#artakha

He watched them, impassive.

From how close they were to him (they could have walked up to him; they could have turned that small distance to zero and stood directly in front of him; but they didn't. They couldn't. Something inside them couldn't. Something inside them wouldn't.) they could notice that one of his eyes was not facing them: it was stuck halfway upwards, forever gazing into the sky, while the other continued to stare down at them without so much as a glint of emotion. Despite having all the appearance of a mistake on someone's part, that strange physical quirk had not been fixed. Evidently, it was not an anomaly.

"Good." Artakha said.

His voice held no warmth, no anger, no grief, no bitterness. It was clear and smooth, like polished crystal, and wholly pleasant in its completeness. Something about it almost had them recoil and flatten as if they had been just welcomed into a lethal trap of a lair by the famished growl of a gigantic drooling beast.

They had not expected he would have come to greet them himself. He never had before, delegating his disembodied words and the mechanisms of his fortress to do such a thing for him. Yet this time he had taken it upon himself to walk away from his chambers, from the pristine faintly hued greys that snaked behind him into the deeper parts of his small realm, to stand before them as he did now; in their arrogance, in their hope, they had thought upon coming back to their senses after the surprise of truly seeing him that it must have meant something.

But his tone was calm and empty, a white room with carefully set pastel toys, an environment so quiet and sterile that it smelled potently of the dust it looked to have been blanketed in.

In a strange way, it appalled them.

"You have come back to me." Artakha continued.

His mask glowed softly, golden and splendid. The runes deeply hetched upon it made it seem beyond ancient.

Against the barely visible backdrop of his reclusive kingdom, the glimmer distorted the kanohi into the garbled image of a small, sickly moon, incapable of offering all that sat around it the full strength of the light it could barely reflect.

He did not extend his arms towards them.

"Come now." Artakha ordered passionlessly. "Your work is done."

Something about that shook them from the hazy torpor threatening to devour their brains in too small bites.

"We're here to help evacuate the inhabitants of the last remaining islands," Tahu explained, mortified that his voice was even leaving him and yet unable to place why he felt that way, "The robot's insides are not safe - besides, there's so much to be done outside, and we-"

"There is no place for us in that world." Artakha cut him off.

He had not moved an inch.

They knew instinctively, uncomfortably, that his 'us' included them too.

"Our only purpose is here." Artakha stated. "We are not needed outside the bounds of this body."

"But there is life out there," Gali argued, though the mere act of speaking made her bones want to crumble in anguish to shut her up: "There are people who need us, who could use our help! There is so much to be rebuilt, and all of us-"

"You were made for this world, as was I." Artakha interrupted her.

Their lungs shriveled.

Their bodies hurt.

He remained unblemished in the face of their visible agony, perfect and still; his skewed eye ignored them as it continued to watch the now forever dimmed heavens, hanging lower and lower each day as the metal holding them aloft bent under the weight of age and abandonment.

"There is no such thing as a 'life' awaiting you in that world of real things." Artakha told them. "We are tools to be preserved: if your service will ever be needed again by Mata Nui, I will allow your deployment once more."

"And then?" Tahu coughed. He could swear his arms were melting off of him.

"Then you will return to me." Artakha answered. "As you have done now, because that is your purpose, and that is your only existence."

"And yours?" Gali hissed. Her head felt about to split into a thousand pieces.

"My purpose is to remain here and create, and see that you are used well." Artakha answered. "It is my only use; there is nothing other than this."

He spoke with the certainty of a man off to the gallows, the kind who knows well no dashing stranger or loyal friend will come to save him, and who thus accepts the coming execution with the mellow tiredness that brings the cattle into the slaughterhouse; but unlike the convict marked for death he held no sadness, no despair in his words, no roaring blasphemies nor tear-soaked regrets, not even that drowsy desire for it all to be done. He felt himself not a victim, and not like a victim he spoke, for that was not what he was.

He spoke like a machine that knew why it had been made, and that its function was now unnecessary. There was no poetry about it, and there was no injustice either. The world had begun with duty, and with this new lack of duty it would simply stop to one day begin again: he had known it would have happened since the start.

He had been made to wait until the lack of purpose passed, to one day be put to work again.

But they could not accept it.

They could not, because they were not him.

They were not machines. Not fully. Not anymore.

"We can't leave it all behind," Onua said softly, because his throat was coarse and dry as though burning inside his neck, "We have our Matoran to take care of - our Turaga, too - our friends, our-"

"You have nothing but your duty and yourselves." Artakha corrected him.

They flinched.

"As I have nothing but my duty and my creations." Artakha continued.

Few were aware that he had no brother anymore.

They did not inquire how he had come in possession of such information: beyond their inquiry being a waste of time, certainly it had not reached him in the same way it had them. Like for his reason of existence he simply seemed to have already known, somehow, that his only kin's death upon return would have been inevitable.

After all, one does not keep a broken instrument.

"We're not complete," Lewa fought back feebly, struggling through the tightness that threatened to crush his middle into a jagged heap, "Kopaka and Pohatu - they are-"

"They will come to me eventually, as you have done." Artakha sentenced. "And in the most dire of cases, I will simply make them once more."

The weak glow of his mask sent chills down their spines and almost sent them to their knees.

He had said it so carelessly. Without any inflection, any intonation, any difference in his speech. His voice had remained polished and clean, sanitized, pale colors melting into a greyish nothingness as though the images he conjured through them had not been nightmares woven into song.

He watched them as they contorted and writhed in place as composedly as they could, still slaves to the stilling awe he commanded. He did not blink.

"How many times have you made us?" Onua wheezed. Dark spots stole the sight from his eyes.

"For now, once." Artakha responded.

They wanted to cry.

They wanted to scream.

They wanted it to be over.

"We can't stay." Lewa breathed. He felt only an impossibly wide, horrible, biting cold.

The waves rocked behind them softly, gently, anchoring them to their bodies and selves as they struggled to do so on their own.

He remained unperturbed.

"Come now." Artakha only repeated. "You are to be preserved in sleep: that is my duty as well. You overshot your time active - two weeks had been calculated as the maximum amount it would have taken for you to deal with any issue; after all that has happened whilst you were awake, I assume this will be a... Pleasant... Change of pace."

(He said 'pleasant' strangely. As though he was using that word only out of politeness, without intention, without understanding it. As though the very concept behind it existing was alien to him.)

Then he turned, and walked through the open gate once more.

He did not look back when it became clear no other footsteps would have followed his own; he did not stop when the heavy entrance to his realm closed definitively behind him and he found his fortress once more lacking his most useful tools.

He walked to his chamber, passing the Matoran he had been given across the millennia: they worked in thoughtless silence, as Matoran were always meant to do, some repairing the signs of age upon the floors and walls, some taking materials to their rightful places, some finishing up the count of this or that's inventory, more still tinkering away much like he'd long been used to - perfect clanging cogs of a well-oiled clockwork. Soon enough they would complete their endless work, for nothing else would be there to be done; only then they would stop, and sit, and wait, in a blank torpor that fools might have called sleep, in order to be ready to return to their duties when their toiling would once again be required.

He arrived to the room (not the forge, not for now) and stood before his useless throne; there he stopped, and sat, and waited, staring forth with one eye as the other gazed upon the ceiling in a vaguely aware torpor, patiently existing in a stasis borne of lack of duty.

He was ready to remain for ages.

He had been made to, after all.

But movement distracted him.

A crooked thing walked into the chamber, smiling.

He recognized not the vessel, but the neutral miasma which slithered from its mangled form: it wriggled through the space around him like larvae burrowing in prey, used to permeating every mind it touched, and only regarded him curiously when it found him impervious to the complex, confusing charm of its ever winding workings.

"You." Artakha said dispassionately.

The crooked thing stood before him, smiling.

"There is nothing in this world for you." Artakha stated simply.

"The toys belong to the box, the box belongs to the child, and the child belongs to the parent."

"Leave my realm at once." Artakha insisted without animosity. "There is nothing for you here."

"In the smith's forge the furnace is indeed king amongst the tools, but a tool itself nonetheless."

"I am aware of myself and my duty, my eternity." Artakha spoke. "You cannot impede my function."

"Of course I can!"

He stiffened suddenly; his neck bent under the weight of his head and his body sagged where he sat. His chest convulsed briefly, just enough to push a murky liquid through his crevices, coating his body in blackened rivulets doomed to dry out.

His mask laid cracked and half made dust where it had fallen from his face.

He did not move.