Fodmodmadtol
15-05-2007, 23:36
Dearest,
Metal grinding and fireworks.
Sincerely,
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v609/zasha/sachasig.gif
DontPissUsOff
03-06-2007, 04:16
Metal grinding and fireworks.
No more of that today. No more of that for a long, long time. Not for years had the dark chess-men spat flame and smoke from their tops, setting the skies and hills afire with rapture at the power and ingenuity of men. Not for years had the hammers rung in the valley, their frantic clamour an accompaniment to millions of dreams, where terrifying monsters were vanquished with fast-forged swords.
Metal grinding and fireworks.
No more could the visitor to the City’s environs watch the hunched, sweat-soaked, tortured forms of men who laboured to feed the roaring, insatiable orange maws. Pride, power and skill, all had been invested in the mighty creations of the forge and foundry; all had been for naught. The foundries were silent, the forges cold and bedecked with faint sprinklings of dew; the Gods that men had laboured to create were dead, slain by time and the frailties of the human spirit. Not even their temples were spared by the blind, burrowing roots that took hold in their tattered floors, the ivies that clambered up damp walls, the birds that nested in tattered, pocked rafters.
I remember, Marcus thought. I remember when this place lived and breathed. When it was alive with the sounds of men; the slamming of hammers, the scream of grinding metal, the roar of furnace and engine. But they had passed; passed beyond the distant, darkened hills, beyond the misty seas; beyond the reach of any man or mortal power on earth. In a thousand towns and a hundred cities, the metal Gods had passed. We shall not see their like again.
He did not know why Sacha had sent him the note; no doubt, the author being Sacha, he would find out in due course. But Marcus did know what had brought him here: the ghosts of men not dead, but irretrievably gone, and the grisly and tragic fascination of picking over the bones of a dead place in a dying land. Like a boy prodding a corpse with a stick, simultaneously terrified of and spellbound by what might lie beyond the next prod, Marcus stepped lightly forward on the concrete floor, disturbing the otherwise perfect silence with the gentle noise of crunching glass.
Another prod, as Marcus advanced into what had been the works’ engine shed. The little boy paused in his poking, staring in silent pity at the new discovery before him: long lines of machines, awaiting a task never to come. On an impulse, Marcus clambered up to the footplate of one, staining his awkwardly worn jeans, and stopped to stare at the corpse within a corpse. The engine’s gauges stared back, unseeing sentinels reflecting his weary face; still poised, like the rest of this place, for labour that had long been ceased. Still waiting for the fireworks to spurt forth once again, and for their home to live with the voices and steps and songs of men, with the roar and screech and hiss of machines; the engines were eternally patient. Something caught his eye, and he peered quizzically at it; alongside the stamped production number, some sceptic had carved simply: “Rest in Peace”.
Marcus must have stared at that simple epitaph for a good five minutes. These machines, like their old hands, were not dead, as the inscription suggested; they were merely waiting to begin their old work once more. Eternally patient, they would still faithfully await their masters’ return long after those masters had joined their work in another life.
The machines, and the factory, were ever long-suffering. Marcus could suffer it no longer.
He climbed back down, and made his way reverentially along the floor to the end door, kicking it open and sending it parting from its rusty hinges with a shred of splintering wood. A courtyard, now; rails embedded in the concrete snaked away to distant cranes whose jibs creaked gently in the fitful breeze. Closer to him, a heap of castings, discarded like the toys of some giant child, law sprawled haphazardly. A crate of builders’ plates lay upturned, its contents chipped and scratched, the steel beneath rusting quietly away. It was all Marcus could do not to shed a tear. Once, metal had ground here. The fireworks had roared upwards, symbols of his country’s pride, power and hope. The metal and the fire were gone; and when one removed the metal and fire, with them went pride and hope.
“If you take away the works, there’s nothing left,” he muttered. The words were not his own, and nor was this place. He turned away dejected, and made his way back round to the creaking iron gate, carefully securing it with the rusted chain and lock that had been there when he arrived.
The Gods had fallen; the temples were dead, rotting away quietly. When the Gods died, so did everything else. The road was deserted; the railway above was empty. The occasional figures who hurried through the desolate tableau either did not recognise him or did not care; and why should they? There was nothing left here but the relics of a past whose hope had turned to something far worse than despair.
Marcus sighed. With a final backward glance at the vast, echoing building and its arrays of gargantuan chimneys, he departed for the long walk back home, pursued by the mocking drizzle.
*****
Sacha,
The metal is stilled, now; the fires have long since died away to nothing.
Come dine in our once-grand halls, my old friend, that I might display the treasures of a hopeful past that failed.
- Marcus.