A Broken Contract

The gears are turning. The gears are turning. The gears are turning.

You run your fingers across them. You cling to your waning reality, no matter how much they try to unmake you. You can see wisps passing across the teeth of the gears, being crushed and worked into unknowable things.

They grind and churn so loudly that you cannot hear anything else. You can only hear the clicks, the hisses, the squeals, the groaning of an ancient and rusting machine.

You cannot sleep. You cannot leave. You wander the halls, staring past your feet into mirror-reflective metal paths that reflect absolutely nothing at all. There are lines faintly worn into them, along certain paths.

Every day, though, something strange is happening. Despite the machine’s attempts to grind you into dust, the machinery you draw near to starts to slow to a crawl, sometimes stopping entirely. Your hand, with every passing moment, looks all the more familiar.

One day, staring out a barred window into the endless wastes that await anyone who manages to escape the Machine, a wild wind catches you. Slowly, you rise to your feet, turning to look down that long, cramped hallway of cables and clockwork. The same as every other one.

You reach up, gently winding your fingers around a cable. It feels… heavy, in your hand. Real. Not like usual. It is not so much that the cable suddenly has weight, but rather, that your hand is solid enough for it to weigh against.

You grip it tightly, and PULL as hard as you can. You watch the result cascade down the hall, cogs stuttering and stopping. You pull harder, and harder, until you RIP the sparking cable out of the ceiling. The entire hallway has fallen silent.

Just as the world feels real to you now, so too does your heart. You feel it beating in your chest, burning with rage. You are familiar with the workings of the divine. The King yet lives, for if he did not, you would not be able to muster dissent against the Trickster.

You course down the hall, slamming your fists into the mechanisms and tearing out anything weak enough. You wreak havoc on his wretched machinery, twisting gears off their spokes and slamming them into others until they are bent and broken. You hurl a cog through a window, likely to the fleeting amazement of the unfortunate specters below.

Soon, you swing your axe wildly, shattering pieces of fragile clockwork with furious blows. You’re practically heaving, panting! You haven’t even noticed the arrival of your axe, its weight so natural in your hands that you don’t stop to question it.

From place to place, you rip the machine apart. You hear it snarl with rusty effort, the ground quaking beneath your feet as vital parts of it are shattered into pieces. It’s likely you’re not making a real dent, but the Trickster will surely suffer!

You hear a voice, for the first time in nearly a decade, call out to you.

“You! What do you think you’re doing!?”

You turn, locking eyes with the Trickster. It takes a moment, but he comes to remember you, and his gaze goes wide. Like he’s seen a ghost.

You do not answer him. Instead, you throw yourself at him! You lunge across the hall, striking him hard across the face before he can realize the mistake he’s made.

…

Suddenly, you are no longer in the Machine.

The old Trickster growls, staggered by that blow. He reaches for his gun, looking up at you… only to realize that the scenery has changed. You stand over him, a panting silhouette among silhouettes, outlined only by the pouring rain.

A cloud-choked sky is lined against a pitch cityscape. He is not in the Machine anymore.

You don’t waste this opportunity. You know where you are, and so does he. The world has not realized itself around you, yet. You hang in the lurch. You step forward and take a hard swing at the god, one which he narrowly ducks as he draws his revolver. With two deafening cracks, he plants twin rounds in you, one in your shoulder and one across your jaw… before you can strike him on the backswing.

You’re missing part of your jaw, and there’s a sizable gape in your shoulder, but that does not break your stride. He hits the ground, dazed briefly by the blunt back of your axe. He tries to lift his gun again…

WHACK.

You lop his hand off before he can take aim. As soon as the hand is gone, the scenery around you becomes more… grounded. The shadows take  on faint details. You can see a wall of pikes, crowned with corpses.

He howls in anger, as loudly as his frail body can muster, and draws back his other hand. He kicks his feet, squirming to try and escape your relentless advance and give himself room to work. You lash out, aiming for that fatal strike, but he ducks just far back enough… and ripostes.

The glint of capricious energies gathering in his hand only now earns your notice, a moment too late. He swipes his hand at you, casting a crescent of wild magic into you.

The feeling is… strange. It’s duller than you would expect it to be. The magic streaks across you, engulfing you in billowing, prismatic magic flame. Yet… all you can feel is a dull, distant heat.

You raise your axe, which he sees outlined against that very same flame that now swallows you. Through the flames, you lock eyes with him. You see his eyes behind the glasses, for the first time, and read in them fear.

“Wai-”

You bring your axe down, splitting his head in two.

…

You awaken.

You lift your head up, immediately darting a hand out to grab the spear impaled through your gut. Your fingers slip along the rain-rusted haft, but you find enough purchase to pull yourself up, just a bit. That thing is pretty firmly dug into the ground.

The scene around you is so much worse than you remember. The relentless rains are just the same, storms swallowing the sky so intensely that even now, as you see the faint imprint of the Architect peering through the midst of the clouds, it is nearly as dark as night.

The streets stink of rot. The homes are sallow, sagging under the weight of a decade of rain. Every shadowed place seems to roil with chaotic motion, the glowering red eyes of the skittering shades only becoming visible to you when they deign to look at you. Like catching the eyes of an animal reflecting your torchlight before it scampers off.

You heave, and pull, starting to peel yourself off of the spear. What you remember to have been a horrific sensation is now merely a muted sting, that rusted metal sliding through your gut. Eventually, you manage to get yourself up to your feet, dragging yourself that last bit through and dislodging the spear from your back.

If nothing else, you are as you remember yourself to be… but for the hole through your stomach. Your battle against the Trickster has been forgotten, your body nearly as new.

Clutching your bleeding gut, you bend down to heft your axe off the ground… not in pristine shape, but better than you’d hoped. You lay it over your shoulder, and begin your long trek out of the city, grateful that the shades seem not to begrudge a fellow undead.