Rust (Prologue)

A snapshot of the barren heartbroken wasteland, and the birth of a story.

Rust

    
    It swayed and groaned, wallowing in the echoes of its own scraping metal. Centuries of tension and twisting from the weight of time and gravity bent the bones and struts into the coarse sand in an unholy bow. It was lonely, it was bitter, it was in pain. The wind whistled through ancient, ghostly arches like a rattling breath in a dry lung. At nights when the storms came it howled and clawed its way deeper into the dead earth, alone in its desperation, desperate in it’s loneliness. It had been over two hundred years since anyone had settled within the now skeletal walls and chambers, and it would not live a year more.
    Saints and kings had once filled it’s halls in its early days when it was made of stone, angels and prayers had filled the rafters of each room in watchfulness. Since then they had replaced it’s heart and hallowed foundations with metal; lanky, spider-like, spindly, ugly metal. Every beloved, chiseled detail was now a chaotic cobweb of disgusting steel.
    They had replaced everything with it. The surface of the planet became an exoskeleton of jutting, nightmarish reanimations of once historic and marvelous landmarks. It was not sleek. It was not modern. It was not polished. It was bare metal, unfinished, as if it was some sort of natural resource torn from the wilderness.
    The storms started, and the world rusted quickly.
    The now empty halls groaned in defeat as the structure gave way to collapse. A thousand years of life came to a slow, earsplitting end as the diabolical metal reared its ugly head and leap onto itself in angry suicide.
    No one witnessed or mourned the death of the scrap mass that was once the Notre Dame Cathedral. No one told stories of its former splendor, or cried at the loss of something irreplaceable. The wind did not stop howling, the sky did not stop crackling, the sand did not stop slithering. When it breathed its last shuddering breath, something else awoke.
    It stirred gently, softly, barely aware. Overhead the tempest and the atmosphere continued on maniacally, indifferent to the sound from deep underground.
    A small sound.
    An insignificant sound.
    A ticking sound.

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Author's Note

More so here to set tone and establish intrigue.
Talk to me.