golden prophecy. “Your Savior has come.”