Fracture
The Hydrax Plateau, Cybertron, 1952 CE…
Morning dawned upon the city of Iacon, the darkness of the night fading away as rich orange rays spilled over the horizon and the sky began to turn blue. The sunlight shone between the great city’s towers, gleaming off shards of shattered glass and metal torn asunder. It painted over the husks of bombed-out vehicles lying in the streets, and over scores of mangled bodies, their energon trickling from their wounds to pool together in bright blue puddles on the roadways. A few living transformers walked among the dead: most carried weapons limply at their sides, and eyed each other with fearful suspicion. Others dropped their guns and swords into the rubble and embraced each other, overcome with a bittersweet feeling of relief.
The war was over. After centuries of fighting, of so much death and destruction, it was finally over.
In the quiet stillness of the morning, in the numb shock of the surviving combatants, no-one noticed a small ship take off from a lonely port at the edge of Iacon. Light and shadow rolled over its hull as it flew between the city’s layers of skyscrapers and bridges, until it left the city’s limits and traveled east. It glided over the miles of empty hills that stretched across Cybertron’s north pole, beyond the battlefields of the war which had ended the night before. The land here was unblemished, its surfaces smooth and reflecting the sun’s first rays through the cockpit of the shuttle. Its reactive panes darkened, and its pilot maintained a constant speed and heading toward the Hydrax Plateau.
The ship landed before the vast wall of blue-grey metal, its rough and jagged face looming over the shuttle as its exit ramp lowered from its belly. Slowly, Optimus Prime stepped down the ramp, holding a massive silver hammer in his hands. Behind him, eleven silvery blocks, each one more than sixty feet long and twenty feet wide, their surfaces adorned with cyberglyphic inscriptions, floated along behind him. Optimus led his procession out from under the shuttle and toward the plateau, their forms casting long shadows beside them.
Optimus looked up at the enormous wall of metal, casting a solemn gaze to the enormous monuments hewn from it: gigantic statues of himself and the other Primes, standing together, their faces cast in stoic expressions as they looked out toward Iacon. Then he stopped to look at the caskets behind him, sunlight glinting off their lids. A great sadness filled him, and for a moment he wished- hopelessly- that history would remember his friends as they were when these great monuments had been made, and not as they had been in the centuries since.
The caskets slowed to a stop, hovering silently above the ground as Optimus gripped the Forge of Solus Prime tightly, and then swung it at the wall in front of him. The hammer rang as it struck, its song echoing for miles around as Optimus swung again and again. It was a low, sorrowful melody accompanied by the shifting of the wall as arcs of energy ran across it. Part of it caved inward, forming a circular porthole and a long hallway beyond it. Ornate decorations wove themselves into being on the walls and ceiling as Optimus went through, continuing to hammer away at the receding metal in front of him. Images appeared on the floor behind him as he marched on: a tapestry starting at the entryway with a depiction of the Well of All Sparks not far away from the Plateau. It continued, showing images of Optimus and his fellows leading their people into battle against Unicron, then standing proudly among them as they built beautiful cities and explored the stars. It showed their bonds of fellowship decay as the Thirteen hoarded arsenals of mighty weapons and sealed their followers within great fortresses. It showed the grand cities they had built crumbling away as they fought each other, each with legions at their backs. Five centuries of slaughter later, it ended as Optimus stopped within a wide chamber at the end of the hall, showing all the Primes impaled upon their weapons in the great hall of the Primal Basilica, together again in death.
Optimus Prime turned and walked back outside, the sunlight snagging on the spiderweb crack in the translucent plating on the left side of his chest. Behind the caskets stood an elderly-looking bot with a long beard made of silicon fibers. Optimus greeted the elder with a nod, which the other returned. Without a word, the two led the caskets into the tomb Optimus had made for them, and arranged them in a circle within the chamber at its heart.
“What will you do now?” the elder asked when the work was done. Optimus set the Forge against the wall and pondered the question.
“What will you do with that?” the elder then said, and he pointed at Optimus’s chest. Optimus opened the panels above his abdomen, parting the purple and grey hatches to reveal a crimson orb of crystal within an ornate shell. He took it in its hand, and looked into the Matrix of Leadership. He felt its rage, the blind fury it had soaked up from the now-dead Primes. Optimus had hoped it could be a useful tool for future leaders, a repository of knowledge and memory for them to draw upon, but now…
“I will take it where it can never be found,” Optimus said. “There it, and myself, will remain. I will not allow our failures to pass on to future generations.”
“And what if you succumb to it?” the elder asked gravely. “The others… what makes you believe you could be immune to its effects?”
Optimus shook his head. “I was created to be its steward. To keep the Matrix until the time came to pass it on to our successors. Now, that time will never come, and so now I will keep it forever.”
“Will I ever see you again?” said the elder, his tone fading from worry to sadness. Optimus shook his head again.
“Farewell, Alpha Trion,” he said.
“Until all are one,” Alpha Trion replied.
The two left the tomb, and Optimus swung the Forge of Solus Prime once more to raise a shield of armor over its entrance. The hammer’s powers transmuted the natural metals of Cybertron’s surface into a heavy alloy over the porthole, dense enough to withstand the ravages of time and whatever weapons that curious explorers might level against it. Optimus swung the Forge over his shoulder, fastening it to his back, and then ignited his energon sword. With its searing blade, he carved a single glyph onto the shield: the symbol of the Thirteen, of the mighty fellowship they once shared. Then, climbed back into his shuttle. Alpha Trion watched as its engines thrummed to life, streams of plasma billowing behind them as Optimus steered the ship upward and into the clear morning sky. He watched it grow ever smaller as it climbed, until it finally disappeared forever.
I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while now. As always, comments and constructive criticism are requested and appreciated.