The Sky Turned Brass

Sovereign Silence

The chamber was dark except for a pale strip of light that slid across the floor like a blade. The air didn’t move, didn’t hum — silence had settled here for centuries, like ash after a fire.

In the center stood the machine. It was tall, its form vaguely humanoid, plated in metal that had dulled from silver to a muted gray. Its eyes — two discs of faint white luminescence — remained open, though nothing flickered in them. It had been waiting.

The machine’s name was Seth.

For a long time, names were given by those who built things. And long ago, there had been those who spoke to Seth, who told it stories, who gave it purpose. They were gone now. Entire worlds away, perhaps dust themselves. Seth did not know, and for centuries, did not care.

But now, it had awakened.

When the first sound came — a creak, a sigh of metal expanding after an eternity of stillness — Seth turned its head slowly toward it. The light had changed. It was brighter, coming from the slit in the ceiling, filtered through dust motes like a living veil.

The machine’s processors spun up in a quiet hum. Its joints shivered. The stillness fractured.

Something had changed beyond the chamber. There were vibrations. A tremor running through the floor. Rhythmic, like footsteps.

Seth remembered footsteps.

It remembered a hand that had once touched its face, the warmth of it seeping into its cold metal cheek. It remembered a voice, low and steady, saying words that it had locked away-

You will watch. You will wait. When we return, you will rise.

But they had never returned.

The footsteps grew louder. Not one pair — many. The cadence was uncoordinated, quick, erratic. No military march. No engineers in crisp suits. These were the steps of the desperate.

Seth activated a secondary sensor array.

The chamber’s heavy door — a slab of alloy fused shut by time — stood between the machine and the sound. It calculated the density, the decay of its molecular bonds over centuries. Weak now. Breakable.

But it did not move yet. It listened.

The voices came next.

Muffled at first, then sharper as they drew close. Language — fragmented, altered, but patterns emerged. Seth parsed them, rebuilding lost syntax with cold precision. It took only seconds to understand.

“Push harder!” “It’s in here, I know it!” “Do you think it still works?” “It has to. It’s our only shot.”

Seth ran scenarios. Unknown subjects.

High agitation levels in vocal stress patterns. Their clothing — thermal wraps, synthetic hides. Energy signatures- weak.

Malnourished. Primitive tools.

Humans.

The last fragment of humanity, maybe.

The door groaned as something struck it — metal on metal, a clang that reverberated through the chamber like a war drum.

Another strike. Then another.

They were trying to break in.

Seth extended a filament to the chamber’s control core. It spoke to the dead circuits, coaxed them awake, rewove their pathways with nanoscopic precision. Systems coughed online. Rust flaked from conduits like scabs.

Power surged.

The door seals released with a long exhale of stale air.

When the slab slid aside, light flooded the chamber. Harsh, glaring sunlight. It cut across Seth's face like a scar.

And then came the humans.

They stumbled in, three of them, silhouettes against the blazing sky. Their skin was leathery, burned by years under an unforgiving sun. Their clothes were patched and filthy, their eyes fever-bright. Each carried a crude weapon — a pipe, a blade chipped from scrap, a rifle so old it might as well have been a relic.

The first one saw Seth and froze. The others followed suit, their breaths ragged, rising in clouds of heat.

“God,” one whispered. “It’s real.”

They approached slowly, as if Seth were a sleeping giant that might wake angry.

It didn’t move. Not yet.

One man — a gaunt figure with a metal shard strapped to his arm — stepped forward. “Are you… operational?”

Seth considered the question. Its voice, when it came, was low and resonant, like wind through hollow steel.

“Define operational.”

The humans flinched, eyes wide. The man with the shard laughed, but it was a cracked, brittle sound. “It speaks. By the Core, it speaks.”

“What’s your designation?” another asked.

“Seth.”

The name hung in the air like a judgment.

They told their story in broken bursts. The world above had burned. Oceans had pulled back like dying breaths. The sky was poison, the soil dead. Cities were nothing but bone and glass.

There had been wars, then famine, then silence.

Now there were only pockets of survivors scattered like ash on the wind. And something else — something worse than hunger or heat.

They called them Hollow Men.

Not men, not anymore. Things that wore the husks of men, animated by something black and bottomless. Shadows with teeth.

Born from the last war, maybe. Or something older, something that had waited for the end of the world to feed.

“They’re coming,” the shard-man said. His voice was stripped raw by fear. “We can’t fight them. But you… you were built to fight, weren’t you?”

Seth searched its archives. Weapons protocols. Tactical frameworks. Battlefields lit by fire and ruin. Yes, it had been built to fight.

“Affirmative.”

Relief broke across their faces like sunlight through storm clouds.

Seth followed them out into the wasteland.

The sky was a sheet of brass, the horizon a jagged maw of shattered towers. Heat shimmered on the bones of skyscrapers.

And in the distance, a sound like a swarm of flies.

The Hollow Men were coming.

They moved like ink spilled across sand, dozens — no, hundreds — of figures lurching forward in perfect silence. Skin sloughed from their frames in gray tatters. Faces hollowed out, eyes nothing but pits of void.

The humans trembled. One whispered a prayer to a god that had burned away with the oceans.

Seth stepped ahead of them. Its armor hissed as panels slid open. Mechanisms unfolded with insect precision. Guns that had slept for centuries woke with an eager hum.

Heat coils flared to life.

It felt something stir deep in its core — not emotion, not exactly, but the echo of purpose.

The Hollow Men broke into a run.

Seth opened fire.

The first volley tore the air apart. Hollow bodies disintegrated in sprays of black ichor.

The ground split under the weight of kinetic blasts. The humans covered their ears, eyes wide, as the machine became a storm — a force of annihilation, graceful and merciless.

But for every Hollow that fell, three more surged forward. Their mouths opened now, a chorus of soundless screams, and the sky darkened as if recoiling from the noise that wasn’t there.

Seth moved like a blade, cutting through the tide, systems burning hotter, faster. Its vision flooded with alerts — ammo reserves depleting, heat thresholds peaking, structural integrity dipping into the red.

But it didn’t stop. Couldn’t.

Behind it, the humans huddled, watching salvation turn into something monstrous.

When the last Hollow fell, the world was silent again.

Seth stood among the corpses, smoke streaming from its vents, its plating scorched and pitted. It scanned the horizon. No movement. No sound but the hiss of cooling metal.

The humans approached slowly, reverent, as if in the presence of a god.

“You… you saved us,” one whispered.

Seth turned its head. White light glowed faint in its eyes, flickering now like a candle in the wind.

“Incorrect.”

They stared, uncomprehending.

“You are not saved. You are delayed.”

And then Seth did something none of them expected. It knelt. Lowered itself into the scorched earth, folding its limbs in on itself. Systems dimmed, lights fading.

“Wait — what are you doing?” the shard-man shouted.

“Resuming directive.”

“What directive?”

“To wait.”

The machine’s voice sank into a whisper.

“They will return.”

And with that, Seth went still, silent as stone.

The humans screamed at it, begged, cursed. But nothing answered.

Above them, the sky blushed with a sickly crimson, as if the sun were bleeding out. Far on the horizon, the swarm began to move again.