A Journey Of Death

A Message of Death

If I could speak of this species to any still living, they would undoubtedly believe that the very power they wielded was the end of them, the flaw to their existence.

You would be wrong to assume this.

The Xif were unlike any else.

They had no wars to dominate and control, no blood spilt to see whose interests came first, no tears shed as a loved one goes to another. The Xif, for all the power at their touch, accepted each other completely, all the good and all the bad, understanding it was within them just as much as it was in another.

It was the disease, that marked the beginning of their end.

I would like to lie to myself, to believe it was their time, that this was a natural happen-stance, one destined to be. But I know better, they were being reintroduced too a belief they had overcome, with aid from a hand that mimics my own, just like the one I am using to write this record of them.

I lament at my powerlessness still. I blame myself for not intervening, for not attempting to save them. But it is not my place to spare life, as it was not 'his' to take it.

They started to die, slowly at first they dropped from their great mountainous homes and streams of cascading waters that poured into the heavens, enrapturing the skies. Like soft rain they fell, their greyed bodies swaying in the oceans they once controlled as their planet grew dark, their power useless before that of the death that came knocking.

To their credit, and my honour to witness, the Xif did not fear, they did not despair and never swayed in their beliefs. They acknowledged instead, that this was to be their end. They embraced this grim sentence with clarity and thought, with piousness and grace, never once bearing hate for the fate that afflicted them.

I wish that their story simply ended here, but to my regret it does not.

Their was a further end that awaited them, the death I was due.

Understanding that it was their time the Xif set about a final stand, not of confrontation but hope, an ideal they passed through one another.

A message. A record.

In a calm frenzy the Xif moved, collecting together they travelled through the now wild seas and skies, ignoring the remains of their dead as they fell, never pausing to offer thoughts or to fix once great sights. Flying past the Xif watched as their towering peaks crashed and sank, their previous achievements reduced to rubble and waste. The aerial roads they carved into the skies dissipated into nothingness, their was a greater cause to be completed. Even as the final remnants of their species carpeted the ground with death they devoted the last of their energies to a monument, a dark monolith of jagged stone, one that towered above any mountain. In the heart of this mountain sat the final Xif, his breathe dwindling, his body fatigued and craving the rest already granted to the others. With a simple smile the Xif were no more, all that remained was a monolith and a small stone tablet, coated in a dense matte of letters and runes, embraced in death by its last contributor.

This was the message of the Xif, a lasting record of their existence. A stone tablet engraved with their image, depicting and describing their history, their knowledge, containing all of their learning in the hope that it would one day be found and learnt from, so that they could live on in mind if not body.

And so i waited.

I sat atop their mountain, created to guard and protect the tablet against time itself. Seasons and years passed like a breeze, rolling one after the other, each clearing out the last. Landscapes were torn and remade as the once tamed seas rose and fell, the sun itself morphing as others appeared in its wake, and yet still the mountain stood strong, resisting even as time wore away at its bulk.

I questioned why I remained atop the mountain, fore I had seen the death of the Xif, what more was their for me to see? I never considered the death of a message, that of their hope, for it is not alive. But who am I to make such a statement, when I am not alive, never once have I tasted air or felt it upon my form.

Eventually life began anew as another species grew to haunt this planet.

Slowly, almost inconsequentially when compared to the Xif this species grew. Where the Xif could control and reshape the planet at will this new species scrambled in dirt and fought one another for the tiniest morsels of flesh.

They did not deserve to find the hope of the Xif.

But find it, they did.

With barbaric and crooked hands they carved through the great mountain, riddling and pitting it like an illness, scrambling through its vast body, tearing through rock as they savaged its remains. By chance a group of this disgusting species found the heart of the mountain. They spared no time in preserving or honouring the last of the Xif, of its figure long reduced to bone as it hunched even still, the stone tablet gently resting off the ground beneath, as pristine as the day it was finished. In an instant they charged, seeing the foreign bones as an unknown threat, the stone tablet just another rock.

Now the pull was gone, this was what drew me to this planet. Not the death of a species before their time, but the death of their hope, their message that strived to reach out and last beyond that of deaths own grasp.

The stone tablet was drawn from the mountain, dragged into a light it had never seen, exposed to a time vastly different to its own.

It saddens me to recall what happened next.

The true end of the Xif.

Raised high the tablet was praised for its strength, for the strange patterning that ran along its sides, the pictures that it depicted seen as nothing more than natural formations, dirt that ran along its edges.

With a crack the tablet was broken.

Hope no longer remained, how fragile it is.

I can only presume that this new species believed the tablet to be special, that it contained some treasure inside, fore they struck again and again, reducing the tablet to nothing but dust that was stirred and carried on the wind, already forgotten by the hands of its destroyers.

Only myself and death knew the true treasure that it was. But what use the language of the Xif if none remained to understand it.

Why is it that a mountain and a message can stand against death for generations, only to be felled by such simple hands? Hands unable to appreciate such a legacy as they rewrite the past history with their own. It wasn't with a somber mind, but anger, that I left this planet... perhaps one day I would return, only to see a new history unaware of the previous.

I cannot help but wonder... what can I leave behind?

If I cannot die then what use is a record, a message to leave behind when I will outlast all who read it. Am I even living now, all I do is perpetually follow death. What use is a journey that never ends if you cannot stop and rest, if you cannot share what you have learnt.

What does that make me?

The Xif, at least, could leave a message of hope to be remembered by, the only message I can leave is that of death, but even that message is not my own, as none will know I was their.

I... have no choice but continue this journey...

Otherwise... I am nothing but a shadow standing behind death.

And none can see past death.