DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Breck recited The Last Rites of the Calton as the lander made impact.
“To wander upon–”
The lander shook and hissed in decompression. Breck muttered his way back to the beginning. When you lose your way, choose the origin over the fray, Elder Moorst had said, his face awash with firelight.
But Breck wasn’t at the beginning, and he was about to head straight into the fray. Fytorion was a planet of clockwork giants, their clocks never winding down. Enigmas to the Order, these giants were said to possess an esoteric wisdom rumored to hold the secrets they needed. For what?
“They,” Breck said, testing the oxygen wafting through his respirator. Who were they? Veiled in more than dusty cloaks in their cobwebbed hold, where the climb had nearly killed him if not for the moon’s guidance. Where a memory was locked inside a fall.
Breck inhaled synthetics that reminded him too much of home. That smell wouldn’t do him any good here. Soon he would smell his own blood. A suicide mission they’d sent him on.
“They,” Breck said again, tasting it.
The lander’s hatch panel stared at him. A cinder. Glowing. Emotionless. The only light in the cramped space. The guts of the lander hung from the ceiling in hoops to trip him up. He shrugged off the one perched on his shoulder. It sprung back up, elastic but hefty, an arterial conduit demonstrating the fragility of its design. He touched his armored midsection where his own fragility lay. The irony wasn’t lost to him as he punched the panel’s button.
The hatch opened. The ramp thundered onto the surface, hydraulics weakened from the change in gravity. The fog it had disturbed already rolled back, even crawling up, likeflike, sentient.
Brek thought he’d cut the lander’s tubes and read the entrails as Elder Moorst did in secret, locked away in his tower. As if they’d know the riddle he needed the answer to. As if he could read entrails.
The wind will carry it to you upon the Fytorion surface, they’d said. Wielded by fingers of frost.
Breck studied the fog walking its way up the ramp, finger by finger. He unsheathed his plasma sword and cleaved the tendrils before they reached his boots. They dispersed, revealing the pocked surface of Fytorion.
The panel’s button burned his retinas, then his neck as he looked away, so he set foot upon Fytorion. A sky so dark it had no depth shrouded everything. No stars. No moon. A complete darkness that–
Breck rolled out of the way just as a mechanical fist rammed into the surface. The ground fractured into a shower of rocks, and he fell through it, the ice stones biting through his armor. He shook them off before they reached his armor’s hex membrane. He ran until he could see stars. Another fist landed. Another. How many arms did this thing have? He looked up to see firey eyes glaring down at him and heard the clockwork mantra said to turn bone to ice.
Breck found the warning was accurate, his feet locked to the surface as a hand the size of his lander barreled at him with digits spread. He swung his blade to a flurry of sparks. Gravity relented. The ground fell away. His boots dangled, and his cape beneath them. Then pressure registered around his torso as stars flickered through gaps that could only be the space between the fingers of this giant.
He breathed in a scent unlike home through his ruptured respirator as what mixed with the oxygen seared his nasal passage, his lungs.
Then the canopy of stars was complete. He found his footing. All he could see, all he could feel, was a metronome. Full of whirrs, clicks, and shudders.
Breck shuddered. Wavered on his feet. His sword and shield counterbalanced him. A network of cables fragmented his view, and he went to touch one. The movement set him off balance, and he fell forward into the web of cables. As thick as his arms, his legs.
He was righted again, by that great hand, which hummed with the life of the body he stood upon. Within that chorus of life, he sensed an anomaly. A hitch in the tempo.
Two furnace eyes gazed upon him then, housed within the visor of a helm as pocked as the icy ground. They burned the color of an exit. Of a fire upon an old man’s face. They burned like the moon that had guided him. But one too many.
Breck’s chest was exposed, his respirator in shreds. Yet he lived, warmed by these two fires that sought to destroy him. To whisper doubly his demise.
The head turned, extinguishing the two fires, and Breck was faced with the a wall of coils, thrumming with the anomalous song of . . .
“To wander upon the song of the gods . . .”
The giant’s fingers lowered to its neck, parting the cables to expose a cylindrical enclosure where lightning danced. A cadence unlike the others.
“. . . to rend the bottled lightning, which would ink the map to salvation.”
Breck stood poised with his sword, ready to finish the task that had come too easy. A mountain that had carried him to its summit. A path fraught with false dangers.
The giant’s finger prodded him. Breck sheathed his sword.
“No,” he said as hands came down in a blur, gripping the head.
Breck leaped aside and caught one of the sagging cables to slow his descent, then more wedged behind a joint. By the time he reached the ground, he couldn’t feel anything, and gave in to that emptiness.
Breck woke to a fire. A single fire. Within the visor of a helm pocked like the surface he lay upon.
He approached the giant’s severed head and its single eye, which looked like a guiding moon above the hold of conspiring men, where the answer to a riddle had been locked in a fall, now set free.
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