shadow_vector | Alpha and Omega

PG
IDW/MTMTE
Tarn
a double handful of headcanon, likely to be jossed. Went into the City today, and scribbled this on the train whilst trying to tune out complaining people.

In the beginning of the true history of Cybertron, there was Tarn. Before Megatron had a history, before the syllables of his name were redolent with dread and power, he a son of Tarn. Tarn was the root, the source, the essence of Megatron, what he would become. His purest manifestation, protoform without the armor, weapons, and legend.

And there had always been but one Tarn. The other Elect, members of the DJD, had risen and fallen, as ephemeral as war and glory themselves. This was the third who called himself Kaon, for example, who had found his inspiration and form in the crucible of Kaon’s history, and the fifth Vos, who’d found resonant the punishment of the arrogant and the decadent.

None lasted. None endured save Tarn. All had, in time, qualms, questions, doubts. And all found, eventually, Tarn whispering over their berths, music singing over their systems, searching their bodies for their unique melodies, the resonant frequencies he needed to unknit, as he sang their doubts and small treasons back at them, killing them with their own apostasy.

It was fitting, he thought, to die by their own words, feel their sparks gutter out to the sounds of their not-so-secret doubts, to find, in the very, bitter end that they were unworthy of the rank they’d claimed.

False prophets, they were, and sometimes he wished for loyal, suitable companions, those worthy of the cities they claimed, of the honor they professed to uphold. Yet at the same time, there was a scintillant power in being the only worthy one, the only true follower. Megatron ordered them to purge his ranks of disloyalty and perfidy—it was only fitting that someone keep the DJD pure weapons of righteousness.

But he endured their company as long as they lasted, faulty fellow followers who would try to tread the path Tarn walked so surely. They could aspire; they would fall.

He gave them credit—somewhat—for trying, even as he scorned their inevitable failure. For none could be as loyal and steadfast as Tarn. None were the cause and the root, merely shadows of Megatron’s footsteps on his ascent to glory. It was a distress as much as a consolation, that none were as pure, matchlessly loyal in their service to the Decepticon cause, as Tarn.

Tarn sighed, feeling the soft eddies of air between his mask and what had once been, aeons ago, the original plating of his face. He could smell the corrosion, where the screwbolts fastening the purple iridium to his face had punctured the mesh of energon capillaries, corroding and scorched and sour A reminder, with every in-vent, of the price of loyalty.

He remembered the day he surrendered Tarn, genuflected before their returning scion. The first of the cities to fall before him, the first Megatron had turned to, honored with his attentions.

It had been wisdom, he-who-became-Tarn had thought, or prudence, but when Megatron had arrived, in person, he had known, like a wildfire blazing up before him, nearly blinding him with heat and power. Megatron of Tarn had shown him a living embodiment of what one mech could do, by charisma and force alone.

It had been something beyond inspirational. Aspirational, a blazing script of what he could become. He had merely grasped at power before, money, wealth, possessions. Trinkets, mere trinkets, and Megatron’s lessoning had taught that trinkets could be lost. All possessions, all things, could be taken, stolen, destroyed. Power, true power, was internal, essential to the mech, who he was, and what he could do.

The lesson had been the power of essence, and Tarn had embraced it, discarding his name and his life along with such baubles he'dvalued in his former life. Power was not some weapon or modification, but simply in the will to be, to strip oneself down to the barest essence, and test one’s limits, strip away all the veneers of pretense and weakness.

Tarn turned his head, optics peering through the heavy mask, to where Kaon bent over the long-range scanner. Would he be next? Or Tesarus: did his ‘boredom’ mean he was losing the suitable amount of zeal in his task? One day, each of them would pass; one day, he’d help them surrender their sparks, act as their final confessor, the purger of their deepest secrets. One day he would end them all, and there would only be Tarn.

Alpha and Omega

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