The planet was red, the rusted remains of a once living world. Wandering through the dead sands, day after day, searching for something, anything, to save me, I saw it. There is a great spire on Cartiferous Prime, or Second Mars, as you are calling it. I thought it was just an odd sort of mountain, you know? Geology isn’t my strong suit, and alien planets—heck, Earth itself—have many strange prodigies. Well, this may have started out as one of them. You see, I figured, when I saw that giant black spire shooting up into the sky, that I could climb it and get a better signal. Not that I really had any hope of finding anyone, but it would keep me busy dying.
As I got closer though, and as the sun began to set, that’s when I saw the gleam. Well, I didn’t know what it was, or even had a guess that night, but in the morning, there it was again. The closer and closer I got, the clearer and clearer it became: There was a structure there at the very pinnacle of the spire, a sort of bubbled dome of glass.
Well, it’s a dry legend, my journey, all the lonely scrapes and struggles I had, but I got up there in the end. Now, I have the power of a god at my command. I breathed life back into this forgotten world, raised cities. My every whim was met, but this: opposition, fear, damnation. In becoming whatever I’ve become, I have no more good that I can do. I can’t struggle; I can’t fight. This contradiction arose: this ancient machine gives me all that I want, and the thing I want most is for there to be something I can’t have, to be told “No.”
So, it made you, my devil. It made you and the other thing and something more. It took those dark desires of mine and fashioned the beast you hate me for. It is mine, but I cannot stop it. It fashioned you and your little village, set you right in the pathway of the monster, making sure you survived with a few scars and a chip on your shoulder.
Now, there is this third mystery which it has done. As you turn my whole creation against me, this seat of power has begun to call out for its maker. I am—oh dear, but we see through that, now—we are a contradiction, waxing and waning, two sides of a coin, and this mighty machine has sent an error message out into the great silence which I once traveled. I have tracked what point in the sky it has gone to, and there is a darkness there, a shrouded nebula beyond my ken.
I cannot kill me, for you are only my dream, but I fear whatever may be in that unknown. So, I will fulfill my promise to you, when I walked with you to my storm haunted spire: Here is the ship I willed up to leave this planet before I knew what had become of my body. Go quickly, for the other thing which is us, the nightmare you blame me for, is also coming, and what it will do when it scatters my dried bones from this chair and takes the seat of God, I cannot tell.
Featured image produced by xAI/Grok 3
Tale Told 