#I gave the Element Lord of Sand a name and she's illegal on iOS now. Bad Joke.

[gavlaoflightandshadow]

My (bad) submission to @malwarewolf-mocs fic writing contest. Its the first fic I've written in like, a decade, and its actually my second go at writing something for this contest. Got 2000 words into the first attempt before I realized the plot was going nowhere and made very little progress for at least a week so back to the drawing board. Anyway here is the Great Being's Plea to the Lord of Sand, or the One where Velika Bends the Truth a Little (a lot). Please don't be gentle.

“I come to you today with bittersweet tidings. My long exile, my journey of 100,000 years , has at last ended, and I have returned to be amongst my people once more, but my return comes at a terrible price. I bring with me abominations, cursed beings, unalive, yet walking as though they contain the divine spark, treading upon our once shattered world. How did it come to this?

It began with the destruction of the Tribe of Iron, torn apart by a plague of madness, dreams stolen by a creeping illness. At least, this is the story you were told, Harena, but it is not the whole truth. It was not a sickness that destroyed our Iron kindred, but a being from another world, a hungry spirit of woe, she devoured their wishes and left their minds scarred and twisted. We found her, deep below the ruins of their village, and when she attempted to feed from us, she found our minds…unpalatable. We dreamed in ways she could not understand, so instead we fed from her, propelling us to heights we could not have imagined. Greedily we drank from her well, and from our studies of this being we created great things, and from our creations we gave gifts to the people of this world. We extended our lives far beyond the limits of evolution, enhanced the gifts of nature, adapted our people to their environments that they would flourish. The Agori looked to us for our wisdom, and called us Great Beings, a title we wore with pride. This was the height of our power, and our hubris shown brighter than the suns.

You know, of course, what happened next. We grew tired of the adoration and responsibility of rule, so we created you, the Element Lords, to lead in our stead. Our energies fully turned towards creation, we became blind to the crude matters of the world, until ‘it’ was discovered. Our salvation and undoing, the miracle. Energized Protodermis, strange matter, capable of creation or destruction, seemingly at whim. We learned the true power of destiny, and as your war raged, and our attempts to mediate peace failed again and again, we set to work on what was to be our greatest creation, a Great Spirit to restore this world following its inevitable doom. We were powerless to stop the Shattering, but we would make it right, that we swore.

The Great Spirit. Our noble work. My greatest failure. Overcome by curiosity, I decided to observe the great machine from within, transferring my mind and soul into the body of a Matoran, dim reflections of the Agori, biomechanical automatons tasked with the work of keeping our creation alive. What I could not have foreseen was the effect of my presence. These machines, never meant to be more than drones, began to feel. Abominations, perversions of our grand design. Have you ever wondered, Harena, what would happen if the grains of sand that make up the form we gave you came to life? I now know the answer to that question, as our plan to heal this world nearly became its final doom.

Mata Nui was created to restore life, and so we designed him approximate a living being, though at many orders of magnitude greater a scale. Energized Protodermis as his blood, Matoran as his cells, and like any living being, a vulnerability to disease. To protect him against cosmic ills, we created guardians to act as his immune system. The Toa, taken from the multitudes of Matoran, and changed to be more like yourself, and at the height of his health, thousands of them roamed his colossal body. These beings now walk openly upon Spherus Magna, our home. Imagine it, Harena. Armies of warriors, each imbued with the power of the elements, marching across the desert. The Agori and Glatorian would stand little chance in the face of their onslaught, to say nothing of your own people, regressed and primitive as they have become. Foreseeing the threat such beings would pose, even before the construction of the Great Spirit was complete, I devised a countermeasure. A being of protodermis, everything they were, everything they could never be, encased in armor blacker than the firmament, bound by protocol and precepts, tasked with the destruction of these Toa. I created salvation. I created Marendar.

Marendar, the ultimate enemy of the Toa, my greatest creation. Another failure. Surprised? While I journeyed through the stars, trapped in my cage of living protodermis, my brother remained here, on what was then Bara Magna. Angonce, his judgment always outweighed by his “better nature”, his mercy and sentimentality. He was unwilling to simply let Marendar carry out his duty, and instead chose to meddle in my designs of salvation. He gave Marendar a spark, turning him from a glorious tool of my design into yet another protodermic abomination. When Marendar broke free of his own prison, it was not the Toa that brought him low, but a Turaga of Stone, once a Toa himself, now bereft of his great power. With words as his weapon, he wove my creation a false tale of heroism and hope, of imperfect, broken beings, of legends never meant to be, and corrupted his precepts. Now he wanders the desert alone, guarding the dunes. He stands with the Toa as their “brother”, as though beings created as they are could even begin to understand brotherhood, the bonds of family and tribe.

The Toa and Matoran are not the only dangerous beings to have emerged from the decaying body of the Great Spirit. Some I have already dealt with personally. First was Tren Krom, Mata Nui’s predecessor, and the reason all of our later creations were flesh and metal combined. Then fell Karzahni, created to repair and maintain the Matoran, driven mad by his own incompetence. I attempted also to eliminate his counterpart, but in my Matoran form, without the advantage of my opponent being either insane or fatally naive, they were able to elude my attacks.

I can sense your confusion now, as the being that stands before is not one of protodermis, but of flesh and bone. It was a simple enough matter to uncover one of my old laboratories, even buried beneath a hundred millennia of windswept sands. Luring a Vorox to my lair was simpler still. You needn’t look so enraged, Harena, I did not subject the poor fallen creature to the same fate as I suffered. After swapping my Matoran form with his own, I shattered the mask that served as my face through these many centuries since the Shattering, and stayed with him as his bestial snarls faded. He did not die alone, and if I have my way, he will not have died in vain. I will admit, however, that his form did not entirely suit me, so I have made…improvements to the original design, so to speak. The fight ahead will require strength not found in the common desert dwellers.

I am sure you wondering why I have told you all of this, recounted the mainy failures of me and my brothers and sisters, the faults and follies of the Great Beings. The answer is itself a question: who truly deserves to stand tall on our home made whole, who have lost more than any other? The Matoran have lived for millennia in a paradise, and what has happened to your people? To our people? Have you not suffered enough? Have the Vorox not suffered enough? Even now, your lieutenant gathers his warriors in the north to march for the wretched nest of these usurpers, do they not deserve a mighty general at their head? I ask you again, who truly deserves to rule the dunes, to hold sovereignty over the trees, and to be guardian over the seas? What I ask of you is simple. Harena, Lord of Sands, Queen of the Vorox, will you join me in ridding our world of that which doesn’t belong? Will you help me commit them to grave? Will you not take that which is owed to you?”

The Great Being fell silent, eyes fixed upon the mass of sand upon the worn throne. Slowly, the mass coalesced, a torso, limbs, a bladed tail emerging from the dust, red eyes burning behind a spiked mask. The figure rose from the throne without a word, and knelt before the fallen scientist-king.

“Velika,” she said, in a voice as dry as the Barrens she once ruled, “tell me what must be done.”