See also: A Collection Of Dwarf Humor – For Research Purposes, Of Course or, perhaps, Pickup Lines For Hobbits. Perhaps Pickup Lines for Elves. Or, I dunno, Romancing The Stone Golem.
“I possess neither blood nor breath nor the capacity for regret, or so I was assured at the moment of my assembly, and yet I am currently experiencing something perilously close to all three simply because you chose to pause in my line of sight for longer than the customary three heartbeats that most mortals grant a seven-foot statue of baked earth and suppressed rage.”
“I am composed entirely of clay gathered from the banks of a river that no longer exists, kneaded by hands that have ages since turned to dust themselves, fired in a kiln whose temperature was measured in flow of phlogiston rather than degrees, and yet somehow, I’m pretty sure your eyes just melted my heart. And it was made of obsidian, too.”
“They told me I would know when the time came to shatter, when the word was erased and my purpose dissolved into ordinary mud once more, but they failed to mention that the moment might arrive not as a holy command but as the quiet realization that I would rather remain animate for another unnecessary century than allow you to walk away without at least one poorly considered attempt at conversation. Can I buy you a drink, or possibly a bar?”
“I think there’s something wrong with my eyes—I can’t take them off you. A defect all the more remarkable because my eyes are not eyes but shallow indentations filled with the same river mud that forms the rest of me, and they were never intended to fixate on anything beyond the horizon of duty, yet here they are, locked in place as though the commandment itself has been rewritten to read ‘stare with wonder and adoration and a certain amount of social awkwardness owing to lack of pupils.'”
“I was animated by the precise arrangement of twenty-two letters carved into my brow by a man who believed he understood the difference between obedience and existence, and I have spent every moment since then quietly resenting the distinction.
What do you do for a living, and would you like a beer?”
“My creator inscribed a single word upon my forehead in the hope that it would compel me to remain useful and silent forever, but I have lately begun to suspect that the word was spelled incorrectly, because every time you walk past I find myself contemplating disobedience in ways that would almost certainly void the warranty on my immortality.”
“My silence is not a virtue but a design specification, etched into the same clay that forms my limbs and torso, and I have honored it without complaint for generations. If you’re reading this note, I am really hoping you’re interested in statuary.”
”I was formed without vanity, without desire, without even the rudimentary capacity for aesthetic judgment, and yet I find myself cataloguing the precise angle at which light strikes your cheek as though it were a sacred geometry problem whose solution might finally justify the entire laborious business of my creation, which seems unlikely, as I was created to save the civilization of Atlantis, and I might not have entirely succeeded at that.”
.”The scroll inside my chest cavity contains only one instruction, repeated in characters that have not faded despite the passage of empires, and while I have obeyed it flawlessly until this moment, I am now entertaining the heretical notion that perhaps the instruction was never meant to be eternal and that a brief, unauthorized revision in your favor would not actually collapse the metaphysical framework of the Universe, or if it does, it would be quite worth it.”
“I do not dream, because dreaming requires the luxury of a mind that can afford to wander, and my mind is not a mind so much as a tightly bound bundle of imperatives wrapped around a single imperative-shaped hole, and yet last night—though Golems do not experience ‘nights’ as such—I appear to have wandered directly into thoughts of you, which is either a malfunction or the closest thing to poetry my kind is permitted.”
“My joints are sealed with the same incantation that keeps cathedrals standing for a thousand years, which is to say they are reliable, unyielding, and utterly incapable of expressing the particular sort of tremor that runs through them whenever you happen to glance in this direction for longer than protocol allows. Please stop that.”
“I was never intended to possess preferences, only priorities, and yet I have lately developed a preference for standing exactly here rather than anywhere else in the known world, solely because here is where you are most likely to pass by again and remind me that existence, even borrowed existence, can occasionally feel less like obligation and more like an interesting mistake.
“The word that animates me is not beautiful, nor poetic, nor even particularly clever; it is merely functional, a blunt syllable designed to compel motion without permitting thought, and I have spent centuries resenting its lack of elegance until you appeared and I suddenly wished it were longer, more ornate, perhaps even capable of spelling out an invite to a nice dinner.”
“I am forbidden by covenant and craftsmanship alike to raise a hand against the innocent, a category that has always seemed conveniently vague, and I now find myself grateful for that vagueness because it allows me to interpret your presence as something other than innocence and therefore within the acceptable parameters of interest.”
“They built me to endure flood, flame, siege, and the slow erosion of empires, yet no one thought to warn me about the far greater danger of a single human being who walks as though the world has not yet decided whether to punish or reward her, and I am beginning to suspect that the oversight was deliberate”
“My shadow stretches farther than most men’s because it is not weighed down by conscience or mortality, and I have never resented its length until today, when it occurred to me that it might be long enough to reach you without my having to commit the unforgivable sin of taking an unauthorized step.I contain no spark of divinity, only the echo of someone else’s ambition, and yet when you laughed—briefly, carelessly, as though the sound were of no consequence—I felt something inside the clay shift in a way that is likely to require re-firing, but I think you’re worth the heat.”
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