Your story is a romance between a villain who considers doing the right thing and a boy who cries. The lovers experience lost knowledge and automated whales while in
The key was shaped like a ganglial nerve, which was fitting, and impressive, given its antiquity. I had inserted it with utmost care into the boy’s head through his bone polished ocular cavity and turned it once twice three times. The boy’s body had shuddered into life, twitching and spasming minutely, and I had sat back on my heels, waiting for signs of sentience, awareness, gratitude.
They were long in coming. I left him there, supine on his faded red velvet couch, the key emerging from the pit of his eye like a slender flute of bone, grimacing and flinching at phantasms I could not see. Instead I wandered his home, the vast subterranean cavern, the echoing ceiling distant and buttressed with wings of granite and pig iron. I walked amongst his inventions, not touched for over a century. Clockwork birds rusted into obsolescence. Simulacra of the galaxy, pleasingly inexact, which I set into motion with put a push of my hand. An oscillating set of mirrors whose function I couldn’t divine.
Finally I came to the dark waters that filled the rear third of his cavern, that heaved and lapped at the shore, opaque and warm and mysterious. An exit to the ocean, a tunnel no doubt in whose depths might languish a bronze submarine or other such wonder. The boy had been fond of exploring the
“Silica,” said the boy, his voice as sere as ashes. “Silica.”
I turned and regained his side. The key had begun to spin in his eye, and his face had gained composure. His remaining eye was focused on my face, though it welled with water that brimmed and ran down his smooth cheek. He raised his hand, and pointed to a clear cylinder of white sand.
I filled a tin cup with the powder, and handed it to him. Carefully, he sat up, tilted his head back as if it were hinged at the base of his neck, and poured the sand down his throat. He wasted not a grain, and closed his lips when the last of the silent cascade was gone.
“I had not thought to live again,” he said, turning to gaze at me.
“You have always been but a boy,” I said, “And never a man. Your life begins now.” I pushed him back onto his couch, his body hard and unyielding, artificial, the light in his eye flaring. I pushed him down, and swung my leg over so as to straddle him. Bending down, canting my head so as to avoid the spinning key, I kissed him and tasted dust and cinnamon.
After, I lay next to him, the cavern silent but for the quiet flux of the tide and the grind of his ever spinning key. I traced arabesque patterns across his smooth chest, and watched his face as he stared at the ceiling. He had cried until the last, his eye welling water, but now, at long last, when he finished, he had finished. Rank disappointment curdled within me. Dust not seed, and I knew that no life had been kindled within me.
“I remember catching a bird when I was young, taking it from the sky and spreading its feathers and parting its chest with my thumbs. Its feathers were as crimson as its blood, and I replaced its heart with a machination of my own devising. It ascended towards the sun when I released it, flew up till I could see it no more, a speck and then gone. I stood for twenty minutes upon the shore, waiting, and then I saw it plummet down and into the ocean. I swam out, but it had sunk and was gone.”
I continued to touch him, listening to his dry whisper. “I remember that, but not the face of my mother. I know how to bury a fox so as to avoid its revenge, but not how to create planetary gears. I can summon Pohludeo, but no longer understand why I should.”
“For me,” I whispered.
The boy arose and walked naked to the water’s edge. I followed. He extended his hand out parted his fingers in a series of fluid gestures. I stood by his side, shivering. A dull orange light awoke beneath the waves.
I had been correct in my surmises. The waters began to boil, and a great shape arose from the depths. It was of the darkest blue, a mineral color, cobalt hued, and it arose through some natural buoyancy, not through some mechanical motion. The waters sluiced down its flanks and flanges and it opened its great mouth wide.
“Pohludeo,” I said, staring at the great whale. A musty breeze swirled out from its hollow center, redolent of rust and mold.
“Pohludeo,” said the boy, and unbidden tears came again to his eye. “I journeyed far within him. Though I have forgotten I know I saw wonders through his eyes. I thought that through him I might effect change. I might impose my will on the world, and ennoble it. But I stumbled and kept my gaze on the ground, never lifting it to the heavens. I wasted my years…”
The waters surged and shifted around the pelagic form of Pohludeo. Its eyes caused shimmering ripples of amber light to play across the ceiling of the cavern. The boy turned from its vast face, and stumbled back to his velvet couch.
“I thought that mechanical hearts were more certain than those of the flesh,” he said, as he lay down on the worn cushions. “I thought that certainty was of greater worth than the pleasures to be found in the vicissitudes of life. There is nothing more certain than death, however, and so I beg of you. Release me.”
I stood over his hunched form, and swept my gaze over his toys of copper and his wonders of gold, all sheathed in dust, miracles in his time and but mere extravagant toys in mine. Had he been born but today, and not a century ago, had I been able to conceive his son—but no.
The boy turned his face to me, the key yet spinning, his eye blinded by tears. I considered him, and then laughed, darkness welling up within me to drown me within my own bitterness, and then turned to ascend once more to the world.
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