A Matter of Time

[Dogs231]

He had tried.

It was all he could do, but it still wasn't enough. The others had decided not to follow him—instead, they marched, silent, to their inevitable deaths. Nobody seemed to comprehend, save for the two of them, the surest stakes of their situation. Possibly, he thought, nobody alive ever would. Perhaps only the dead could understand the truth of their words.

He felt like a prophet of bones, his congregation drawn from among those long gone, a flock of the dead and the damned. The choir invisible sang and hummed in the distance. Its ominous music was like the Sword of Damocles in his ears. An evil omen of a million different worlds, each ending with the metaphorical guillotine clasped tight around his neck.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED FROM "Recycle"

It was only a matter of time before Alexander reached the objective. In the same vein as how, given infinite time, an infinite amount of monkeys on typewriters would eventually produce every work made across the history of humankind. Of course, it happened, first and foremost, on a much-condensed timeline—two long, terrible days, not infinite millennia.

His foot ground against the small, grainy stones of the shoreline. With each step, he reminded himself that it was only a matter of time. The thought kept him sane in the stress and the solitude. With each step, he moved forward in a physical and a logistic sense, each inch of progress a marker in his mission, no matter how incalculably small it proved to be.

Eventually, though, Alexander's senses caught something. He stopped dead in his tracks. A few feet away, illuminated by the moonlight and the stars, he saw the bloated, whey-faced corpse, marred by the ashen hue of an untimely end, washed up on the shore. Amidst the sea salt, the stench of death and rot hung in the air, far worse than anything else.

To others, it was an omen; to him, an opportunity.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED IN "Process of Elimination"