Quicksilver
#3 of Speed-Writings
More horror, mood, stuff, it's very short.
CW: Vomit, minor gore, insanity, the usual.
Not all ancient evils must be from forgotten historical times, buried within antediluvian vaults. An 'ancient' malevolent force may be brand new, it is merely the attributes and aesthetic surrounding it that grants it such a title. The accoutrement of such things is what defines them, not age--it is the opening of Pandora's Box, to varying degrees of metaphoricity that grants such things, such titles. Is the perception of time being warped, ancient? When the years and hours last the same lengths of time, the temporal beat of the cosmos being twisted and stretched by specters of one's own mind, the archaic and modern becoming coaeval.
To be hurled into an abyss of wrought pig iron for disgracing a deity of binary. To find oneself trapped within the labyrinthine mind of redundancy, of never-used paths and vacuum tubes glowing ochre judgment. I find no quartz that resonates. I do not find clock hands. I find a ceaseless array of pendulums and flywheels. The world is a painting of orange and grey within which my lumbering body makes its trek. I find myself walking across the pipes laid on the floor on my six legs, upward and downward on electrical wires. The world itself twists as I meet the same rooms again and again. Do I merely meet the same component of a machine again and again, or do I meet the very same node? Where on the ineffable schematics do I lay?
Doomed to crawl across metal and metal. I cannot starve myself, I cannot die of thirst or exhaustion. I cannot die of what my captor cannot imagine. I creep across the ground and it with iron of my own, yet the world smells all the same regardless. I lay down and heal. I walk on twos, then fours, repeat. Twos, fours, sixes; twos, fours.
I will get my leg caught foolishly in the gears, it will turn into greenish pulp. It will oxidize, and cauterize on bare electrical wire and heated tubes. It has already healed. I am walking with a leg of lead pipe. A nixie tube lays in my left eye, burning my brow, burning my soul. I will continue, as I have been, to be ensnared. To reflect my environment. I was an amputee before I was amputated. The world spins. I gaze at an orange glow. I see worm gears. I see worm gears slithering across the ground, one is crushed by a pendulum. I trip over piping, and those worm gears turn to come to me, and come through my throat. My tracheotomy fits them. They turn in my stomach. I puke, and molten hot solder sprays from between my mandibles.
I dare not cry.
I will eventually become one with my environment. All things decay into dirt and I will decay into metal. I will be one with the automatons' catacombs. I do not feel time, I feel the changing of the world. I feel the gears turning in me, and the lullaby of magnetic fields. I have purpose and I have perspective. Time is a flat, revolving, toothed circle. I am as old as I am new, I am the degrees of orientation I was years ago and henceforth. I will amalgamate to find my sense of time, the universe is a wound-up spring unfurling, as my chitin peels in brass shavings. I am spinning. My teeth bite into swirling discs. I emanate a soft glow of electric impedance. I pirouette.