The Lords could not be harmed, shifting mounds of nature that they were, shapes unclear and indestructible as they reached out to their traitorous subjects to submit them once more; above them they stood, colossal and sublime, casting long shadows upon them as they towered like pillars holding sky and ground apart, and on them were fixed six brilliant gazes of crystal and metal and flesh.
How those hands reached out for them! With such a longing awe, like children begging to be held, the living wide-eyed killing machines strained to join them, turning their backs to those who had believed to find in them friends and allies and soldiers against those who had torn their home apart so thoughtlessly to give themselves to the Lords wholly, completely, utterly, enamored and entranced by their elemental infinity, so ethereally solid that they could feel it in their palms already; and the Lords, magnanimous as they were (as they fancied themselves to be in their cruelty), reached out to them in turn, welcoming them as their impenetrable army of one, beckoning them closer, closer.
And with that closeness they saw, perhaps too late, the gleam in the glowing eyes; and with that closeness they realized, perhaps too late, that there was nothing childish within them if not for a turbulent hunger, vast and all-consuming, and something else so darkly bright, so blindingly obscure, that they could not put a word to it.
And those hands reached, and sank into them.
And the Lords screamed in anguish.
In a sudden focused frenzy the beasts curled their claws of protodermis and climbed the infinite bodies. They left marks of their passage - deep wounds bleeding copiously, reaching down to bones that long had been stripped away by divinity, tearing apart non-existent flesh with the ease of paper, their skeletal frames ravenous as they dug holes in the godly forms to take their essence for themseves, coating shining metal in fire, stone, earth, water, ice, air, like disgusting bugs carving their way through luxurious fabrics and woods and painting and statues, hungry, hungry, hungry, starving and yearning and needing - and the Lords shouted, the Lords wailed, the Lords cried, the Lords howled in unison with the mechanical men eating them alive, ascending higher, higher, not demanding audience anymore, only digging into their nerves with a staggering familiarity, a bloodied fondness.
Artificial faces at last before the divinely natural eyes, frightened gods cradled with such murderous tenderness in hand-crafted palms, an unnatural light sparked within crystalline matter: perhaps what they forced upon the Lords was a sarcastic pantomime, perhaps it was a genuine gesture carried on in the only violent manner a living weapon could muster, perhaps it was as new and frightening for them as it was so painfully horrifying for their destined misshapen mirrors; but their mechanical bodies strained with their thin muscles as air poured through vents so scalding and freezing and humid and dry and dusty and clear, as they crowed out for all the universe to hear the love bursting in fulminating sparks and horrid shrieks of cogs clashing in ways they were not built to do, and with something that could be considered akin only to a terrible kiss they sank into the sublime endlessness of the Elemental Lords, and tore them to shreds in an indescribably gruesome amorous spectacle.
Nothing was left of them - nothing but men, frightened mortal shells of flesh and bone, clawed free from their ineffability as their former people approached them cautiously, circled around them to bear witness to their descent from their gilded thrones.
Hunched over them stood still the living beings of metal and muscle, immoble, eyes aglow with energy, encased in their element as though it were their skin - fitting them so naturally, like it had never fit upon the Lords. Then something zapped, creaked, exhaled harshly: their irises flickered, sparks of color pulsing before giving in, and they collapsed upon the exhausted remains of their domains, as still as corpses yet with hearts still beating gently, calmly, sweetly, radiating spots of light upon but a spec of their slowly reawakening world like fireflies unaware of their own mortality.
