Empty Worlds

I have landed, the ground is rocky 
and the air smells like dry leaves.
Empty and hollow, the winds blow below
and above in an eternal breeze.

How and why this has all come to past
has been lost in the past,
yet what is and all that could have been
is all it will ever be.

There are machines moving in the distance, 
I think they’re broken.
Broken? Or just functioning in ways I do not understand?
Who am I to decide,
to determine,
how the way something is to be?

After all, I don’t even understand how
my lungs turn the air I breathe
into the life, I live.

I found a giant face made of stone. 
It’s half-buried in the ground staring at the sky.
Strange to think that the sky
is something we often associate
with something above,
and yet the sky is all around us,
beginning at the ground we walk upon,
and extending forever into the void.

The sky’s the limit?

If you only knew.

There’s a tower here. 
I tried to get into it, but there’s too much rubble.
Rubble is all that remains,
whether by the maker or by the role,
nothing is permanent in creation.

It’s a kind of jester irony
that for there to be any creation at all,
destruction must take place.

A sculpture floats above the ground. 
The center is glowing blue and there is several spheres orbiting it
Planets? Moons? Satellites? Gods?
The sound is deafeningly clear;
numbing in its singular purpose.

O – what beautiful dissonance it creates.
I’ve entered into one of the buildings. 
There’s mirrors here but they are all broke.

Fragments of reflections;
fragments of memories;
fragments of the present – 
is there nothing more true to reality
then seeing what a broken mirror sees?

Most of the buildings in this world have been torn down,
they lie in ruins with their insides stuck out.
Necks broken and limbs twisted:
Time is a foe we cannot defeat,
but is it really something we must fight?

Why is struggling such a strong will
even in those things that have no life?

There aren’t any machines here, just empty planes. 
It’s as though civilization just stopped.
Civilization is not life,
as I have come to realize;
civilization is not creation,
nor is it nature.

What is not suitable for us,
is home for others;
what I see as empty,
is teeming for something else.

I come across three sculptures.
They are cruder than the ones before.
And two of them been destroyed.

Destroyed or abandoned,
I can never tell.
On a long enough timeline,
everything’s chances of survival
comes down to a cold and calculated
zero.

I walked into a hut, it was someone’s home, at one point. but over the years they are been destroyed.
To be destroyed,
what a strange concept, as if it is final,
but what you look at it on a large enough scale,
destruction is also creation,
just as the vase crumbles,
dust is formed.

In the second hut, I see a spit over some rocks. they are probably for cooking.
I can almost smell the alien dishes being made,
feel the heat and the aromas
flooding the air around me;
the chatter of the occupants,
the vibrant emotions dancing around,
too bad my helmet protects me
from the toxicity that now calls this place home.

In the third of the three huts is a single stone sculpture. It is the same face that is elsewhere only huger.
So simple and daunting,
it makes me wonder what they knew about
the greater world around them.

Surely they understood more than their simple
lifestyles revealed,
but maybe that is the key to all of this.
As I leave the world I’m encountering a field of hundreds or thousands of, those sculptures.

I don’t know what they mean. Perhaps someday I’ll find out.

A mountain looms in the distance,
like a final monolithic monument to the being they represented.
Hollow, yet strong,
crumbling, yet eternal,

O – this world is dead
but so full of life waiting to be awakened.

I hope in time, that will come to pass.

Mirror One:
When I have fears
that overwhelm my confusion,
before my pen has struck the page
with its unmistakable ink,
I find myself in labyrinth
held together by Atlas himself.

The weight of the cosmos
holding down my hand;
the weight of the cosmos
held in my hand.

Mirror Two:
Before I have created what is yet to be,
which holds the universe of possibility,
I become drawn to the improbable;
what fears may come
in dreams that never end;
what joys are left unshared
at the door of anxious calamity?

Mirror Three:
When I behold the vibrating stones
upon the cold shores of the horizon,
I am reminded that all things
come and go with the tide.

Life ebbs;
life flows;
life fades away
to be renewed once more.

Mirror Four:
And I think that I may never live
to see what it all may come;
never see what all has yet to be;
to hear and feel
all those things yet to be brought
to the paradise of existence.

But that is the way things must go;
finding paths and routes,
untraveled or well-worn,
and see where they lead.

Mirror Five:
There are plenty of roads
for everyone,
but no one can trek them all.
And when I feel, I tremble,
that I shall never look upon Orcus
with such longing eyes.

Death is a singer,
wailing her final eulogy.

Mirror Six:
Hear her song
and enjoy the melodies,
for when Death has finished singing,
your end has come.
Never revel in treasures
of unreflecting discourse.

Disaster looms for those who do not see,
but do not search for Heaven
with your good eye closed;
falsities and fallacies are around every corner;
virgin eyes with dirty looks.

Mirror Seven:
Then on the stage of creation,
I stand alone and think
till the day that which may eternally lie,
even Death, in these strange eons,
may come to die.
Everything becomes known,
but nothing can be done:
the curse of being one with God.

Day 1:
I visited a place that was sandy 
and dry. 
I saw a broken boat 
and I tried to fix it, but I couldn’t.

There’s something about this place
that I can’t quite figure out;
a cycling echo
traveling in circles
around the monuments
of empty shells and husks.

The sand is hot,
but its origins are as cold
as a grave.

Day 7:
A few chairs lied broken 
by a building that looked abandoned.
Hollow like everything else I’ve come across;
hallowed like a cemetery;
the silence is deafening,
the isolation, overbearing.

Yet through all of this,
I don’t feel alone.

Later:
In it there were bookshelves 
with books about all sorts of topics. 

One entire shelf though was missing, someone had clearly stolen it.

The strange markings on top
are eerie and intriguing,
like the lure or a predator,
or the promise of hope
upon the edge of Armageddon.

The dust in the missing area
isn’t as thick as it is
in other areas.

Clearly, the theft happened recently.
Maybe the thief is still around.

Day 20:
There was a pedestal 
that made a funny mechanical sound,
deep within the crypt-like metropolis.

I listened for a while 
but couldn’t decipher it’s meaning.
It just replayed the same monotonous hymn
over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

It simply stood there,
not caring for the lack of an audience;
it just kept playing,
buzzing,
swarming,
like a haunted cloud of gnats
in a dry heaving desert.

Day 34:
I found a large capitol building.
Someone had strewn candles over the second level. 
It was raining and the artificial light turned the water red.
The ruddy shower reminded me of falling rose petals,
or a spray of blood.

Out of nowhere, a voice echoed through my mind:

“By three they come…
by three thy way opens…
by the blood of the willing,
we call thee home…”

Hours Later:
I looked at the light but it hurt my eyes.

There was clearly something wrong with this.

Even if the people of this world
had lived with a completely different kind of star
which emitted a different kind of light,
it all acts the same way.

No, this light wasn’t light,
it was breathing and shifting,
like a wave floating through the air,
penetrating my suit, my skin,
my muscles, and my bones.

I swear, the light was alive…

Day 46?:
A tall tower stood before me 
with a crack in the sides. 

Someone had painted a symbol on it.
It seemed so familiar to me, 
but I couldn’t recall from where I had seen it;
I had left my PADD back at my camp.

Why? I don’t know.

What I do know,
sent shivers down my spine:
the color, like a red I have never seen before,
formed the symbol,
but it lived. 

I could sense the memories within,
hear the voices of thousands upon thousands
of inhabitants;
ghosts trapped within the color.

Day 50:
I found what seems to be
some kind of scientific lab.

There were two machines in a room, 
which hummed like the pillar I had encountered
near the city center,
only this one sounded deeper,
older. 

I tried to look through the windows 
but they are frosted up.

Sarcophagi made of glass,
yet their contents remained hidden.
What they held terrified me;
what they held fascinated me.

Day 96:
I’ve made my way
to the outskirts.
Outside the air was chilly. 
The mountains were covered, in snow and ice.
The wind howled like a beast.
But for some strange reason, I felt more at peace here,
that I ever did in that metropolis.

The light is almost serene here;
almost normal.
I wish I had landed here first,
rather than at the first sign
of civilization.

The life here, if you could classify it as that,
doesn’t seem to be cursed or haunted,
merely lost.

Day 112:
I came across a number of houses 
covered in ice. 
I looked inside 
and found that they had been abandoned.

Not even memories remained,
just this empty structure,
like an unused book
full of blank pages,
waiting to be filled by something,
anything,
to be given meaning and purpose,
and therefore life,
but here it stands,
a testament to nothing.

Day 115:
Someone had made a snowman 
and had sticks for arms.

At first this amused me greatly,
but then I became curious,
and then I became scared,
and finally I felt alone.

The snowman could have been a recent creation,
or something far older.
Either way, I had no way to tell.
It just stood there with the moon 
eclipsing the sun
in the background,
and the reality of this place,
eclipsing my sanity.

Later On:
There was sculpture 
that is framed the dark sun perfectly.
I marveled at the precision this culture had,
how accurate everything they had created
and achieved,
and yet their feet never left the ground.

I stared at the structure
for who knows how long,
when suddenly it blinked.
Blinked like an enormous eye.

I ran.

Day 198:
I walked through the icy passes, 
left the world.

Left myself too,
though not all of it.

What I could carry, I brought with me,
but this place, this landscape,
is hungry.

It has been starving for eons.

The ice is penetrating my suit.
I should return to my ship, 
leaving this place behind,
but something is calling me,
deeper and deeper into the unknown,
like a question luring me with the answer.

“By three they come…”

repeats in my head.

I am already here,
and I know of one other.
Who is the third?

I guess I’ll just have to wait….

The Great Artist, Sekhmet,
shaped these lands
as a testament to her own world.
A world filled with horrific wonder
and terrible awe.

The beauty of this place
is so far beyond anything else
in the whole of Creation,
that it’s very existence
should be a taboo;
a forbidden act of love
so profound that only Death
could bring peace to the hearts
of those who lay their eyes
upon its surface.

This planet,
is not for you;
it is not for me;
it is not meant for mortal lives.
She paid respects to the Three Rulers,
mortals who held up the skies themselves
though their feet never touched the ground.

These colossal kings carried their mother
without complaint;
without defiance;
all in the name of love,
silently guarding those around them,
without disturbing those below them.

Forever blessed, they came to be worshipped
as gods themselves,
but Time is not kind
to those who play God.

Their nearly-unbroken reign
was passed down from grandparent
to parent
to child,
a testament to the monument
that had been so carefully crafted
in their name
and in their honor.

Courageous, generous, humble –
one would be challenged to find a fault
in their sculpture,
yet fault lines do not always come
from within;
sometimes the trigger is rested
upon the finger that pulls it.

But Entropy made disaster inevitable.

The ground itself still sings songs
of that Fate-filled day;
ballads to the heroics;
elegies to the loss;
eulogies to the memory
of all that once was,
and all that could have been.

The three kings
tried their best to hold up the skies,
but the ceiling simply imploded
like a glass dome,
bringing down a rain of flames
as the reign of the kings
went up in flames.

Many of her people tried to escape,
but Entropy makes fools of us all.
Sekhmet, beloved creator;
unholy destroyer,
even she must succumb to the will
of Entropy and its law:
moved by will alone,
this is the way things have come
and will be.

The Great Artist escaped,
though many reviled her for doing so.

“How dare she abandon us?”

they proclaimed.

“How dare she forsaken us?”

they exclaimed.

The gods have their reasons
of which reason knows nothing.
Sitting in this immense cavern,
a world within a world,
it’s easy to fall in line
with the people of this world,
to see their logic and reason;
to feel the totality of their abandonment.

But perspective, like Death,
is a grand equalizer,
bringing everything into focus.

Sekhmet, grand creator;
Sekhmet, unholy destroyer.
Drawn away from her creation.
But the people did survive,
and though they did not know how,
they assumed it was purely by chance.

Soon, they rebuilt;
soon after, they began to grow;
soon further, they began to expand
and took the first steps
towards kissing the stars themselves.

The scars on their beloved homeworld
transformed from messages of dread
to memorials of hope,
that they are the only ones they can truly rely on;
that all they have achieved
was under their own merit.

Moved by their own will
alone.
They learned to carve.
Then to crave.
Then took those first steps
into something more.

First, they built simple structures,
testing the waters
which lapped at the shores
of the cosmic seas,
not staying long in the unknown,
before returning to the familiar known
of the ground below.

As the decades passed,
they honed their craft.
Improving in leaps and bounds,
crashing through boundaries,
sometimes recklessly;
sometimes dangerously,
yet always in the name of something greater
than themselves.

Generation unto generation,
progression unto progression,
the people moved forward unhindered.
Their passions fueled their ships;
moved by will alone.

Eventually they came to the border,
that area where the skies were once held,
the realm of the kings.
Looking down in pure amazement
at how they ever did what they did
for as long as they did.

It was here that they made their greatest,
and most horrific discovery:
Sekhmet had not abandoned them at all.

Here, on the threshold of the cosmos
she had created a structure,
one piece for every soul lost from her world;
one for each one who perished that day,
and one for each who had gone on since.

A monument which created a lattice,
a net,
holding back the fires of Entropy
from ever touching her creation ever again.
But all at a cost.

She spent centuries crafting her final piece.
Imbuing a little bit of herself into every sculpture,
blessing it with her protection,
and thus, her life.

The three kings still held the sky,
but not as they used to.
Taciturn satellites that now ward off intruders,
both big and small.
As for Sekhmet,
her sacrifice became a new sky,
insuring the immortality
of her mortal creation.

The people did not know
what to think.
All this time,
they had been driven
by the idea,
by the thought,
by the sheer concept
that they had been abandoned;
left behind to their own devices;
moved by will alone,
yet in truth,
all of their progress was only possible
by one final act of love
from the one they had believed
didn’t love them in return.

Who was this person,
so willing to give all for us?
Sekhmet spent so much time
and care carving one figure
over and over again.

She died before telling the universe
the full extent of her love for creation
with a final expression in destruction,
but we know now,
and we will continue the legacy
of our blessed mother.

Who else was worth spending such devotion,
but Sekhmet?

Who else was able to bring forth
such noble an act,
and to be left in the dark?

She could have quit,
she could have ended her duty at any point,
yet still she created her final piece;
by the Maker or by the roll,
she created the ultimate work of art,
for what is done out of love
lies beyond the realm of good and evil.

She moves by will alone.