I knew when the words left my mouth that it was careless, but I was in a loop, and that has affected my mental state. If I could be watching my mouth in a situation like this, then I would never be able to stand up if I were placed outside the loop.
In other words, it was getting harder to give much of a damn about the opinion of others, and I would rather say my mind, even before a Jade Oracle.
"Chatty," the Oracle repeated, and the warmth in it thinned, "I have had ten thousand years and no one to be chatty at, little clockwork boy. Forgive me for making up the lost time on my way out the door. At the final moments of my life, I get to break all protocols I have lived by."
I did not expect her to say this, and I decided to focus on what she was saying rather than deflect from the matter on ground.
"You keep saying that," I slowly said, as if making sure that my words came out in the right manner. "You are dying in three hours."
I looked at the single flickering disc, the last green light in a ring of six dead ones. "Your consciousness has been alive for at least ten thousand years. What has changed, or are you nearing the end of your lifespan?"
The disc pulsed, and when she answered my questions, the wit was gone from her voice, and I don’t know why I felt a bit guilty for being the one to take away the joy in her voice, even though it was being used to deprecate me.
I could take it... kinda, and if this being was dying soon, then I did not want its final moments to be rough.
These few thoughts in my head flashed past, and I barely acknowledged them before I focused on what she was about to say.
"Nothing has changed about me, little clockwork boy. You have understood the wrong thing, and I do not blame you, because the men below have understood the wrong thing for ten thousand years, and they have killed millions on the strength of it."
Her voice began to rise in strength, returning to the way it was when she first spoke to me,
"I am a Jade Oracle. I was set here to roam the dark and keep the Pale Matron and her hosts for all eternity in this prison, and even with the destruction of my domain, I still hold this door, and I can hold it, broken, headless, stripped, down to a single dying light. I can hold it forever. The thing below does not frighten me. I was made to keep it. They were never going to take this door from me, and this single glow left would have held for all eternity."
"Then how..."
I crouched on the floor and squeezed my ears as the Jade Oracle screamed,
"They are not taking it!" The last flickering disc flared, and for one moment the dead room filled with green light, and in the light I saw her whole, vast, and winged and bright, and then it was gone, and the after-image ached behind my eyes. I coughed and felt something sweet at the back of my throat... I had been injured by her cries.
"They are not taking the door, little catastrophe. They are killing the guard."
I went very still as I tried to understand what she meant, but the ringing in my ears was a distraction. Thankfully, the voice of the Jade Oracle went back to normal.
"They cannot overpower me, so they have spent ten thousand years poisoning me. I endure on the pure light of the heavens, the same light that fills your channels when you crack one of those ancient gates. It is the cleanest thing there is. And the men below learned, long ago, that you cannot break a thing like me. But you can foul it. You can pour filth into clean water, drop by drop, century by century, millennium by millennium, until the water can no longer remember it was ever clean."
"What filth," I said, though a cold part of me had already guessed, the way you guess the end of a sentence you do not want finished.
"Blood," she whispered, "Mortal blood, stained by the light of the Caelith as we were brought down to the earth. Spilled in the right pattern, by the right lineages, in the right moment. It is the precise opposite of what I am; this blood is small, and yet it screams, and its lamentations are wrong. Those men have been feeding it to me for ten thousand years."
These words landed with a sort of weight in my chest that I could hardly breathe, because it all seemed too much, but I had seen the fog of blood as the Caelith was opened, and I knew that for each pyramid, there was a family that had been specifically bred for this purpose.
How could you breed a family as if you were breeding crops or animals? Is this what we became when we became powerful enough, all life no longer had any meaning other than to pursue our purpose?
I had never pursued power in the past because I may have known where that path might lead me, but I could no longer look away from this, not when it had been thrust right at my face.
The wit in the voice of the Jade Oracle was entirely gone now, and what was left was a grief so old it had passed grief and become something I could not describe, because I had no background to understand grief on such a scale that transcended millennia.
"These men took those families touched by the light of the Caeliths, and they bred for it. Generation upon generation, they were selected for the exact resonance that would let their blood corrupt me. The blood of millions, little catastrophe. Poured into me one murdered child at a time."
The last green disk on the ground flashed, "Three hours from now, when the last of the filth finishes it work, and the last clean part of me... this part talking to you and remembers the light, goes out., then there will be no guard, and the seals will fall, and what is left would be the last dying announcemnt of a broken prison."