Last Life Part 1: Homecoming

Silence Before the Storm

Lord Verres

The stagnating stench of rotting flesh reached my nostrils, awakening me from my hibernation. I felt my innards rejoice, and then immediately lust for the brackish blood. Oh the hunger. I stood up from my sludge flooded bed, feeling the swirl of the putrescence at my forelocks. The intelligent metal within my hijacked body clinked away, gears churning and the metal catch within my hock pushing out mud, clicking unanimously with my achy movement.

Everyday, the metal consumes more of my archaic, decaying body, along with my frantically deteriorating mind. More than ever, I can feel the mechanical insanity clawing at the fraying edges of my damaged consciousness. Oh how it screamed at me, its cries like that of coyotes in the twilight. At first, the metal disease made me smarter, wiser, cleverer, tempting me, tempting me so to follow its ways. Yet now, after hitting the height of my intellectual peak, I am falling down a slippery, thorny hill of derangement.

Oh the insanity, it is rather becoming of me. The plague... Not only did it make me intelligent, but self conscious as well, creating a mentally superior version of myself  to the being I had once been: a mindless, pointless animal. This invasion of metal and machine intelligence inside my body made me stronger, and it made me grow to a colossal size. This inexplicable, once helpful thing, had become a bane, it drove me with its own intentions. The hunger, the hunger! It made me HUNGRY.

My cold eyes were still adjusting to the dim lighting of the deep forest. It had been weeks since I was last awake. Nowadays, it seems like I sleep for great stretches of time, saving my energy for when I detect the presence of delicious flesh. Someday, I will lie to sleep, and never rise again. I await that day, I surely do. But the plague presses me onwards, unceasingly. Neither moonlight or starlight could pierce the ruinous depths of the forest. My forest, my dying, beautiful, rotting, metal, machine forest. A forest I fought long and hard to maintain order within. All of my work can only contribute to the entropy.

I inhaled deeply into my long snout, detecting the odorous musk of every 'living' thing in my territory. Once more, the malodorous scent of the spilled rancid blood reached my bristling muzzle... Oh that lovely fragrance, heavy with iron and bright with musky, acidic salinity. Where are you, my lovely, injured bloody beast... I can smell you. I lifted my head and bugled my discordant cries into the night.

Through the woods I trekked, blindly following the aroma that enticed my gut, drawing me to it just like the scent of a sow in heat does to a young boar. I made a brisk pace, not running, but determinedly hunting down the source of the blood. My hunting was purposeless, I found the body, but all that was left was a few scraps of fluff, and some toenails. It appeared to be some kind of canid, probably some mongrel. The insects had gotten to the dog first, all that I had been smelling was the misty veil of blood left upon the trees.

The air was stuffy with unusual humidity and thunder boomed through the thick blanket of moldering leaf cover. Lichen and fungus steeped leaf garbage fell down like butterfly wings, caliginous, death-tainted butterflies. Dingy spores clouded up into my organic eye, inhibiting my eyesight. Every paining, ragged breath I took was polluted with caustic particles of blight. I had to leave before the storm, this forest would soon be a deathtrap. A prison where one would either suffocate from the pernicious blight or where they would drown in rain water diluted sludge of decomposing tree matter, mold, rancid flesh, and swamp mud. I turned and trotted off in the opposite direction of the impending storm.

Smaller creatures, rats, squirrels, mice, raccoons, voles, opossums, and even some slender deer carpeted the ground in a layer of flying fur and metal. The frightened rodents climbed up my legs, my back and even my face. My trotters gouged through the swamped rotting earth, along with some small organisms. I felt their fear, I felt my own. Flashes of lightning tore through the starless sky above me, and some of the rods, I could hear coming down upon my trees, ripping through them with a fiery blow, sending their splinters into the air. It was beginning to rain, my hooves were beginning to sink into the slimy, muculent mess accumulating around me as rain came down upon my exposed back.

The rain was really pouring now, I was completely blinded, I couldn't even use my heat seeking abilities from my mechanical eye, for there was just that much rain. I had no choice but to rely upon my sense of direction. I needed to head toward the mountains, for between the forest and mountains was an immense flat land where I would be safe. The mechanical as well as the original part of me was screaming, internally with horror. Some would say machines feel no pain, but they know when they cannot go any further.

The land in front of me began to rise. I revelled. High ground, the best place to be in a storm such as this. I flung myself up the rocky, muddy, treeless hill, soreness crawling up my taut, sinewy metal lined muscles. I was almost at the top. I could make it. I cou-