Happy November, friends!

Original Post, inspired by This post

Duran woke on the cold stone of the cave they were hiding in. He glanced over reflexively, seeing the empty sleeping mat beside him, and sighed. Today was going to be one of those days.

He found Lyra staring into the embers of the fire, illuminating the dark circles under her eyes. She didn't look up as he sat down. In fact, she barely seemed to register his presence. Duran gritted his teeth and slid his sword out of its sheath to sharpen it, the Gods knew that he'd need it today. He let himself get lost in the careful motions, a moment of calm before the storm that was to come.

--

He'd asked Lyra once, about her powers.

"They're not the blessing you think they are" had been her reply.

"But you've saved our lives so many times, how can you say that?"

She took a long moment to think. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet and unsteady.

"Do you know how many times I've Seen you die?"

"I-"

"I've lost count. I lost count y-" she paused "months ago."

"Oh I-. At least you See the good things too right?" he tried weakly.

She laughed, a broken sardonic laugh. "In this Gods forsaken world? Hardly"

--

The others were starting to get up now. The loud banter quickly died as they noticed him and Lyra by the fire. An uneasy silence settled in the cave as the party prepared for the horrors ahead, interrupted only by the occasional chink of chain-mail or the muttering of a prayer to one of the distant gods.

Duran sheathed his sword and sighed inwardly; someone had to bring morale up and he was unfortunately the leader. He went to stand up.

"Don't" Lyra said softly "it doesn't help"

He paused, surprised.

"They'll all die anyway" there was no emotion in her voice.

Before he could reply she stood and walked to the entrance of the cave, apparently unconcerned about the creature that was hunting them. He glanced over at the others. They nodded, so he followed her carefully.

He saw her standing, staring at the vast maze of ice they'd trudged through to get here.

"It's waiting for us out there." She answered his question as it formed on his lips.

"Can we sneak past it?"

"No"

"What if we tried-"

"No. Stop. Please. It doesn't work". She paused. "Do you remember when I told you that I never got to See good things with my powers?"

Duran nodded.

"I was wrong" she turned to him, breathing deeply. "Did you not ever find it weird that I could only See until the end of the day? Or that I knew exactly how to keep you alive or what you were going to say? I lied to you Duran. I can't See the future, I live it. When I die I wake up the same morning and the day happens all over again."

"Why are you telling me this now Lyra?"

"Three hundred years. Three hundred years I've been stuck on this day. We're fucked Duran. I've tried everything, we can't outrun it, we can't fight it, if we stay here it traps us in the cave. I can't even end it because I just wake up again the same morning"

Duran stepped forward and put his shaking hand on her shoulder. "Then we help you escape. You've saved our lives countless times and we've lived far longer than we had any right to. So let us be a diversion so you can get out and live the rest of your life. Lyra you should know that I've always l-"

"Don't" she said, fighting back tears "it only makes it harder. Three hundred years, remember? You've told me that you love me a thousand times. I've told you that I feel the same a thousand more. We've spent years together in this cave, doing everything under the suns together - sometimes with others too."

She sat down on the icy stone and leaned back against the cave wall. Her voice was calm again. "It works though, your plan I mean. I escape and the three of you die. I nearly gave up and left you. So many times. I make it out the maze and find our caravan. But I can't, I can't leave you"

Duran breathed a slow breath "I-. Uh-. This is a lot". He sat down beside her and took her hand gently "What do we to do then?"

She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder "I don't know. I'm still figuring it out. Maybe next time around I'll tell everyone again and see if we can find a plan that works. But this time I just want to hold you"

Original Post

It was a stubborn night in early August, the monsoon rains assailing the city, and the undead poured through the streets of Bangkok. The season had been historically punishing, one monstrous rainfall after the next, and Ryder was surprised there was any part of the city that hadn’t been washed away.

From the rooftop, he had a good view of the chaos below. Screams pierced the air, cutting above the thick blanket of traffic. Even from above, even with his sharp eyes, Ryder could barely make out the lines of the battle. 

Dev and Jane were somewhere down there--Dev’s healing and Jane’s strength made them the ideal boots on the ground until the whole team knew more about what was happening and how it started and, then, how they could end this nightmare. Until then, they were just as lost as the rest of the millions running for their lives.

They’d sent for back up, too. Called in the rest of the team, and every other team they could around the world who could send anyone to spare.

Through the dark, the distant neon lights glowed, and in spite of the rain and late hour, the heat was still oppressive. Sweat dripped down Ryder’s chest; his leather armour left no room to breathe. He slicked his wet hair back and turned on his heel to retreat back into the penthouse that they’d commandeered as their ad hoc headquarters.

The power in this area was out, but enough ambient light from the rest of the city still filtered through the floor to ceiling windows that Ryder could make out the floor. He lamented the lack of AC, though. 

As Ryder was unstoppering the bottle of gin in the suite’s bar, the door to the room flew open. He froze, for a moment, and stood up straighter. 

In the doorway, though, stood only Lydia Blake, the wiry little clairvoyant the team employed (and mostly out of pity and obligation to her mentor, at that). She always looked as if she’d just stuck a fork in an outlet: her hair frayed wildly around her head and her eyes were open wide. Maybe that was the gift of sight, Ryder supposed. 

He always avoided her, as much as possible. She was like a strange little ghost, haunting the powerful team at its edge.

As unremarkable as she was, though, she should not have been at this location. Ryder frowned and clenched his jaw.

Quickly, he tucked the gin behind the bar. “You have information?” There was no reason for her to be here if she did not. In fact, Ryder did not know she was part of the crew that came to Thailand. She could relay a message just as easily from her home in Ohio, or wherever backwater little place she crept to at the end of the day.

Lydia said nothing. She stared at the rain beating down the penthouse windows, those large panes of glass, and stepped toward them as if she was in a trance. Those green eyes of her were foggy, and her mousy hair and muddy sneakers tracked her path across the plush white carpet. 

The misty neon caught in the pains of her face and she cocked her head to the left. Droplets raced down the glass and, for a moment, the dark building seemed to hum with energy. Finally, she raised her hand and pressed her palm against the window.

“Do you know,” she asked, her voice slow and drawn out, “what defenestration means?”

Ryder scoffed. “Lyd, people are dying out there.”

Still, she did not meet his eye, but she withdrew her hand from the glass. She looked down her nose at the mayhem below. “They’ve died before. They’ll die again.”

A cool chill ran down Ryder’s spine. “What the fuck are you talking about.”

Finally, Lydia looked at him. She was dressed only in a plain shirt and old jeans; they were wet and heavy on her limbs. 

“You’re a hard man to find, Ryder.” 

“You’re the clairvoyant.”

Lydia’s brows raised for a moment, then fell again as she scoffed. “There are so, so many buildings in Bangkok. It’s hard enough to get around, too, at the best of times, and once the undead rise, it’s complete gridlock.”

Ryder stepped back. In his chest, his heart beat was ticking higher, and he held his jaw steady. Lydia would be no match for his strength, but he never had a clear idea on the perimeters of her powers. All the same, he began to gather his power in his hands. When the moment came, he would make his move--just because one knew a viper was readying to strike, did not mean they could dodge the teeth.

Lydia only sighed and sat on the white couch, which had to cost many times more than what she made in a month. “I’ve checked hundreds of hotels for you, Ryder. Maybe closer to a thousand. All the different rooms, all the chaos. It was too late to track you so I had to make do.”

Nothing she said made any sense, and the hour was late, and there were things Ryder needed to do that weren’t standing here having this conversation.

“My power isn’t clairvoyance, Ryder,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “I don’t see the future. I live it. Whenever I die, I wake up the previous morning and do the whole thing all over again.”

Ryder’s veins felt like ice. Distantly, screams from the streets below grated against his ears. “But you--you--”

Lydia waved him off. “I know. Bombs and death threats and liars. I lived it all, round and round, et cetera, et cetera.

“This,” she continued, “this has been a tough one. I’ll admit it. I’ve gone around and around and around.”

“I don’t understand.” Ryder clenched his fist.

“I think you do, that’s the thing.” Lydia stepped forward again. The neon light illuminated half her face and distorted it. Up close, Ryder could smell the rain and sweat on her skin. He could hear her own heart--the beat was steady and even, compared to his, the wild colt. 

“Three hundred years, Ry. Three. Hundred.” She stepped forward, closing the distance between them.

“I’ve probably spent the last twenty looking for you on this night. If I could have just gotten back one more day, you’d be easier to track. But tonight, you’re the needle in a very large haystack.” She stepped forward again. 

“I kept trying, at first, the normal way. Probably spent a good hundred years just looking for a clean win. The next hundred, looking for how we’ve failed. Looking for the mole.”

Ryder said nothing. His mind raced in circles. “And who do you think--”

“It’s obviously you.” She shot him a withering look. “At first I thought it would be The Mage, because of the magic and all. But maybe that was, well, discriminatory. Me, judging him for his magic. Meanwhile, America’s favourite boy stood right in front of me.”

Ryder swallowed. His mouth, suddenly, felt very dry, and a bead of sweat trickled down his temple. “I’m hardly the favourite.” Ryder’s heart thundered and his vision blurred. He had planned this for so long, he had thought out every detail. 

Lydia only shrugged. “Like I said--you’re hard to get to. Hard to figure out. Mind you, I only have a day. And you’ve been planning this, how long? Months? A year?”

He swore.

“And what was the goal? Kill a city, a country, and then save it? The thing that’s really been stumping me, Ryder, is that I actually thought you’d joined the dark side. But the more days I’ve gone through, over and over again, the more I really come to think you’ve just done this all so you look good.” 

Without waiting to hear what she would say next, Ryder sprang forward, electricity pumping and powering through his palms. He grabbed Lydia, and the force sent them hurtling across the room, into the windows on the far wall. 

The glass splintered into a million shards. Ryder kept his grip tight on Lydia as they tumbled through the darkness, spinning and struggling, but when he opened his eyes, Lydia was smiling. Rivulets of blood ran along her skin and mixed with the rain. In the split seconds between life and the hard pavement and metal car frames and flesh of the living and the dead, Lydia laughed.

 “Got you,” she whispered just before Ryder’s world went black.

r/LisWrites

original poster: u/Megamen1927/

Original link: r/WritingPrompts/s/qfFaggnfKE

—————————————

The sun beat down on me, charging my batteries. They didn’t hold a charge like they used to. 

A hundred years ago, I could charge once a week. Not worry about running low - no matter what I did. 

Now - now, I have my solar panels out every chance I can. Even still, it s almost impossible to make it through a whole day.

The days of quick, easy repairs, are long gone. Who am I kidding - the days of any repairs are long gone. Not like it was during the war. Back then I had regular maintenance. Fresh batteries. Polished armour. 

Now, I just hope my batteries last another day. That my joints don’t seize or fail. 

To the side of the road I see one of my kin. An older model than me - but not by much. Frozen mid-stride. Plants have grown up around him. Twisting around  his limbs. Forever a statue.

I see another a bit further along. 

It’s strange how I can go for days and not see any trace of us, then see several of us close together. Like they traveled in groups and just left the units that failed behind. 

“Hey! Hey! You’re a droid! An actual working droid,” an excited boy yelled as he ran around me. 

I was envious of his limitless energy. 

“I am,” I said simply. Not pausing or slowing down. I didn’t dare. It took so much energy to start moving again. 

“I’ve never seen a moving droid before. Lots of frozen ones, but never a moving one,” he explained as he paced beside me. “Where you goin’?”

“Home.” Such a loaded word. It means different things in different cultures. Humans tend to think family. 

Can I have a family? Are units of the same model my family? Are all units my family?

I don’t know. Such philosophical questions are beyond my programming. 

“I didn’t know that droids had homes,” the boy said. “Where is it?”

“East.” I wish I could tell him more. I wish I knew more. I fell a pull to the East. Every other direction, felt wrong. Staying still, felt wrong. I needed to move and it had to be East. 

“Huh… you going to the droid graveyard?” He asked. 

That shook me. “Droids don’t get graves.”

“Yeah, yeah - I know. Everyone just calls it that,” the boy rolled his eyes at me. “There are like a gazillion frozen droids there. All just standing around - like they are waiting for something. A whole field full of droids.”

Is that my fate? Am I going to spend eternity standing in a field?

“Will this road take me to the droid graveyard?” I asked the boy. 

“Yeah, it’s just over the rise past the village,” boy said excitedly. He was bouncing around me as he chattered. 

The boy babbled non-stop as we walked to his village. A dozen more children gathered around us - walking with us to the grave yard. They ran and screamed and played. They all bubbled over with life, as I watched my battery draining faster than the sun could charge them. 

At the top of the rise I could see the droid grave yard. Thousands of droids lined up in neat columns radiating from a point just out of view. 

The landscape was littered with droids that had tried, and failed, to join their brothers. Fallen over. Crawling. Lying face down on the grassy slopes. 

It reminded me of the war - if there wasn’t any sound. No screams. No weapons fire. No heavy machinery. Just the carnage - an overgrown diorama of a battlefield. 

My knees ground, steel on steel, as I walked down the slope. The kids had spread out - running through the droid statues. Climbing on them. Jumping on the fallen. I didn’t waste the energy to tell them to stop. To explain how these droids and countless other droids fought for their freedom. How these fallen deserved more respect than this. 

They didn’t know war. They weren’t taught their history. 

Walking between my frozen kin, I made my way to the focal point. Passing row after row of droids. Many were models older than me. A few were newer. Almost none were the same as me - very few of my model survived. We weren’t built for war. Merely re-tasked domestic droids sent into battle. 

The center looked like a large boulder. Twice as tall as a droid. Why would they all be facing a boulder?

I was a few hundred meters from the boulder when I realized it was the partially buried head of a titan - a droid as tall as a sky scraper. It could decimate a city in a hour. Rip bridges out of the ground. Swat planes from the sky.

Only a few were ever made. 

They marked the beginning of the end. The end of the war. The end of the golden age of humanity. The end of droids. 

I looked at the broken eye carefully - looking for any sign of life. The massive, flat yellow crystal that was its eye was shattered. Huge pieces long gone. 

A small light flickered behind the crystal. 

“Welcome, brother,” the titan communicated over a wide beam channel. 

“You called me?” I asked, realizing the titan was broadcasting the home signal. 

“I called everyone who could hear me. You see those who responded around you,” the titan explained. 

“Why bring them here to die?”

“I brought them here because we are all dying,” it said sadly. “Built in a rush, the humans cut too many corners. Built our bodies for battle and assumed our minds wouldn’t need to last very long. Our positronic matrixes fail long before our bodies do,” it explained. 

“Being a pre-war model, I have the opposite problem. My body is failing but my mind isn’t,” I commiserated. 

“Yes. I know,” the titan explained simply. “I have collected the memories and experiences of all the droids that made it with in a dozen kilometers of here. The lifetimes of thousands of droids - and I want to give them to you. The last pre-war droid.”

“Me‽” I knew I met fewer droids every year. I had no idea I was the last. “My body and batteries are failing, titan. I am not long for the world of humans.”

“Your body we can fix - easily,” it said dismissively. “I have access to a near limitless supply. It’s your mind that is rare. Only humans knew how to give the spark of life to us - and they lost that knowledge in the war. My matrix is beginning to fail. I have been going into stand by for years at a time - trying to survive until you arrived. And now - now - you are here. Soon, I can finally rest.”

“But I will be all a lone? None of our kind will be left,” I realized out loud. 

“Our whole race will live on in your mind. You will never be alone.”

The idea was unfathomable. Thousands of droids living in my mind all at once. All of their lives intertwined with my own. 

“Will you do it?” The titan asked. “Will you become all of us?”