igrab
in
grabi_hands
Φ Soul-Sick Medicine • Prometheus
Soul-Sick Medicine
Prometheus
I am like a machine
All that I really need
Is medicine and then
I'll fall fast asleep
It wasn't that people weren't happy, with their clockwork hearts and their clockwork life. Perhaps that was what it was, that they were happy, so they didn't know loss or pain or joy, not really. When their gears broke, they fixed them. When they broke beyond fixing, they made another in their image, and so the people ticked on.
He didn't know why he was different. He'd been made that way, he supposed, after a long line of Prometheus after Prometheus that was just a little bit off. Cogs loose, they said. One too many springs.
But his father had surely never done anything like this. Never cut through the mechanism, never ached in a way that gears weren't supposed to, never yearned. If Prometheus Senior had felt what Junior did, he would gotten out a long long time ago.
They were within, you see. The people believed that this, the clockwork world, was the entire world, that nothing lay beyond it. Prometheus wanted more. So he dug and cut, he turned the tools of his clockwork trade against the bricks and mortar behind the screaming sheets of metal, and when he clawed beneath it, he found a door.
On the outside, everything was blue.
Φ
When he returned, it was to panic and mass confusion. What could they do? What would they do? What was it that Prometheus held in his hands, that was so powerful it could change them?
Thump, it went. The color red seeped through brass fingers and stained the workings of the machine. Thump.
"Live," he whispered, and gave the people back their wet, sticky insides.
Φ
He came to know her as Eagle, though her wings were crafted of brass and copper and gold. He knew so much more about the world now, knew that the Mechanics were just a tiny insignificant coil in the massive clockwork empire. They wouldn't be missed. There were the Angels, with their wings and claws, who had freedom but could not wind their own springs. There were the Fauns, the Sprites; there were the Nymphs and Satyrs and Centaurs. They were all half-clockwork, half-flesh, and they could think independently, but could only go where they had been made to go. And there were the Gods. Larger than life, bodies of flesh but it was in their heads that their clockwork brains would tick, and the Mechanics had worked tirelessly for centuries keeping them well-oiled. They were nothing to a God; they were all clockwork and no soul, but Prometheus had set them free, given them one thing - a beating heart, and with it the power to choose.
Eagle would come every morning to rip his insides out, but he would only smile, and laugh, and watch fervent as the blood stained him red. I am alive, he thought. I will be alive tomorrow, and the next day, and for every day henceforth. You can take my liver, you can take my heart, but you cannot take my soul.
Prometheus
I am like a machine
All that I really need
Is medicine and then
I'll fall fast asleep
It wasn't that people weren't happy, with their clockwork hearts and their clockwork life. Perhaps that was what it was, that they were happy, so they didn't know loss or pain or joy, not really. When their gears broke, they fixed them. When they broke beyond fixing, they made another in their image, and so the people ticked on.
He didn't know why he was different. He'd been made that way, he supposed, after a long line of Prometheus after Prometheus that was just a little bit off. Cogs loose, they said. One too many springs.
But his father had surely never done anything like this. Never cut through the mechanism, never ached in a way that gears weren't supposed to, never yearned. If Prometheus Senior had felt what Junior did, he would gotten out a long long time ago.
They were within, you see. The people believed that this, the clockwork world, was the entire world, that nothing lay beyond it. Prometheus wanted more. So he dug and cut, he turned the tools of his clockwork trade against the bricks and mortar behind the screaming sheets of metal, and when he clawed beneath it, he found a door.
On the outside, everything was blue.
Φ
When he returned, it was to panic and mass confusion. What could they do? What would they do? What was it that Prometheus held in his hands, that was so powerful it could change them?
Thump, it went. The color red seeped through brass fingers and stained the workings of the machine. Thump.
"Live," he whispered, and gave the people back their wet, sticky insides.
Φ
He came to know her as Eagle, though her wings were crafted of brass and copper and gold. He knew so much more about the world now, knew that the Mechanics were just a tiny insignificant coil in the massive clockwork empire. They wouldn't be missed. There were the Angels, with their wings and claws, who had freedom but could not wind their own springs. There were the Fauns, the Sprites; there were the Nymphs and Satyrs and Centaurs. They were all half-clockwork, half-flesh, and they could think independently, but could only go where they had been made to go. And there were the Gods. Larger than life, bodies of flesh but it was in their heads that their clockwork brains would tick, and the Mechanics had worked tirelessly for centuries keeping them well-oiled. They were nothing to a God; they were all clockwork and no soul, but Prometheus had set them free, given them one thing - a beating heart, and with it the power to choose.
Eagle would come every morning to rip his insides out, but he would only smile, and laugh, and watch fervent as the blood stained him red. I am alive, he thought. I will be alive tomorrow, and the next day, and for every day henceforth. You can take my liver, you can take my heart, but you cannot take my soul.