let us sing the requiem
the song of an endless absence
let us now commit a dream
unto the eternal stars

sing cordite on the breeze
and smoke in the skies of night
sing the light of a thousand lives
in the night of a thousand stars

sing hollow in the silent void
in the holes between the stars
sing the holes in the silent city
in a thousand empty streets

sing the fall of a thousand ashes
and stars in the skies of night
sing the song of a dream of honour
to a thousand stars undying.

hail the fallen
hail the silence
hail the night eternal

the last decepticon

Once there had been a thousand. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand. An army—multiple armies. And more: cultures, lifestyles, beliefs.. A people. A species. A philosophy.

They called themselves Decepticons.

Once there had been cities, living hives with living beings. Creators, creations. Warriors, teachers, politicians, scientists, artists, lawyers, merchants, freighters—ordinary citizens with ordinary dreams, all together contributing to something extraordinary known as the Decepticon Empire.

And there had been the Cryptkeepers.

The Autobots had feared their dead. To her mind it made no sense. Perhaps it was embedded in the Autobot philosophy, which she did not share. Was every life lost a galling reminder to Autobots that they had failed to preserve all? Was it easier, then, to banish the fallen than live with the guilt? She did not know. All she could say with certainty was that when possible, the Autobots banished their fallen soldiers into deep space, alone on floating mausoleums, their bodies entombed to rust alone, unguarded. When resources did not permit such lavish tribute, the Autobot dead were simply vaporized, eliminated as if they had never been.

The Decepticon philosophy was different.

The Decepticons buried the cold laser cores of their beloved dead within the steel corridors of Cybertron, keeping them forever near. Monuments were built as if to serve as containers for the spirits of the departed, where they might be visited, remembered, held up as examples for their successors to emulate. Even in death the Decepticons remained part of the cities where they had lived. In desperate times, when resources were scarce, the bodies of the fallen were recycled back into raw materials that could serve the Empire. Their smelted shells were always used for noble purposes—the creation of weapons, or statuary, or buildings—to serve in death as they had served in life.

The instruments of this conversion were the Cryptkeepers, an elite and noble cadre who recycled the bodies of the fallen and guarded the tombs where the cores lay interred. While the warriors fought, and the leaders led, and the scientists invented and the citizens were brought online, lived, loved, fought and fell…through all the ages the Cryptkeepers had endured, eternally vigilant against those who would disturb the rest of the fallen.

In the past million years a terrible superstition had grown up in the Decepticon ranks, that the tombs beneath Polyhex were haunted by angry and vengeful spirits. She had spent eight million years in the catacombs under Darkmount and had yet to see a single such spectre. She suspected the rumour was born of the overactive imagination of a would-be grave robber, a plunderer who had seen his wicked act thwarted by the ever-guarding Cryptkeepers.

Her name was Mortua. Upon her creation she had been built as a glossy black cyber-hearse, moving about her duties with a motion absent of sound, wearing an intricately detailed Decepticon insignia in the centre of her ornate grille. To the surface dwellers, she and her kind had always been disturbing reminders of their mortality. It did not surprise her that even in the Empire, there were those who avoided her company because of her function. She did not care. It was her job, her duty, to guard the fallen. She cared for nothing else.

And now, at this end of all the ages, she was the last Decepticon.

Mortua supposed that Galvatron had been the beginning of the end…a destroying angel come to lead his people to disaster. Certainly he had been a herald of destruction for the Cryptkeepers, when his rash madness had caused the Decepticons to lose all control of Cybertron and to flee off planet to Charr. Mortua wondered if any of the routed Decepticons had spared a thought for the Cryptkeepers, left behind below Polyhex. Perhaps they had, and fear of Galvatron barred them from returning. Perhaps they had not, preferring to leave death and the dead forgotten…along with those who tended the fallen.

Cryptkeepers did not rob the tombs. To do so was to defy a sacred trust and violate the Cryptkeepers' very reason for being. Previously the Cryptkeepers had been rewarded for their service with ample fuel, timely repairs, and a certain respect of commingled disgust and awe. Mortua needed nothing else. None of them had.

Then Galvatron and his army fled Cybertron, and there was no more fuel and no more repairs. The tombs, fat with fuel and spare parts, were off limits. The Cryptkeepers were forced to leave the tombs to scavenge, either on the surface or in the depths of the planet. Those on the surface fell to Autobots. Those in the depths fell to Transorgs. The years took their attrition until only Mortua remained.

Galvatron made a deal with the Nebulans, created Headmasters, Powermasters, Targetmasters. The Nebulans mindraped their Cybertronian partners and eventually overpowered them. Galvatron vanished into deep space. The Decepticons, leaderless, faltered. The Autobots pressed them, harried them across the universe, hunted them down to a tiny planet called Amalo.

Rodimus Prime demanded nothing less than total surrender.

Onslaught drew up what remained of his ruined pride and defied him.

And there, on the red rock plain of Amalo, the remnants of the Decepticon Army made their final stand, believing in their cores that to surrender to the Autobots was to pervert, to destroy something fundamental to their existence as Decepticons. No. There could be no surrender. Choices were made, and most chose to fight to the last. The fighting heart of the Decepticons ceased its beat on Amalo, for not one of those brave warriors ever left the red rock planet.

Full truth be told, a handful defected. A handful believed that it was better to capitulate now, perhaps some day to win Cybertron back again, than die to the last in that place and give up Cybertron to the Autobots forever. Perhaps there was some merit in their claim. Perhaps there was some sweet vengeance in the knowledge that the Pax Cybertronia would not and could not last. Yet even this handful never again dared call themselves Decepticons.

***

Fuel was scarce on Cybertron. Not even the resources of Earth were sufficient to support the new Autobot Dynasty. With a harsh peace imposed on the last surviving Decepticon descendants, the Autobots used this time of no war to reinvent themselves, building smaller bodyshells, incorporating organic elements into their forms, the better to disguise themselves on carbon-based worlds. Within the span of a mere three hundred years they were no longer Autobots. They admitted it even to themselves, and gave themselves new insignias, new names. They regarded themselves as evolved beings, carrying on the Autobot tradition into a brave new future.

The former Decepticons—the traitors, the fallen—also adopted the smaller forms and semi-organic components. Amongst themselves they spoke of revolution and revolt. Yet there was something craven in them…something that had sold its soul.

***

Mortua hung her head, regarding the shifting desert with its thousand thousand grains of sand, flowing from one horizon to the other, cradling her in its waves. Was she one to talk of what the ex-Decepticons had done? She, too, now bore a proto-organic form.

In the hungry years, she had hunted downwards, every century moving lower into the planet in the quest for fuel. She traveled down past monstrous ruined engines great enough to move a planet, down past ranks of rusting Centurions, down below even the realms of the TransOrgs and the buried city of the Unicron cult to the heart of Cybertron. What she had found there had recreated her. In a span of moments it had rebuilt her into the mold of Cybertron's current rulers.

Mortua wished she had a name for what she had discovered. Some datapads spoke of a supercomputer called Vector Sigma, some of a mystic Oracle, still others of lost creation factories or the being called Primus Himself. It could have been any of them. It could have been all of them. All she remembered of the experience was the blinding light, the booming voice speaking words she could not recall, the reshaping of metal and circuit and core itself into something new.

And then it let her go. She did not know where to flee—towards starvation in the crypt, towards the fangs of Transorgs in the depths? She ran upwards, ever upwards through tunnels never before seen, driven by a motive not entirely hers, moving in a blur as a sleepwalker.

And then she broke through, emerged into empty air, and stared up at the stars—witnessing their light for the first time in a lifetime of eight million years.

***

The Decepticon cities were in ruins by the time she emerged into the light of night. In the three hundred years since Amalo the great cities—Polyhex, Tarn, Vos—had fallen into disrepair. Part of Vos had been gutted, rebuilt to a smaller scale to match the smaller bodies of the dominant inhabitants. A handful of ex Decepticons lived in Tarn, pretending they were everything their forerunners had been. Polyhex, however, was wholly abandoned, and marked by the signs of decay.

All living things must die. None knew that as well as the Cryptkeepers. Robots were built, robots lived and robots died, to pass into Mortua's care. It now occurred to her that cities were living things as well, organisms of a sort, that were born and grew and flourished, and became diseased, and, in the end, died—as Polyhex had died. What she saw now was no different from what she had seen in all those eons under Darkmount. Polyhex was merely one more corpse to tend.

She had read her history datatracks, studied ancient holographs and learned the past of the Empire. From her studies she could recognize the toppled monuments, the crumbling buildings and the deserted avenues. She knew what great events had taken place here, who had walked these streets, when the city had been filled with triumph and when its inhabitants at last fled in defeat.

Mortua was not comfortable intruding in the remains of the once-great cities. It was too much like disturbing a sarcophagus. She headed towards the great waste, the desert, away from the new civilization with its neon lights and pulsing nightlife, into the wasteland, the last of her kind.

***

Alone in the desert waste, she shuffled the sand with a silver-clawed paw. She, and the world about her, had changed beyond all recognition. How was Cybertron to go on without the Decepticons?

She turned a slim muzzle skyward, watching the stars gleaming in the firmament like a thousand souls. Eight million years entombed below Darkmount. The sight of the open sky was breathtaking in its alien beauty.

Primus, The Ultimate Warrior, The Last Autobot, The Life Force, The Honour of the Blade, The Allspark. Before Cybertron Was I Was. Cybertronians had so many beliefs. Mortua respected all and personally held none. Before her recreation, she had never had an experience with Divinity. Even now, she could not say that she had gained any insight from her encounter with whatever-it-was at the heart of the planet.

Looking skyward, she wondered what sort of Divinity would choose a Cryptkeeper to stand as the last Decepticon. Surely there were so many more worthy.

Megatron, a mighty leader. Soundwave, a guide to universes within and without. Shockwave, who might be able to make sense of it all. Scrapper, who might be able to recreate an Empire with his own hands.

And from the holes between the stars Mortua received an answer.

She had one further duty left to perform. The corpse was gigantic—as large as all the territory where Decepticon banners had flown. The fuel pump had long since ceased to beat—extinguished by Rodimus Prime's Autobots on Amalo. But the requiem had yet to be sung, as it had to be, to honour in death what had been worthy of honour in life.

Mortua transformed to robot mode and saluted the star-studded sky. Another transformation, raising her animal head skyward, and the single-voiced mourning song of a jackal pierced its way to the heavens. A solitary voice, singing in a hollow land, a howling dirge for a thousand thousand lives lost, and beyond the individuals, the death of a dream, the end of an era. From this day there would be no more history created. Only memories of the past remained, mere echoes and recollections, and one lone Cryptkeeper who had realized that all things living must die, a fact that extended to more than robots, but to cities and beliefs and worlds as well. Mortua's song rose, note by note ascending to the sky in recognition of Primus' choice.

The Last Decepticon must be a Cryptkeeper—to lay an Empire to rest.

~requiem~