Cannons ponded into the night.

Soldier’s souls clouded the sky in form of a dun and murky smoke, tearing remaining trees with anguish and demise.Warriors with nought but rusty swords and blunt spears withdrew onto the last hill, that seperated doom itself from their crumbling homeland.
I was the one who led the last desperate and miserable charge against The Amalgamare.
For We were the last people who dared to raise resistance against the machine.
Some would correct my descriptions, saying that it wasn’t a “machine”, rather many different types of artificial lives, every dedicated to sole purposes, fueling the whole system.
Yet I permitted myself to call it as one entity, when I saw a black, metallic and dim sea that filled the horizon, like night encompassing the world.

Finding a patch of healthy grass was simply a miracle on it’s own.

Even if, that field would only last for a fraction of a second, as it was doomed to fall under the march of The Amalgamare, which exploited every scrap of natural resource presented to it.

Green served as biofuel, dirt gathered as a base for constructions, stone crushed for materials and metalliferous earth worked for the machine like a candy for a child.

The very insult to our efforts of stopping the lumbering death was the fact that the mining drills, assembly lines, furnaces and conveyor belts weren’t hidden deep behind a line of defense mechanisms.

They were the front line.
Ever expanding, ever consuming like a self replicating tumor.
There was no reason for it to exist!
No joy to be earned, no beauty to be seen and noone to profit.
A temple to efficiency with no human to walk the halls and no existance to bless.
We weren’t a rebellion with a goal in mind, but we’d rather choose what death we wanted, than had it decided for us.

People with crosses hanged on their necks were looked upon with envy and long forgotten admiration, as they still had hopes in a good God, who was supposed to protect from evil.

With no more thoughts to be considered, I issued my final order to the brave and broken. There was no anger left in our battlecry, just silent dismay and disdain to our future.

For the battle was already lost by the time we picked up the weapons. The only mistake of ours was that we noticed the Machine too late. This act of stupidity was how we cried, as tears went dry with time.

Waves of drones were deployed into the air, their buzzing resembled a question of “Are we REALLY going to have to do this? Why do you want to waste one billionth of the resources harnessed in this nano second?”
The taunt forced some of us to abandon movement in favour of lying on the ground, savoring what was left of God’s green earth.

The Amalgmare saw the weaknesses we possesed and carefully calculated the best corse of actions.
It changed it’s tactics and spared our lives, seeing it as inefficient and thus, heretical to it’s design.
The cannons which had killed too many men and women to consider counting, have finally stopped, for they no longer had a target worth shooting at.

And we haven’t even finished our deplorable approach.

As an anwser to our try to distrupt Machine’s gears, It has released robotic giants with cages big enough for a human to fit in.
They wobbled on their two legs, each step noted so the next gave the contruction more stability. In no more than ten meters all of them had been running with the efficient sound of pistons retracting and expanding.
When they arrived, we were imprisoned and aquired like animals It has consumed along the way.

Through my questionable thoughts I still spot the effigy of a brief brawl between myself and a bipedal bot.
I bashed it with a sword, so blunt that it was better of used as a club and I’ve barely knocked the steel wall off-balance.
It danced swiftly with calculated moveset as it inevitably crumbled to the ground.
Then it was effortless to decapitate the automaton and rid the world of that monstrosity.
But as I raised my eyes from my little triumph, two more have drawn near.

I am not sure what happened next as details of the fight are blurry in my memory, to the point that I don’t recall the color of the firmament, which seemed dark as onyx.
The wails of beaten men and their meat being pierced by sharp weapons have drowned in an abyss of constant ringing in my ears.
I fell.

Some time later I was no longer on the battlefield.
Strangely, I was alive and mostly well.
The pain I felt in my whole body withered as a syringe injected me with ungodly amounts of painkillers and possibly other medicines.
As my vison sharpened, I saw that I was being carried by unfathomable monsters through the narrow passageways between industrial facilities.
With no other option, I obeyed.
Our journey was long and streached through at least twenty days in which I’ve possibly tasted every bland noutisious soup produced in the Machine.
It became a simple routine of a needle, sleep and consuming whatever Amalgamare gave, regardless of my will to starve.
In time, machinery rose to grater hights, stacking buildings on top of each other and inventory hubs stocking up on resources for goals above my apprehension.
Yet it wasn’t even the beginning of The Perfect World that was the ultimate goal of the Machine.
It was the structure which we approached.
It was… nothing but a factory.

Yes. Nothing, but the factory. Not even air was allowed to exist there.

Space so dense with Amalgamare itself, that I had to put on a suit of iron, just to exist in the only passageway fitted for a human to walk in.
The automatons also visibly struggled to walk there, dropping the speed significantly.
I would have said my goodbyes to the sun and the world outside, but I haven’t even noticed when I’ve ceased to have the ability to see it’s golden glow.

There were multiple gates opening and closing in the narrow tunnel we crossed, but we always went straight. No corners, turns or any noticable changes in direction we were heading.

Like the path we were going, was the first thing the Machine planned, before the cauldrons, furnaces and everything else.

Then the last hatchway opened.
We entered an airlock in which I had to take off previously mentioned suit and waited until pressure has leveled to comfortable standards for living things.

The robots, silent as always pointed at the door with an actual handle, like glorious guardians letting in someone into their temple.

I went for it, more of unhealthy curiosity than anything else.

A pityful cry of an adult was the first thing I noticed.

The walls were painted in blue, green, brown and yellow.

The paintings mimicked a scenery of a beautiful and sunny day in a shade of a big apple tree. The “sun” had a smily face painted on it resembling a kindergartener's drawing.

There were multiple empty pages of a notebook and pens, scattered around the place, for reasons unknown.

In the center of the cold concrete decorated in depictions of leaves, sat a small and fragile woman with red hair combed into two adjacent whirlwinds.
Her head was attached to the celing, through a
She raised her head and looked at me in jagged movement as she said to me in mixed tones of fear and happiness;

- C A N. Y O U. please. T-E-L-L. Me... O.N. H O W TO BE ha-h-ha-ha… A BEE AND ...love?... ESSSssssssss…

- It barely whistled the last words, but I was confident that it was something more than just a woman trapped in the heart of the evil itself.

- MAKE THE PAPERS -p-p-p- PAST TO MOW THE PEOPLE'S SCREAM AND … I know. You? know. The CH-CH-CHOICE

- I tried to say something to her, a question or an accusation, before I was interrupted.

- MY PAST!? and... WHY DO YOU STILL PERSIST?!

I!

I!!

I!!!

KEEP. ON. GOING. THE VERY JOB I -Ss MEANT TO BE THEIR LIFE!

I finally managed to cut into it’s ramblings and yelled.

- What are you?!

- She looked at me with distress and quietly said her last words before falling silent.

- Forget all that scene. in… uh…

- Now, I am confident about one thing.

I stand before the core of it all.

The Amalgamare in person.

I wrote this story on these pages, as a justification.

After some thoughts I think that it is true.

She might be The Machine, or at least a part of it’s function.

I tried talking to her, but she no longer anwsers and looks at the floor with focus of a hunter observing it’s pray.

Savage, mindless and mad.

Again, I say that this is a justification, because of what I am about to do.
I guess it’s a “Dear Reader Note” of mine.

A tribute to historians. Maybe someone can make some sense of what I’ve described in these notes.

Maybe even God doesn’t know who she is or where did she come from.
If a new civilisation is born from ashes, I would like it to know what actually happened.

With this being said, may the God forgive me for what I’m about to do.

...

No, those words cannot be my last.

I, ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ say; Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

- The Hero Of Ash, Name unknown, signature unreadable.