"Jungle?"
You are Seh.
You are one of three things to exist in your world. The others are Pain and the Airships.
It has been these three for over 120,000 years, the Song trapped in a circular rhythm, and all three are nearing their blessed end. Your corpses and yet-living selves, thronging and devouring like maggots within your own decaying flesh, are piled into the sky. Your hands and teeth have seized 2,999 of the accursed airships.
The last one floats above. Higher than the rest, buoyed by the gases your mass grave releases. Timing the release of its bombs so that the updraft of each blast carries it inches further out of your grasp.
How much longer?
No.
It is the last one, you don't feel the burning of the bombs anywhere else. Prioritize upward growth over coverage, there is nowhere it can flee to fast enough.
How much more pain?
No.
A bomb falls, hits, screams its wrath out into the world. Scatters You like sand in the wind. It doesn't matter. More You flows in to fill the hole.
They came from the stars. If it flies higher, if it decides to leave, if even just one of them gets—
No. No. It's almost over.
One of your countless bodies has the life squeezed out of it in gasps as it is trampled by others, blindly flinging themselves higher. Many of them miss, and tumble down into the vast tangle of gaunt limbs and flesh. They will never touch the surface again.
The Song repeats. Explosions, screams, crunching and tearing and swallowing.
The Song repeats.
…
The Song varies.
Another beat is there.
Faint, distant. A new sound approaching the chorus.
Heard by ears on the other side of the planet, a rushing of wind. The atmosphere parting. The sound of speed.
Stay focused. It can't be an airship, the airships don't fly that fast. One left, just one left. The rushing builds into a roar. Different ears are hearing it now, tracking its movement. It spans long-filled oceans and buried continents in a split second. It draws nearer, louder, faster.
Thousands of kilometers in the blink of an eye. The roar echoes in billowing waves, spreading out behind it. The shockwaves are nearly that of the bombs. Another second passes, and the roar overlaps with the blasts, and—
You hear a sound that only ones as you are could recognize, that only ones as you are could survive hearing. The sound of explosive force, heard from the epicenter in the milliseconds before the mind witnessing it is turned to mist. The roar peters off. Something warm and wet falls in gobs.
You recognize its taste. You have tasted it 2,999 times before.
Go. Go go go go. Surge, grab, gnash, waste no time. Buoyant cartilage is crushed between teeth with such frenzy that they crack and loosen in their gums. Get it all. Get it all, let not a drop of its VILE BLOOD REMAIN, LET IT BE OVER, LET IT BE OVER AT LONG LAST—
Silence. Stillness.
The intruder crashes down elsewhere. Bouncing, cutting, like a shattered sword. It smashes through bodies, slowly coming to a halt. It is burning to the touch, but that pain is but a drop in the ocean. Hard and smooth. Not flesh. Metal.
The hiss of something opening. Footfalls.
A gruff voice, humming a simple tune.
A Song.
Focus in, focus in more. Entire strata of You let out a sigh that has been held for millennia. And they go dark, like untold trillions of candleflames beneath the rain that breaks a drought. There are usable bodies nearby. Crawl. Try to remember how to speak in anything but screams. Make sure.
"…Is it. Dead?"
"Hoh?"
"The airship. Is it dead? Are they all dead?"
"Oh. Was you blimp? Sorry. I fix."
"—No, no, don't fix it. It's not mine, don't fix it. Don't fix it."
"Okay. I clean off now, bad for see through."
Footsteps. A jump.
"Bad for steer."
The humming resumes, unbothered.
It's over. The battle. Your cosmic suffering. It's over. The ground rumbles as countless bodies finally fall limp, taking their pain with them.
A thought occurs.
"No, don't look at it, DON'T LOOK AT IT, IT'LL START ALL OVER AGAIN, PLEASE!"
The humming pauses. The planet tenses again. Trillions of teeth are bared.
Then it cautiously continues, with a brief clatter and a scraping sound. More gobs are flung down to the ground, and pulled under. "Is nasty, stuck on." A grunt of exertion, another large scrape. No ramblings, no awed rapture. Just mild distaste in the voice.
"…You saw it, you looked at it. But. It didn't infect you? How?"
"Is okay. I wear goggles."
The gorilla squeegeed the last of the weird airship-guts off the windshield of his vehicle, then clambered down off the pockmarked nosecone. The gravitational slingshot maneuver it had been attempting was fun, but ultimately resulted in a slow-down. No good. Stick to open space, where the only things to hit were asteroids. That's what the cow-catcher was for, after all.
As he stood back up, scratching his matted neck, he glanced at the weird person that had come out of the ground. They looked quite a lot like the ground, and the stuff that had piled up on the skids. It would be rude to assume they were related, though. No telling what kind of history the two had. Besides, it was clearly The Ground because it was where he had landed in an advanced lithobraking maneuver.
"You is dirt?"
"What? No, I am… Seh. Prince Seh Cealal. Or, I was."
He lumbered over on his knuckles for a closer look. The figure was much thinner and paler than him, and didn't seem to have any fur. The only thing it had was a battered crown. It wheezed, and angled its face towards a little to the left of where he was standing.
"…I must ask you, before I die, what is your name? You have, I think, helped destroy a great evil here."
The mechanic sat down crosslegged. What remained of its brow furrowed upwards. It didn't know of good and evil, but it knew of death. Death was stillness. Death is what all things tried to move away from, to outrun. Few others had succeeded.
"You die soon?" he whispered.
Seh gave a weak, pained smile, the only kind he had left to give.
"Yes, and I welcome it. I have fought for—" His voice cracked.
"—so long."
The smell of methane was sharp in the air, enough of it that even the gorilla's scorched sinuses could pick it up. He looked at the empty horizon, and the whimpering, bloodstained ground. The sky was blue, but a sickly blue, like it was struggling to remember what it once looked like. He shuddered.
"Is sad place for."
"It is my home."
They sat in silence. The gorilla scratched at the charred bone of his face.
"Me home far away. Far, far."
The silence continued. The ground kept compressing and collapsing in stumbling waves, rocking the duo and the ship every which way in a slow fall.
"…It was beautiful, once. I hope it will forgive me for staining it so."
"…Trees?"
"Yes. Forests, rivers, mountains too. Great oceans and meadows."
"Jungle?"
"…I think so. I never saw them. It could be said I have been to them, though, just as anywhere else on this world. But not in the way I would have liked. Only to trample and consume them."
The ape turned a battered socket wrench over in his hands.
"…I need fix ship. Still talk?"
"Certainly."
One of the craft's wings was hanging off at an angle. Strong, undead hands hefted it back in place, and a dexterous thumbed foot began to twist the bolts back.
"…What brought you here? I had sent messages, but you didn't seem familiar with any of this."
"Hoh. I fly fast, very fast. Go more far than any else. Try find what beyond. Then, find nice, warm person."
"Out in the void?"
"Yes. He talk. He tell me, bad times come. Time come when need things with good heart, things that fun, things of whimsy nature. They need come together, hold each other, join and fight. Fight to keep flame alive." There was an undeniable warmth to the animal's words, as if they had been taken from the oven and passed to him, as he passed them now to the prince. "Fight to keep laugh alive. He tell me, you good creature. You funny. Find other thing that good, funny, bring together."
The gorilla paused to finish haphazardly tying some frayed wires together, then uncapped a can of red spray paint and shook it vigorously. He continued, spraying out 'FAST' in large, messy letters as he did so.
"No much luck so far. Mostly planet and rock."
Seh chuckled weakly, wincing at the pain in his ribs from doing so.
"You won't find anything funny here, I'm afraid, unless you are very cruel indeed."
Sparks sprayed from the twisted copper bundle. The gorilla grunted approvingly, and the maintenance hatch was slammed shut again.
"Is okay."
Footfalls approached the prone form of the prince, sprawled across his own bone-thin bodies. A torn, leathery hand was placed on his shoulder.
"You want die place with trees instead?"
Seh gathered his thoughts. Dug for memories of greenery deep, deep in his mind.
"…I would, but it can't be done. Where would I find any?"
"Me home. Many tree."
The prince was pulled to his feet, wrist grasped by stubby fingers. He stumbled as his knees buckled, but his hands were met by the strong back of an animal, stained with oil, and he fell no further.
"You said you had travelled far."
"Yes. Home long, long way away."
They loped a short ways together. Seh was hoisted upwards, and tumbled into a scratchy seat patched with duct tape and missing large chunks of foam. He sank into it. It was still far better than a coffin of his own corpses. He could barely feel any of them anymore. After being so many for so long, it was like dissolving. Like slowly floating to bob on the surface of a vast, dark ocean.
"Then I'm afraid I won't make it. The air I've been breathing has been… ruined, from my own decay. The smoke. And I've eaten nothing but…My nutrition has been very poor for a long, long time. I don't have long."
As the ape clambered past him into the pilot's seat, there was the sound of a small hatch popping open, and something small, round and sweet was thrust into Seh's hands. He lifted it close, and smelled the sweet tang of citrus. Another click, and the craft around him began to shudder as engines rumbled to life.
"Is okay."
A long strip of three-layered duct tape that aspired to one day be considered a real seat belt was fastened around Seh's waist. Another switch was flipped, and a cacophony erupted into the air around them. After several moments, Seh recognized it as fast, loud music. He sighed.
"But your home is very far away."
"Yes."
Seh considered protesting further. But he was very tired. He instead shoved the orange in his mouth, savoring its sweet nectar. Something else, after the hundred and twenty thousand years. Something else.
This was fortunate, as it prevented him from biting into his own tongue as the rocket moved, flattening him into his seat with G-Forces that he should not have survived. The atmosphere roared past first, then the twin moons in orbit over his grave, and then the rocket flew free of the sun's gravitational pull before a full minute had passed. Faster, faster, and faster still. Truth was overridden by speed. Pain was cast aside for freedom. The undead ape and the last living piece of Seh blazed away into the dark at impossible speeds, leaving the world of injury and suffering behind.
"We be there in 'bout twenty minute."