Stone Man

2/24/2017  - I was taking a little rest in the late afternoon, in between asleep and awake, and this bizarre vision came to me.

 

 

Stone Man

 

 

                It was another world, a place of endless desolation. The horizon was made of beige dunes, sand hills, and canyons further. The sky shone perpetually blue, for this was a world where it never rained. Amid a low valley, a column of hundreds of people was marching. From the nearby ridges I followed, careful to hide. The people seemed to go willingly, but at the same time they were being made to advance by another power or purpose I could not yet understand. There were men and women, young and old, dressed in civilian clothes; quite a few of them rather elegantly. Many conversed, some laughed. I realized they had not yet seen the danger. They had been deceived.

            As the journey neared its destination - a place on the girth of a low, barren mountain - I noticed more of them were being treated as prisoners, for there were now overseers that did not allow the march to slow. These beings were incased in black armor, and held whips in gauntleted fists. Thus far they had not needed to employ their whips, save occasionally. Mostly, the people continued walking of their own volition. I wondered if there was anything alive in these overseers. Intuition told me they were hollow machines, imbued with a strange breath of consciousness. 

            It became clearer to me then that this entire world, wherever it existed, was hostile. As of yet I could only sense it, like a sky you cannot see - but there was a dark mind, or vast form of consciousness, that reigned over this world. I do not know if it is something that could be found. My impression regarding it was that it was like a colossal machine, running mostly automatically, though with a willful, cunning sentience. The machine-mind was in charge of everything: the overseers, the desolation, and horrors that fueled its engines which  maintained and fed it power.

            By and by the columns reached their destination; an enormous metallic, roofed complex that extended from the hip of the mountain. It had no walls, only monolithic pillars of steel. In the shade here, at the center, was a circular opening in the ground, roughly thirty meters in diameter. Along the concave contours inside were slight protrusions of stone, and spikes. Beyond this, everything plunged into absolute darkness.

            The people being marched to this place had grown to the thousands; indeed, I fear the columns never ended, like a steady river. Approaching the mountain they realized their folly and would have resisted, but it was too late. The overseers whipped them, herding them like cattle towards the pit. The men and women fell in by the dozens, wounding themselves on the rough and sharp protrusions as they fell. There were those who resisted at the ledge, yet were hurled forth by the powerful metallic overseers. Many tried desperately to cling to the protrusions, nevertheless these efforts lasted a short while before proving futile, and they fell into the abyss with the rest, floundering and wailing into shadow. It struck me that some of these victims were so drunk, drugged, or blinded by their preoccupations with earthly endeavors, that even as they descended into the blackness of the abyss they failed to realize the final gravity of their plight. On and on continued this progression of people towards their doom.

            Even in the dark, my vision followed them as they fell. It horrified me to behold that the further they descended, most turned gray, and their eyes a sickly glowing green. A macabre un-life was overtaking them, body and soul. This was truly a purgatorial world.

            But who was doing this? And for what sinister purpose? All I knew was that there were huge, negative forces organized to control this realm of desolation, but that these were ancient beyond my understanding. A great deception was at work, bending everything to its will.

 

            Years past after first I witnessed these events. Living on the peripheries, hiding from the tyranny, I discovered that there were those who had survived the fall into the abyss. These few were forced to work as slaves in barren reaches controlled by the machine-system. They would be subjected to incredibly arduous work, such as digging, shoveling, hammering, hauling enormous weight of rocks and other minerals of importance, and pushing giant revolving levers, over and over. During their toil the metal overseers were ever present, ensuring the captives work unrelentingly. Scores perished over the course of years, but some endured. I came to learn of the story of one such individual.

            This man suffered the most difficult labor of all, and was beaten countless times by the overseers, struck with heavy cudgels as he cowered by walls, or while falling to the sand, on hands and knees, then curling up, helpless. He should have died, more than once. Yet, despite these thrashings, he would always eventually stand again, and force himself to continue with the slaving labors.

            One day, after much time had past, I saw this man with my own eyes. He was in a small valley that was part of the imposed labor camps, and he was kneeling amid the sands. Slowly, he unfolded and rose to his full height. He was no longer the same person; he had become lean and muscled, and taller than average men. What shocked me most was that his very skin had transformed. All the blows had hardened him, and his exterior was now likened to a rough layer of extremely strong ochre and beige rock. I knew the weapons and pain that had been brought against him before could no longer do him harm.

            He looked ahead, towards the horizon. When I saw his blue gaze, I saw that he was no longer afraid. Although he was not yet free, he had already become a new creation, more powerful than other mortals, perhaps even indestructible. It was as if destiny had shaped him, hewn him from the hardest rock, into this being. Because of this new power, I sensed the future, and understood with certainty there was a purpose he was going to join himself to. The exact details I do not know, but there were others who would need him, those who seek to resist the machine-mind and its order of desolation that rule this world. Soon the man of stone was going to help them in their perilous efforts to bring down this mysterious nemesis. He would use his strength to become a breaker of chains.

 

 

 I was beginning to dream the rest of this when someone knocked on the door and woke me up