Hums like dying lungs bounce off empty corridors with a slow, uneven rhythm. Moss constricts itself around the stone-walled chambers, as if a python and prey, its patience cruel and endless. Faint lives weave in and out of the darkness; nameless beings that had yet to see the sun, as the moon had swallowed it long ago. A heavy mist hung over, suffocating the light. Through this fog limped the knight, wandering far beyond the borders of memory, seeking a home that would know not of her name.

A voice breaks through the fog, soft but measured, like a hymn from another age.

"Subject identified...

Metal chassis...

Antler fracture... detected."

A silence followed, thicker than the dust the knight crept through. Within it, the hum of circuits from an age beyond sighed.

"Resemblance is... noted," the voice whispered at last, faint and uncertain, as though afraid of its own words. "Though, the master would not walk so heavy..."

Another pause. A click, a flicker, like a thought reforming after centuries of sleep.

"Still..." she spoke, voice trembling with static, "welcome home."

The words settled into the fog long after the voice had faded, and the knight began to move towards them, without knowing why, in the same vein as one might follow a lantern in a dream; chasing merely a glow, never the hand that holds it. Each step closer was a step softer, each corridor further was a corridor narrower, each breath thinner, until the ruin itself seemed to respire around her steel casing.

Cables hung like roots from the ceiling, dripping slow droplets of rust. Faint screens blinked awake as the knight passed them, each one catching her reflection for only a heartbeat before dying once again. The floor was slick with derelict oil, reflecting the faint lights like a still pond. The scent of metal and decay thickened, heavier than incense in a succumbing chapel. Through it all, the words lingered, faint, patient, and waiting.

One screen refused its end, and in its tired glow, the knight saw her: a faded construct, the keeper of dust, a figure pale and motionless, kneeling among ruin. Her metal hands picked delicately at something unseen, her voice floating through the static in fragments of an ancient routine.

"Please remain still...

Contamination detected...

Commencing preservation..."

The knight continued to draw near, and finally, the walls narrowed into a chamber fossilized in moss and wire, where one of the last machines still dreamed. The voice that once haunted the corridors was clearer here, trembling, afraid. There she was, just as the screen had shown her; knee deep in decay, hands poised gently above her little garden of ash.

The construct stirred, head rising methodically, with the slow grace of one waking from prayer. For a moment, she was still, merely watching the knight through the haze. Then, in a voice worn thin by ages, she spoke.

"Master... Is it you?"

Silence; the air between them thinned, long enough for the illusion to wither. The maid's hands faltered, returning to their resting position, the motion small but emphatic. A faint tremor crossed her voice.

"No... The gait is wrong. The shape is much too small." She paused, a strange calm coming over her then, as though relief and regret had found the same place in her heart as she conceded her error. "Forgive me. I must have mistaken you for someone else."

Turning once more to her labors, she brushed the ash with tender, deliberate care. "Still, guests have been rare," she murmured. "Would you like a flower?"

From the dust, she gathered a tangle of wire and rust, constructed with impossible patience into the memory of a lily-of-the-valley, and held it forth.