This Project Is Not A Rational Love

They say she’ll be a princess in a mechanical marvel of a tower, that's the running joke at her farewell.

But of course she was chosen for the job when her graduation project spread wings and took flight, never to come back because no one and no thing could demand when it soared. Her piece was freedom from the ground and the maker, reborn in metal and magic. A self-sustaining wonder. They praised her for it, and she earned it, because she worked herself to the bone for her creations like all true gods do; out of whole-hearted love, a fierce obsession and the bright lure of greed.

They offer her the job of maintaining the monolith of mechanics that strides across the land, seeding the weather under these ever-dark heavens. It’s an incredible honour, but more so a challenge she accepts. She’s packed in an hour and sets forth on a two-month journey following the shaking ground and gaping footfalls speared into the earth, chasing the sun blazing out of a glass cage high above the land while natural weather sits dormant, dead.

Not a single person says, so explicitly; you are a sacrifice, now bleed for us.

It's a different world up in the air, tucked into the cozy hollow of a behemoth’s eye socket, surrounded by the bulbous glass sphere of a head and the most magnificent mechanics ever formed by man, monster or god. The first time she laid hands on the engine, she wept. For it was so beautiful, it hurt that she had not seen it before. Wasted years, empty years without this, and her previous memories became shaded in hollow colours of before this glory.

The earth heaves as the monolith's massive strides eat up the ground far below her. Long, long legs expand up, thickening into armoured plates to hide the hydraulics, and narrows again after the hips, tapering to a peak where the head sits. No arms on the towering torso, none needed. No mouth for why would a being so perfect need to speak to be heard, no ears for what would it listen to but the whispers of the atmosphere, no eyes for where would it look except for up, up, up.

No brain, for thoughts are a mighty, dangerous thing.

Instead, its head fills with the artificial weather and people pretend the real sky isn’t a dark abyss. She likes the swell of the storm, a seed of a thrashing hurricane contained by the perfectly smooth glass. She is protected from the cruel winds outside, but if she rests against the glass, it burns cold, a muffled roar that vibrates through her bones. It’s a violent beauty but still the tamest magic she’s seen from it.

The rains make her wary, the way it sloshes through the sphere like a crashing tide and the strides become a stumble. She sleeps in the hips those days to the hiss of rain on its skin, the hard metal of her tools clutched to her chest, waking every hour to check and double-check the runes on the feedback circuitry. She can’t sleep anyway, not with the fear of her goliath falling and lying at rest with its failed brethren as if it was nothing more than metal to rust.

The snow is a freezing threat that has her panting up and down the spiral staircase of the spine, dragging the heft of a plasma torch to defrost the mechanics. Her legs burn from the effort but her mind is filled with an echoing blizzard; nothing but a desperate need to keep the magnificent structure powered even as she withers.

The bright heat of the sunny days has her as far down in the legs as she can get despite the motion sickness, but she’s still sweltering in the burning metal cage. The radiation she feels on her skin as an invisible pressure is a lingering thought in the dead of night, wondering if she will fall, still clinging to melting wings of wax and the betrayal of a creation. But at least Icarus still flew, and what else would she call this feeling in her chest but flight?

Her monolith is indeed a temperamental thing, as all works of art are, always something breaking or broken and she’s so exhausted with fixing it that it leaves no time to be improved. She has ideas of course - passions, experiments, dreams. That's fine though, she's used to the bone-deep weariness, injuries happen when working with tools like these, and magic is a fickle thing. It needs to be coaxed, the battles well-chosen.

She lost days of sleep for her final graduation project, until her vision swam with shadows, and for this she would do so much more. She joked about being a princess but she loves so much, so fiercely, so violently that she feels less like a princess up in her tower, and more like the dragon guarding her hoard.

This project is not a rational love. They hardly ever are, with someone like her. And not for the first time does she think that she was chosen not for her technical skill or art, but instead because she is so easily lost in the beauty of a thrashing hurricane.

She is not the only worshipper. Far down below, people follow the footsteps in nomadic, serpentine lines or run alongside clifftops to try and meet its empty eyes. Crops cycle in tandem with the pacing across the earth and she sits above it all, legs dangling into the swaying drop below. She feels their joy too because something this impossibly incredible should be shared, but the first to take a pair of bolt cutters to the legs is the first person she’s ever killed. And she doesn’t even have the decency to hesitate.

She shakes and sobs that night, pressed deep into the eye socket she calls home but thinks about stepping right off - and the next day dawns the most spectacular sunrise she’s ever seen. A brilliant array of hues seep out of the glass dome and into the sky, reaching right over the horizon. There is a rainbow cut across her skin and death is not the worst thing she would do for her creation, this love, the obsession.