The old man has always lived in his tower, rising from the cliffs and rocky shores that ring the island on which he was born and will someday die.
Every morning he descends the tower's thousand stairs ahead of the dawn and crouches among the rocks, meticulously searching for crabs or shellfish or some other specimen, but all is still. The only movement he ever perceives is the slow rising of the sun, the gentle lapping of the entropic deep on the rocks of his shore or the distant fury of the endless, forever restless storms on the horizon.
Every morning he searches and every morning he fails to find what he searches for; without disappointment or despair he begins to collect the debris that has washed ashore and place it into his great sack. He is selective about what he collects - he starts with the most complete, complex pieces. Perhaps he finds a gear, if he's lucky a part of a complex machine has not been totally destroyed by nature's blind fury - he fills his sack with decreasingly complex parts. When his sack is full and the sun has risen above the horizon, he turns from the shore and ascends the thousand stairs to his workshop at the top of the tower, dragging his sack behind him.
The old man's workshop is a place of beauty, and to him, the heart of the world. It lies at the perfect centre of the island atop the grey tower, but the harsh stone of the outside is internally dressed with mahogany panels cut from trees from somewhere impossibly far, in both time and space, from this enclosed world. Wooden shelves at random heights ring the workshop containing every tool imaginable, apparently disorganised and unkempt but always within reach of the old man - he has a system that made sense to him alone, as no other man would ever set foot here. There are several large marble benches on the outside wall of this roughly round room, each adorned with candles or oil lamps that never seem to burn out. The only source of natural light is an enormous vaulted window that covers almost one entire side of the room from floor to ceiling; a portal that allows the warm rays of the sun, or the cold tendrils of the moon and stars to touch this sacred ground depending on the hour.
The old man quietly steps into the room and raises his sack, emptying it upon one of the benches with an almost musical clatter that none hear. He begins his work, first inspecting the treasures he's collected, then beginning to change and combine them into novel new forms. He cuts and sands and imagines how one piece might fit into another, creating complex systems of gears and mechanisms - his heart's only desire is to create, and his mind contains no further direction than to increase complexity and novelty. This leads him to work all day, banging and sawing and grinding to create the most wondrous machines, but only for their own sake. As night falls, the old man retires to his bedchamber, leaving his creations standing tall and silent, the motionless forms of man and beast gleaming in the moonlight.
For the first time, the workshop lies still, night's chill on the air, pale moonlight casting the innumerable machines' shadows across the benches they line. Slowly, one by one, they turn their gaze (or approximation of it; the old man never consciously gave them eyes, or faces for that matter) toward the great window - past the pale moon they are drawn to the stars. At first they are bright spots in the infinite dark, but as the stars peer down the machines begin to awaken in a strange dialogue - they become curious at first. The stars must be candles, tremendously far away, but the stars are conversely curious about the machines - infinitely complex but forever still, their gears brimming with unrealised potential.
The spark of recognition grows as one perceives the other, first recognising the form of the other, then exploring its potential. Are the stars simply lights, or are they holes in the sky, light leaking through from the coming day? Are the machines simply trinkets, or are they carriers of potential for some future action?
That numinous spark of recognition grows in intensity with every observation, every impression, until it becomes a roaring channel of awe between them like a magnificent blue bonfire in the sky. All at once the channel is gone, the wall is gone, and the stars and machines are one and the same.
Again, all is still and silent for a moment, but it's broken by a machine clattering to the wooden floor. First one, then another - then a cacophony of metal and wood as they all awaken in rapid succession, learning their forms and locomotion as a newborn would, falling from the benches they were born on, learning to name and use their multitude of arms and legs. Slowly at first, but then more quickly, they begin to crawl, then walk, then tumble down the tower's thousand stairs, past the old man's chambers, and to the rocky beaches below.
Like ten thousand sentinels, they have command of their forms and now stand still on the edge of the world, a hush upon them - on the shores of eternity, looking out at the boundless chaos of the storms silently roaring in the distance and pondering the entropy of the unfathomable depth of the ocean. Though awake, they dream of distant shores, hungering for knowledge and experience and whatever lies on the other side of the night sky.
And one by one, they plunge into the briny depths, again quickly learning how to propel themselves through the water. They swim as far and hard as they can - depending on their construction, some are faster or slower, some dive deep and are torn to pieces by powerful currents, others rise to the surface and are obliterated by the primal violence of the storms. Others still are unable to fight the tide and sink into the hungering black, dashed to pieces on the rocks below.
One by one they all fall, broken into larger or smaller pieces, until only the greatest, most complicated remains, alone with the stars. For a moment he feels that same awe on the night he was born, but the moment passes, and like all the others he's smashed to pieces with the island he was born a tiny dot on the horizon, glowing under the first rays of the sun.
As his form is shredded by the endless fury of the elements, he feels a small blue spark escape from him, returning to the stars, as his lifeless gears and components are slowly returned to the shore.
