5. Wynn

Wynn


Asterisk43.png

When your hat and boots are drying by the fire at the door,
And you're cooking up a mystery mash with seasoning and more,
Give thanks for all the earth they moved and for the roof they raised,
The digging of a dug-out is a feat that must be praised.

Thunder. Blessed thunder.

It always meant rain. He didn't know why he craved the rain, and there was usually a reason why he didn't know something. His mind put up walls where walls were needed. It had put up hundreds of thousands of them. They filled the cavern that stretched out around him, each one a single cell of his skin.

Thunder. Finally, thunder.

There was a meaning, deep and dark and final, to the sound. It meant that things were going to change. It meant that Vivian was returning to finish the job…

You loved him wrong, the Set animal told him. Loved him, but loved him wrong. Your love was sweet poison, and it kept him coming back until it put him somewhere nobody returns from.

"You're wrong," he told it. He pointed at the ceiling of the cavern. "Thunder. Liberating thunder."

He was certain the Set animal hadn't always been there… no. He was certain that it had always been there, but that it hadn't always always had been. That was the trouble with really good or really bad ideas. You couldn't get rid of them afterward.

Except with a cleansing rain.

He felt it before he saw it. The trickle, the falling, the flood. It poured down from the lake above to wrap his factory in a watery embrace, and his heart swelled…

No, that wasn't his heart. That was the expanding foam they'd seeded into the walls in case he ever got too hard to handle, became too onerous a responsibility to take care of. That was what rain meant.

Rain meant death.

He let out his breath, and the factory heaved. He hadn't meant to hold his breath in the first place, so he didn't know how long it had been. Possibly decades.

The impossible steel met the possible foam, and the outcome was predictable. His relief destroyed its cause. As it always did.

No way out, the Set animal sighed. No easy way.

"No easy way," he agreed. The water kept coming; soon they would be getting their feet wet…

Thunder. Tremendous, all-shattering thunder. Stalactites fell. Kilometres away, he saw the lower membrane crack and shift, like someone breaking cookies off a baking pan.

Rain was death. Thunder was murder, or suicide. Either way, they were hurting up there. His heart, really his heart this time, swelled. He wished he could reach out.

And so, he could.

Plates and gantries and inverted smokestacks and I-beams and molten copper bent and unfolded and pinwheeled through the cavern. His factory had been expanding like a runner's lungs as he pushed the limits of his madness, day by day, and now it was running a marathon. Perhaps a relay. There was a torch to be carried, and nobody could carry a torch like him.

"This is a mistake," the Set animal growled as Wynn reached up to clasp the wounded facility, cradle it, let it know it was loved. "You are making a terrible mistake."

"I am unmaking one," he told it with a smile. God, but they were lonely. Why were they so lonely? He could feel it through the rock. "That's what I do."

Wynn.png

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License