September 21 - A Crack
Deep underground, far deeper than most would ever dare to tread, lies an ancient and powerful machine. It’s a machine wrought from gritty sandstone and cold-forged steel, sparkling gemstones and intricate gears, countless mechanisms pushing and pulling and twisting and turning on one another, in perfect harmony, to achieve its purpose. Of course, nobody knows what its purpose is any more. The Ilkin tribe knew, once, but the new generation simply never bothered to learn the machine’s function. Nobody from the tribe had ever used it, and it had been many years since someone had even delved deep enough into the cavernous spaces beneath to even see the thing.
But despite this lack of knowledge, the machine continued to exist. Even in its dormant state, gears spun, belts pulled, stone crushed, and gems shone; it was constantly performing some unknown task. An important task, probably, for why else would those ancient generations long since passed have built it? If, of course, they even did build it. Perhaps it simply appeared one day, fully constructed and carved from the landscape beneath. It may have been divine intervention.
The machine, though, had a flaw. After going so long untouched, neither maintained nor cared about, it developed a crack (more of a stress fracture, really) deep within its indecipherable components. And this crack would grow, until the gear it was on simply snapped in half. And this, in turn, would wreak all sorts of havoc with the eternal undulating rhythm that the machine has maintained for all this time. And at this point, people would have undeniable proof that there was something deeply wrong and broken with the world, though they would never suspect a crack in a deeply buried machine to have broken it.