eugenesis-text

Postscript
He was never afraid of peace; not like some.
His chisel moved eagerly among the granite, nuzzling the purple stone into gasps of powder and
fragment. There was no skill involved, no poise, just a pitch and hammer, a strike to wipe
the groove.
Pebbles fell onto the snow and disappeared without trace, much like the name he was erasing from
the monument, little by little, letter by letter. He worked backwards, starting from the end: ‘T’, then ‘A’,
then ‘E’.
A dry wind bent the trees; their branches scraped a sky as pale and fleeting as breath on glass.
He paused in his work, straightened, and waited for the woodland to settle. It would soon start to
snow, and the snow would scrub detail from the land, wiping the slate clean. He liked the idea, and smiled
as he steadied the chisel. The letters ‘G’, ‘I’ and ‘N’ sprang from the trough.
Nightbeat stepped back to admire his handiwork. Just goes to show, he thought, that not even death
was set in stone.
A small scratch now marred the third column of names, but it hardly detracted from the grandeur of
Optimus Prime’s statue. It had been erected in 2006, a few miles from Autobot City, to serve as both a
lasting tribute to their leader and a safe place to conceal his body. Even though the Matrix had been passed
to Ultra Magnus – and, ultimately, to Hot Rod – no one dared risk sending Optimus Prime’s corpse into
space (look what happened last time, they said), and so his body was sealed inside an underground tomb.
There was also a quiet hope, silently nurtured, that their leader might one day return to them. Three
months ago, Nightbeat would have scoffed at the idea of such an unlikely resurrection.
Not anymore.
He ran his finger over the main inscription, lingering on the date of death: 2 January 2006. The
scalpel felt heavy in his hand, and for a moment he considered adding an asterisk and footnote reading ‘and
1 January 2013’. No: there had already been too many alterations made to this slab over the last few
months. It had become a gravestone. The new inscription was plain and direct: ‘In Memory of the Autobots
Who Died in the Eugenesis Wars’.
It was funny, he thought, how quick they were to give names to things. The higher the bodycount,
the grander the label: the Polyhex Massacre, the Siege of Iacon, the Unicron War – and now the Eugenesis
Wars. Maybe giving something a name pinned it down and gave it a definitive beginning and end, and
there was certainly comfort to be found in closure.