The eerie tones of the orchestral piece massage my ears like the caress of a lover, and despite myself, I sigh contentedly. Here, at long last, I experience something like happiness, if one can call it that. I've long come to realize that my emotional organization is quite alien to that of most other living beings, but "happy" seems like the right word. I'll stick with it.
The music is ancient, and the recording somewhat crackly with age, but I love it all the same. It's a tiny piece of my only real link to the galaxy around me, and not for the first time, I regret that I couldn't have been there to hear it on the day it was first performed.
I can appreciate it, but in truth, to claim it as my own is a lie. For better or worse, I am a creature of the dark, and with the dark comes lies. I tell many lies to others, but to lie to oneself is a road to ruin.
I've little legitimate claim to that proud and ancient culture, or to its many artistic achievements. After all, I'm a monster made for a purpose, grown from the same stuff as a forbear who is herself far removed from her past. This neither excites nor horrifies me; it simply is.
Nonetheless, I enjoy the music. It grounds my thoughts, keeps away the strange tangents my mind is so prone to. Of course, the work at hand also helps. Performing open-heart surgery on oneself has a way of gripping the mind and sharpening focus.
I lay face-up on a solid metal slab, staring up at a full-length mirror positioned above me. From there, I can see the open cavity of my ribcage, held in place by several pairs of mechanical spreaders. Inside it, the Burning Heart thrums with power.
Carefully, I brush the blade of my knife across the surface of the Heart, shaving away the occasional errant splinter. Alchemized though it is, Tarnicite is not something that is easy to simply collar to one's will. It was born of the dark and the cold, and grew in one of the most hostile and alien environs the galaxy has to offer. Even the Force cannot totally shackle its endless need to consume. This unpleasant little process is occasionally a necessity, unless I wish to have delicate crystalline quills digging into the inside of my chest.
Fitting, in a way. The very object that enables me to live at all also slowly seeks to consume me.
Though at first annoying, I've come to enjoy these sessions. They give me time to think, time to ruminate on things. After all, it's easy to ask the existential questions when your own artificiality is laid out before you in so stark a way.
To that end, I never use anesthetic. Putting aside the difficulty of performing this task while unconscious, I barely notice the pain. It is a ripple, a sort of distant echo among many. Like trying to pick out one voice amidst a chorus. If I focus on the work, it's difficult to hear it at all.
In my earliest few minutes of existence, the pain was beyond description. The pain of a newly-made, newly-suffering body that had emerged into the universe already ruined and broken. I remember wondering why. Why, why, why. "Why me, why does it hurt, why was I made this way?" I hated that word, buzzing always in my mind like the parasitic pest that it is.
It is fine, on occasion, to indulge the voice of the Why. To sometimes ponder one's place and status is just part of being cursed with thought and being. Thankfully, I usually don't have such questions any longer. For me, there is little in the way of uncertainty left; my course is one written into the flesh of the cosmos.
Ultimately, my purpose is to destroy. I am a thing of indiscriminate and uncaring annihilation, as directionless as a forest fire and about as lethal. Whether I like it or not was irrelevant; I'd known it to be true the moment I closed that dusty old book not long ago. In that instant, I finally understood. Understood the point of the pain, the point of my ruined body and even worse soul, the point of servitude to the Creator-Mother. She, too, has her role to play. My pain was eclipsed by the weight of a destiny that paled it to insignificance.
Would that Songbird had been correct, and that my nature was mine to choose. That's a tidy and comforting worldview, and maybe it is true for others. They were born, not made.
Can a blaster decide it is no longer an instrument of death, and decide to take up a career as a paintbrush? I think not. In these moments, when I flay myself open to the core to maintain myself like a machine, it's easy to see my purpose was decided for me. I see muscle, coiled and taut like that of a jungle predator. Bone that I can scarcely split with the blade of my lightsaber. Even the fireblood that bubbles and seethes through my blackened veins is lethal. Every micrometer is made for purpose, made to terrify and destroy.
It's like reading a book and skipping directly to the ending. Little do those sorry fools in the first pages know it, but their story is already a finished one. So it is with me. Partly by the actions of the Creator-Mother, and partly by forces even greater. That thought is so delicious in my mind, so transgressive, so heretical. Greater than the Creator-Mother?
Nonetheless, it is so. One of many blasphemies I must think and say and do in the days ahead.
With my task finished, and the heart smoothed down to a flawless sheen, I remove the rib-spreaders and close myself up with practiced hands, melding bone and stitching flesh. Molten-gold fireblood streams downwards freely, sizzling where it meets the frigid metal of my bed.
Whatever else one can say about the Creator, one cannot argue the quality of her craftsmanship. Not many living things would be able to just hop up and stroll away after having their organs exposed to open air and their bones splayed apart like the wings of a bird.
I require no such convalescence, but I lay a bit longer anyway.
