Therealljidol: The Sorrow Machine

There was a man who felt perpetual happiness every moment of his life.

It was torment. He prayed for death.

Now if this were any other sort of man this tale would end here.

This man was a king.

He sent for his land's best Tinkers. His most powerful Witches. His most learned Scholars.

"Build me something," he said. "Something made of sorrow so that I might feel this."

The Witches shook their heads and told him that they could not make such a machine. To do so would cause harm in the world untold.

The Tinkers shook their heads and told him they would not make such a machine. To do so would violate their sacred oaths.

The King then asked the Scholars to research the subject of the Tinkers. To find every scrap of information about their history.

Then he took this research and found that the Tinker's held something even more precious than the oaths they swore.

Tinkers were gangly and thin. They looked sick even when at the peak of health. Even their children looked like stones or rocks.

Their children were fewer and fewer. Soon, there would be no more.

A long-ago curse had been placed upon them and their children was the source of their problem.

Curses were caused by Witches, he thought.

He gave the problem to them. Give him something to remove the curse with and they would receive a great reward.

The Witches thought and thought. They brewed and brewed. After many failed attempts, they had a potion they knew would work.

The King came to them for his solution, which they handed over gladly, eager for the reward he'd offered them.

"Oh that," he said. "I give you these final moments."

They looked at each other in puzzlement as the King's guard approached from behind, sliting each of their throats.

The King was already gone. He did not hear the screams and the desperate echoing quiet after.

He offered this cure to the Tinkers.

At first, they scoffed, denying any such curse existed.

He waited.

They offered to make themselves slaves, to work for him until his kingdom died.

He waited.

The Tinker's began to build. Swiftly, as if they stopped to think they would never complete it.

In two days time, they presented to him the sorrow machine.

It was brutal in its beauty, the King thought. Metal met metal in a coil of fire.

In front, the flames spewed an odd mix of blue and pink.

"Give us our children," the Tinker's demanded.

The King gave over the potion before starting the machine.

It made an eerie noise, a far-off howling. Something gathered there.

All at once he felt it. Sadness was not a rock but a trail of pebbles, all filling him up inside one by one. He drowned in it slowly and felt the world die with him.

With no sorrow, the world had become like him, golden with happiness. Glittering cruel happiness. Mothers turned on sons. Towns went dark, as though trying to lure unwary travelers in.

The King, seeing this, knew he could not let his kingdom end. He felt every sorrow his people were immune to. He cried memories, feeding them to the machine.

The machine was not a normal machine, Thought it had been built for sorrow, it felt what the King had been and still was. It felt happiness and content. It felt warm night's in bed and the soft lips of its lover.

It offered the King a bargain. The King would stay with it somewhere far away. The machine would only take some of the kingdom's sorrow, sharing it with the King.

So the King built a tower of metal and stone, far away from his own kingdom. His chosen would rule in his stead, as his kingdom healed from the wound he'd given it.

"How long must we do this?" he asked the machine.

He knew the answer.

"Forever," the machine said.