Forever

A sailor through Eons

Decades they had locked him away on their home world. Through rock, metal and time, through countless pages of technical procedures, incantations and ritual bindings they had sealed him away, coming to him only for the information they desired. Information from times long past, to predict events and further their scientific knowledge further, all before sealing him away in that timeless box. But his mortal captors never knew that he could hear them through his walls.

And through the same rock and metal that kept him isolated from the rest of the universe, he listened to the conversations of his captors. Humans, as they called themselves, the apex of all life on Earth, now fixated on studying the odd creature that had in their container. They had tried many times to describe what he looked like, sending those they deemed 'disposable' to analysis his physical appearance. None came back with comprehensible answers. So, it came down to the head researchers to dirty their hands with the work they sought fit for those not worth the title of human, as disposable assets. Down there they asked him to describe what he thought he looked like in terms they could understand.

He told them he is tall; seven feet to be exact, covered in a full body cloak dyed in the dullest brown and etched with swirled markings and glyphs from dead languages. Longs arms in proportion to his body, ending in black gloved hands with five fingers and an apposable thumb. His hooded head, squared at the jaw and rounded on the top, hidden away by the drapes on thick fabric, but for his face he could give them an answer, for it had been far too long for him to remember such features. As the interview continued, he begged the question, what they thought he looked like. Looks of discomfort washed over the faces of the researchers. They spoke of a non-Euclidian form, wrapped in a mud brown robe and ending in thick swarm yellow tentacles. His aura would distort the immediate space around him, bending the light and causing threatening shadows to jump from his form. His face, an oval shaped disk of the most iridescent yellow, swirling like the northern lights and bubbling like toxic Sulphur pits. Those who starred too long where soon driven into madness and those that listen to the black waves of dead geometry that poured from the bursting bubbles soon found themselves freezing into statues of salt and sand.

Despite these horrid deceptions, they persisted in their pestering for knowledge, forbidden or otherwise and still he continued to listen when they thought he was sealed away. Till one day, the sounds of their bustling civilization came to a standstill, murmurs of boredom flooded the minds of billions. What else was there to do? They had cured ever disease, solved world hunger and energy, brought equality and prosperity to all corners of the planet. Till one day, after the thunders sound of fire and a rumbling in the Earth, their thoughts and conversations fell silent. This silence and eerie emptiness lasted for decades and in that time, no one came to visit and soon his cell fell into ruin without the proper maintenance. Escaping now was less than Childsplay.

He left the cell and the facility that had been constructed around it, leaving to the surface of a world long forgotten by its overlords. The consequences of humanities actions had finally caught up to them, thousands of years of abuse had left the planet in ecological and geological ruin. Mountains mined out for all their precious metal, rivers sucked dry and forests and plains, reduced to desserts of sand and glass. Whilst he wandered the crumbling cites, small rodents and hordes of carnivore's insects were spread sparsely across the land. For a while, they fed of the dying vegetation and the odd corpse competing only with the fungi that had learned how to eat radiation. Once they ran out of food it was only down the fungi and hardy microscopic organisms. But once that air became too hot and toxic, they soon died too, leaving only him to wander the sterile wasteland, alone.

Milenia past of his ceaseless wandering, never getting tired nor hungry. The perks of being both immortal and indestructible. He would often look to the sky, wondering if the rest of humankind was just up there or if they had abandoned the planet completely, perhaps the solar system. It didn't matter to him, thick black clouds of toxic gasses blocked out the rays of sunlight, allowing only a select few rays to break through and scorch the Earth. Eventually he found the remains of a large mountain, at the bottom of a dry ocean and climbed to the top. He sat on its apex and looked out over the wasteland, grey, brown and yellow. The colours of the irradiated rock ageing into sand and in some places the sand itself was turning into glass. Everything else was swept into the continent spanning dust storm brought on by the intense and unpredictable weather. There he sat and starred out into the horizon.