the garden within the wasteland

Mary wails

At the past of a hundred years, lived a boy smart and strong, yet this child was cursed at birth, a disease that overtook his body, changing and infecting his skin until he appeared more monster than human. Only when he was attired with his armor was he allowed brief humanity.

Across the land, far away from any settlement or sign of life, was a battlefield—a battlefield with no end goal of victory, only survival and stalling. In the distance, not far from these crooked and cracked dry fields, stood the great boar, the metallic liberator, a symbol of peace and a new age by men long forgotten, for citizens long dead. The machines of this beast constantly spewed out mindless, primal machines. Any man who dared to journey towards the great beast did so out of pride. "To be the first to bring the Enkidu to its knees" was the dying thought of many, many soldiers and adventurers. The deer god, as rumors say, had been too frightened to send out his own champion and too sickly to go himself, for as she stared into the battlefield, she saw many, many corpses—of warriors carrying curved blades, of groups with firearms—all of them shot, trampled, and exploded by the endless legion of machines. She began to ponder a question himself. she stood atop whatever empty spot of land was free of any blood or body parts and thought,
"How do I even reach it?"
She looked over to his left.
"What do you say? You think I can break into the Enkidu if I try?"
She was talking to the thin air as it breezed by her white hair. After a brief moment of silence, she nodded, her pinkish eyes piercing the distance. All that was returned to her gaze were the endless machines and countless dead bodies in the distance.
"Really makes you wonder what happened for them to reach this point. I mean, you should, right? Why won't you say?"
Again, silence—nothing but silence—as he began to walk towards the machines, stretching her arm back, reaching for her blade, a tall, rugged blade made of copper with steel guards tipped at the ends with gold. A blade that had seen countless lives on the battlefield, crossing with humans and machines alike.
"I mean, you say all that, but it's not much of a response, is it now? You know, I traveled into this battlefield. Mistakes of the past will repeat in the future. If I can know the past, I can predict the future."
She stopped dead in his tracks, lowering her posture, quickly covering behind a pile of machines stacked atop each other, each one destroyed and damaged, left here to rot.
"You don't see it over there?" she responded, peering his eyes over the pile, observing a small machine. It marched ever so slowly, with massive buckets for arms it dragged behind it, struggling to keep moving. It was a small, tiny machine. Each part of its body, aside from the buckets, was made of small blocks of steel compared to the regular machines—the "marchers," as they were called. The machine continued to waddle slowly and clumsily towards a group of deactivated marchers, and the machine began to cry, mourning the lives of its machine brethren—lives they never had, or more likely, lives they never owned. The small crying machine began to scoop up whatever remained of the marchers—metal, all the fancy wires, any recyclable parts.
"Yes, yes, I know. If you're right, then that crybaby will lead me to the heart of the beast—at least the entrance."
Mary Wails stood up, her blade strong and prepared in her hand, ready for the worst as she approached the small machine. Her attention quickly shifted to her left side, her body twisting at the slight sound of an engine revving up in the distance. She quickly dashed away, heading to a massive misplaced rock, barely dodging the gunfire chasing her. The bullets reached her shadow and barely missed her before she finally got out of the machine's sight.
"What was that? You have a better view than me."
The wind began to howl and roar. Mary placed her blade back into the sheath as she began to nod.
"Alright, alright, keep an eye out."
She readied herself and dashed fully, moving right and right. She glanced to her left, viewing the machine in its might. A hulking machine with the stature and posture of an ape, it had six gaping holes all over its face, each one periodically opening to puff out smoke. The massive bronze machine hunched over, slamming its left hand to hold itself up. Its right arm, the arm opposite Mary, was not a traditional arm like its metallic, heavy left hand. It was a gun—a tall, massive machine gun still smoking from the previous rounds of fire. It turned towards the woman, its movement slow and bulky like the turning of an old gear. It couldn't move its gun arm towards her, having to carry its body towards her yet failing to catch up with her speed. She reached for her blade, ripping it out of her sheath.
"LET'S GO!" she cried out as she slid down towards the machine, slashing her sword across its chest, causing it to stumble backward, revealing the machine's organs of electronic points and wires and that ever-bleeding fuel. She then harnessed her body, rolling to the left.
"NOW!" she commanded again as she got back up, moving away from the machine.
On the left shoulder of the machine, a body began to form—the ghastly image of a knight covered in pure metal armor. The body of the knight was transparent, and his existence constantly wavered from left to right slowly, in a calming pattern like the swing of a clock.
The figure quickly grabbed the barrel of the machine, materializing only its gauntlets. It placed pressure on the barrel, causing it to malfunction and explode. The explosion led the machine to fall to its knee, half of its body destroyed by the blast of its arm.
The ghastly figure floated backward to the back of the machine.
"Look, Miss Wails, the name of the machine is listed as a model 12-20 'Comforter.' Curious, isn't it?" The knight's voice was orotund; he took all the correct pauses and breaths, as if his voice would belong to the royal courts instead of in a knight's armor.
"Great call on the arm gun. The bot didn't have a chance, did it?" Her voice cleared up now outside the battlefield. It sounded honeyed and quite at rest as she slowly placed her sword back.
"We should find shelter quickly, Baldwin. My skin is starting to burn," she continued, not a sign of worry within her voice.
"I told you to pack an umbral, Miss Wails," the ghost knight named Baldwin replied snarkily, with a massive, untold "I told you so" hanging in the air the second he stopped talking.
Mary flinched as the machine sprang yet again to action, quickly crawling away from them.
"Is that machine running away?" asked the knight.
"It isn't," Mary replied flatly as she watched the machine rush towards the hunched-over, blocky machine—the crying machine that had been hunched over, now in a ball, terrified like a small child left in the forest.
The "comforter" now leaned over the crier, protecting it like a wild beast would protect its child.
Despite being half-destroyed, its armor to protect the machine remained strong.
"Pathetic," Mary Wails sounded out in the same flat tone as she continued walking towards the machine, readying her blade once more.
And in one slice to the exposed wires, the machine stood no longer.
She kneeled over to the crying machine, still letting out that gravelly recorded crying sound.
"You will lead me to the gates of the beast, or there will be nothing to recycle of you. Alright?"
The machine looked up, its pure black eyes staring at the woman like a stray dog or kitten begging for a home. It began to nod its head before springing up, its entire body bolting like a spring. Its head began to twist around until it sounded a loud beeping sound.
"MISS WAILS, FALL BACK!" cried out the knight as he rushed towards her, attempting to grab her.
However, Mary quickly realized and dashed back as the head of the machine let out a massive bang, detonating itself, the machine having been executed for its crime of treason.
"They thought of everything, didn't they?" she replied, disappointed.
"All that was for naught. Let us find you shelter for your skin as of now, Miss Wails. We'll travel at moonlight."
Mary took one last look at the distance, observing the one overlord of this land—the massive metallic beast as it roared.
"It ain't going anywhere anytime soon."