For as long as any could recall, the city had always been there. To wonder what there could have been before it, or even whether there could ever have been anything at all, was an idle waste of time at best, and a sign of malfunction at worst. All one needed to know was that the city had always stood on what might once have been recognisable as the moon's soil, and that, despite its immeasurable age and the withering decrepitude that seemed to have been spreading through it like some sort of inorganic disease since it existed, it would remain standing for longer than any could imagine. So ancient was it that it seemed natural that it would endure as long as the moon it covered, for, after incalculable centuries of being as one, they could very well be considered to be such. Walls might crumble and collapse, unattended machinery might melt down, shatter or break open, contaminating the empty skies with its lethal exhalations, time-eroded pillars might crush lesser structures under their fragmented bulk, but the city’s supply of yet-intact buildings seemed inexhaustible.
In truth, one could wonder whether it was a city at all, at least in the sense of the word familiar to most creatures capable of speech and coexistence. Few recognisable traces remained of any civilised beings having ever inhabited it, located in narrow, sparse pockets, and it was difficult to conceive what sort of entities could have found themselves at home in such a cramped, almost oppressive environment. However, more difficult still it was to imagine what other purpose the great conglomeration of towers, stratified pathways and wells could have served. The goal of whomever had built it was clearly to provide as much space as possible, divided into uncountable layers, grids, sectors; what could all these units, individually diminutive and outright insignificant if compared with the surface of the moon as a whole, have functioned as, if not neatly organised dwellings? There could be stranger theories, of course – holding or containment cells, storage for extremely exotic and peculiar objects or materials, millions of factories shrunken to an incredible extent – but few of them could be substantiated by what evidence lay scattered in the ruins, and fewer yet did not require an exceptional effort of the mind to consider plausible at all.
Regardless of its purpose, if it had indeed ever had one, the city hurtled blindly through the black void of the cosmos, and lived. The things that moved between its walls, over its highest pinnacles and in its innermost depths, were not akin to the ingenious minds that had designed it: many of them were just as blind and heedless as the city itself, forever running errands no voice had commanded and tending to lives that were not there; others were dim and brutish, no more capable of complex thought and speech than the inhabitants of Gabriel’s oceans or Solomon’s jungles, and surviving by force of that primal cunning and adaptability that had enabled their ancestors to thrive ages before; others yet were lost in bizarre activities, the meaning of which had faded away centuries since. And then, there was them.
They were perhaps not as old as the city, but might have rivalled some of its none-too-late developments in age nonetheless. When the shadows of vertiginous spires were not yet ubiquitous on the moonscape, they were already watching and waiting; and when only the dilapidated husks of the great towers remained, they watched and waited still. Gradually, their experiments and innovations grew too radical and numerous to contain, and spilled out from the darkness of the world’s bowels into the open. As their lair decayed around them, parts of it were modified and rebuilt in strange patterns, while others were arbitrarily abandoned to the rot that seeped in from the surrounding city. Their eyes crawled about in the desolation, seeking something known to them alone, while their hands worked ceaselessly in interminable cycles of improvement and replication. Over thousands of iterations, they had become no less alien and unknowable as they had first been set forth into the world, but had instead refined their inscrutable nature, creeping ever closer to an ideal their creators, whoever or whatever they might have been, had, perhaps unknowingly and perhaps not, strived to attain. Whether there were, or had been, any others like them or not, they did not know, and, truth be told, it was none of their concern; they knew what their goals were – at least, the immediate ones – and how they should go about in reaching them, and they required no more.
What it was exactly they did, no observer could have been certain. Besides bettering themselves to accomplish their tasks, they were clearly constantly occupied with the latter; but the assiduity of their toil could not have shed any light upon its essence. They carried materials from and into the deeps alike; they scurried about in halls of humming engines and grinding mechanisms; they festered in corners and alcoves, and oozed through aimlessly winding corridors; they writhed and twisted in waters no sun had ever touched, and where sightless creatures writhed and twisted alongside them; and none of this hinted at any overarching, universal purpose of their doings, even though such a purpose doubtless existed, as there could have been nothing else to keep them in motion. But this did not concern them, as they knew what they did themselves, and that was all that was necessary; and, all the while, they watched and waited.
Lord Zee
Cyclone