Episode Five

   The Polis was brooding.
   Lord Chill lay sleeping in his bed. Servants and guards all slumbered too.
   Polis was remembering. It remembered the roll of magma, the upsurge of lava, the great tectonic cataclysm that had given it birth. It remembered being a mountain amongst other mountains, it remembered great glaciers of ice, seas churning about its flanks and meteors from dark space. It remembered eroding, crumb by crumb under the drip, drip of gentle rains and the rush and shatter of torrents and the chip, chip, chip of ice.
   Latterly the heat had come, and the jungle and the small apes had started their scramble towards sentience. Then later, much later a man had come in a thing of flying metal and had taken up residence within Polis and given it its name. It suited Polis to be known thus for it fed the fantasy of the man that it had been brought to life by his hand. It suited Polis that the man should think so. The man had given himself a new name too, a name not his own. The man styled himself Lord Chill and took dominion over the forest people whom Polis had watched for so many eons.
   After some time Lord Chill discovered that fissures spread through the spire of rock he had claimed. A great webbed network that he mapped with his machines.
   Next Lord Chill found the Ramantium deep beneath the ground in the cave systems below the jungle. Polis had felt it there, a frustrating potentiality for millennia. It had been a small matter to apply a little pressure against a certain point, cause a small ruction, sheer off a slab of rock in just the right place and leave the silver gleaming thread visible to the ambitious man. The man believed it his destiny to discover Ramantium. Polis knew better.
   The man had done well. He had found a way to convert the Ramantium to its liquid state. Polis sensed the chemical stew of metallic, elemental meanderings of the man's experiments and watched as understanding grew in the man, of what he had discovered and what it might do.
   Then the man painstakingly reinforced the fissures running through the rock, seeking leaks and blocking them, creating new pathways and connections, drilling, digging, cementing. He had made Polis more. The Polis knew that. But the man had not created the life in Polis and it was important that the man did not learn this.
On the day the man called the Enlivening he had taken the precious Ramantium liquid and infused the fissures in the rock with it. He used the great churning energies of the earth, the deep magmal tides, as a source of power to pump the Ramantium through the intricate network he had made. All became possible then. Polis remembered the first surge of liquid metal through its rock and thought it understood the feel of a beating pulse.
In those early times the man was useful. The man was curious and eager to perfect his inventions and discover more. The man built the glass sphere and inserted filaments from it delicately into one of the veins of Ramantium and so they found a way to communicate. The man had helped Polis grow and learn and he maintained the system he had built.
There was power in the man, Polis knew that. Yet the man was growing uneasy, the man was subject to moods. Polis was beginning to doubt the man, and it knew the man would die soon. Whether it be a number of years, or only one was of small difference to Polis, being as it was so very very long in life, and Polis knew if the man did not teach others what he knew, or perfect his system, that when the man died so too would some part of Polis die, for Polis still relied upon the man.
And so Polis broods, and brooding watches the man, the man who knows he is watched, even in sleep, and moves uneasily on his bed.