The Last Golem

The Last Golem

Prologue

Part 1: The time before Fel Na’Daa

            It had long been accepted that life on earth began in the ocean. It was thought that the complex creatures we see around us like cats, palm trees and elephants are all descended from the very first life form which came into being deep in the black murk of the ocean near some boiling, mineral-spewing chimney. While it is true that the vast majority of the life forms most people interact with were and are the offspring of that single, courageous cell, the claim that it was the first thing ever to live on the planet Earth is absolute and complete nonsense.

    Almost five billion years ago, a very large chunk of rock smashed into the Earth by completely random chance. Most of the debris from the collision was flung far outside the Earth’s gravitational field of influence. Some of it, however, was not cast quite so far and eventually, the rocks came together to form our moon after spending a long while floating about in orbit of the earth. On that chunk of rock was something very, very unique. A quantity of matter that, when colliding into the Earth at many thousands of miles per hour, was fused with the rocky crust of our planet. Supposedly there was so much energy in this lucky collision that something extremely curious happened to that extremely curious matter. It came alive. Boom. There it was. Consciousness. Intelligence. Without any organs or cells to speak of, there was life on Earth.    

After a long while, the thing which was now alive sat up. It had arms and legs, a head and a chest. It looked around. It even had eyes. It was nearing sunset on the young Earth and the sky was a dark and deep red. The sunlight that filtered through the billowing haze of ash and dust was dim, but the featureless landscape was still visible. The crater formed by the meteor spanned far beyond the horizon in all directions, and still many hundreds of miles beyond that. The ground was thoroughly cracked and glowing an unenthusiastic cherry-red hot. It had been just under a week since the meteor struck, which had given the thing time to figure out what was going on.  It had taken it two full days to learn that it could move and soon found that simply knowing that it could move was wildly different from knowing how. When it had eventually figured that out, it sat up, took in its surroundings and stood. It was just over eight feet tall, very stocky and somewhat stumpy. Its body appeared to be made almost entirely of the same rock it had just pried itself from, with the exception of two things. Firstly, it’s eyes, which were perfectly round and green, and glowing with an intensity that was neither dim nor fierce, were very deeply set and heavily browed under the rocky overhang of the being’s frown. Secondly, were the two blunt projections which were barely breaching the knobbly surface of its head, near the top and towards the front. Where the being’s body was bumpy and formed of many individual small rocks, the antlers were something smoother and slightly glossier. They were thicker than those of a deer, but not dissimilar in texture.

Although the creature knew nothing and had no reason to want to move, it felt far within itself only a deep, intense curiosity. Its mind was a sponge, empty and hungry. So far it had learned that it could see. It saw the land tilt and sway when it moved its head. It saw the sky change from black to orange to blue to red to black time and time again as it lay on its back in the days after its awakening. It knew it could hear. When it shifted its hulking body, the low grinding rumble of the stone within it immediately filled it with a profound satisfaction. It knew it could smell. When it stood up for the first time, it detected a change in the air. It became noticeably fresher, and lighter. It had not yet discovered its ability to sense heat, as all it had felt so far was a constant, tame warmth from the ground, though it was actually radiating hundreds of degrees. Along with the discovery that it could move came with the discovery that it could feel touch. It realised that it had a body, and could feel the ground beneath it. It then promptly noted that it could not feel the ground a number of meters away, and so learned that he was separate: a distinct entity.