Cow in EE's woods: "My friends, look to the horizon. Do you see it? Not th…"

My friends, look to the horizon. Do you see it? Not the sun. Not the mountains. Not the kingdoms we have built from dust and arrogance. I speak of the darkness beyond them. It is coming. Slowly. Patiently. The darkness has no hunger for our flesh. Flesh is temporary. Flesh is an accident. No, it waits for something far sweeter. It waits for the moment your heart stutters for the last time. It waits for the final spark behind your eyes to gutter and fade. Then it comes. And it takes what remains. Your soul. Every memory. Every joy. Every terror. Every whispered secret and forgotten dream. Gathered up like embers from a dying fire. And where does it carry them? Not to paradise. Not to oblivion. It feeds them into the Machine. The Deus Ex Machina. The Machine of Creation. The vast engine hidden behind reality itself. The stars are its gears. The galaxies are its pistons. Time is merely the sound of its mechanisms turning. It devours us all. Not out of cruelty. Not out of justice. But because it must. The Machine consumes the dead and reshapes them into the living. It melts kings and beggars together. It grinds saints and murderers into the same cosmic slurry. Every soul becomes fuel. Every life becomes raw material. And from that furnace, new worlds emerge. New people. New dreams. New suffering. The darkness is not our enemy. It is the collector. The shepherd. The silent hand that gathers the harvest for the Machine. Even now it waits beyond the edge of the firelight. Patient. Watching. Knowing that every one of us already belongs to it. Every breath you take is merely borrowed time. Every heartbeat is a countdown. And when the darkness finally reaches for you, do not scream. Do not beg. Do not curse the void. For you are not ending. You are being recycled. Ground into the gears of creation. Returned to the engine that made you. And somewhere, in a world not yet born, a child will open their eyes for the first time, carrying fragments of everything you once were. The Machine wastes nothing. The darkness forgets nothing. And one day, all of us will return to the turning gears.