Once upon a time, there was golem made of bismuth. It stood a tall 8' 7" and weighed more than a tonne. Its body was covered in broad iridescent scales, and its head resembled the head of a large horned lizard. It was sculpted in such a way that it appeared like it was clad in full obscuring armor.

The bismuth golem frequented a garden, an overgrown garden overrun by weeds and thistles. The garden was but a part of a larger demesne. The garden in which the golem resides was once fraught with beautifully trimmed rose bushes, but its glory days had passed and its former majesty had faded after many years of neglect.

The golem patrolled the whole domain, but it preferred to tarry longest in the neglected garden. Nobody is not quite sure why. The mind of a golem is more enigmatic than most. A golemeter sculpts the mind of a golem just like how they sculpt the body of a golem.

The golem was diligent in its overwatch. It roamed the demense day in, day out. They trudged through voluminous shrubs and crumbling ruins to inspect every yard of the estate. It drove every and any invader who dared to trespass, and maintained what remained of the manse that once stood as the centerpiece of the estate.

There was once a great gothic manse built upon the center of this land. It stood proud and defiant against the wind. Large fluted columns held its ceilings up and pointed spires rose upwards as if to dare pierce the heavens. Walls half as tall as its facades but no less majestic surrounded, securing the garden and manse from the rest of the world.

A noble family and their corps of servants had once lived here. Nobles and their nobleborn lived in this spacious estate in bliss and luxury. The bismuth golem was tasked to protect and serve them. It had served them for over three hundred years, outliving many of its wards. Long had its name faded and long had its origin turned myth.

Once upon a time, the estate was this, serene and blissful, but after a tragedy that had been etched into its crystalline memory, this place of duty and service would come to an ultimate end. Trespassers had invaded the golem's dominion: they climbed over the walls and dug beneath the foundations. Those that had escaped perishing to the traps that adorned the walls, rampaged on the estate. They brought torches and poison and weapons. The garden was set ablaze and they charged to raze.

The estate had only known peace and quiet, but that streak had been cut short that day. The golem had dealt with invasions in the past, but it had never dealt with an invasions this large before. The invaders were swarming in all directions, overwhelming even the overwhelming bismuth golem.

It pulped all the miscreants that dared to trespass its dominion, to attempt to lay a hand on its wards. Its poleaxe swung wild in the battle, sweeping many attackers to the ground. In the overuse against wave after wave of marauders, its weapon was mangled badly and had lost all the possible advantage it could get from its steel polearm. The golem resorted to its fists to crush the remaining invaders that were harassing it.

Blood soaked the dirt, most of which once belonged inside a victim's body. Various weapons alongside their dead wielders were scattered around. The golem stood in the middle of it, bathed in the blood of invaders, bathed in more blood than it had ever witnessed and produced, surrounded by torn bodies of plucky invaders. Its shiny scales were full of nicks and stained with dark blood. It stood resolute and unyielding.

The golem bent to the ground and picked up another weapon to arm itself, a bec de corbin once belonging to a hapless warrior who perished against the golem with a fist that crushed his chest. It turned to face more battles until all the invaders had been driven off the estate or dead.

The manse was aflame. Puddles of blood filled the halls. Screams of nobleborn and servants alike echoed in the corridors, masked by the barbaric shouts of the invasive reprobates. The sound of hammers impacting stone rang in the chambers as the superstructure shook as their holding pillars were being taken down. Above it all was the crackles of blazing fire consuming all the kindling that lay within.

The guards lay dead and broken on the floor, laying in the puddles of their own blood. They have been trained to resist invasions, but they have grown lax and overconfident in the presence of the bismuth golem. While the golem may equal an army, it could only be in one place. Many others could slip its grasp and wreak havoc among the residents.

In the midst of the celebrations of the rogues who had stormed the manor, a sound of metal meeting stone rang in the hallways. They had killed all the inhabitants of the estate, but they were yet unable to fell one. They hollered in the chambers the golem held sacred, their voices audible over the roaring flames.

Soon, the golem would meet face to face with the rest of marauding force. A borrowed weapon in its hand and a standard procedure in its mind, it stood ready to weed out the scoundrels that besieged its demense. The scoundrels looked upon the dwelling's guardian standing on the doorstep of a burning building, coated in bloody grime and shallow nicks.

The golem's heartless eyes stared into the barbarians souls that stood celebratorily on the bloody backyard. Then, it charged forward into the mass of arsonist warriors. At the end of the day, only one would stand alone on the estate's grounds.

It swung the polearm in its hand with great force that it tore open one man's side and ripped another's shoulder. A shower of gore sprayed from the swing. The warriors' astonishment were shortlived as they drew swords and spears to battle the bismuth construct.

The trespassers swarmed the golem just as many who had done so near the start of their siege. The golem dodged and parried their strikes skillfully

While a few strikes manage to slip through its defenses, their dull blades did near nothing to its mineral constitution. Pulped flesh and pulverised bone began to pile around as fighter after fighter assailed the golem.

Some had grown wise and fled the battle, but they wouldn't escape the golem's laser-focused objective. Some ran to the garden where they witnessed the fate of the others who fought the golem. Some hid in the burning manse where they were baked and entombed. Some scaled the high walls where they struck down by the golem's spear throws. A few others managed to escape in the tunnels they dug to flee from the battle. The golem did not pursue. Its purpose had been done: trespassers had been driven away.

The bismuth golem stood tall that day, as it always had, but the domain that it had been created to protect were in ruins. The manse had crumbled into a pile of malachite rubble, and the furnishings within had been reduced to soot and ash. The once well-maintained grounds were littered with corpses and the soil itself was stained with blood.

Many would attribute pride in its duty and shame in its failure, but golem held no feelings on the things that had occured. The golem was without feeling, emotionless. Emotions may be attributed to the actions it had done, but it did it all by rote.

The golem had always been this way, and will continue to be for years to come. Even after decades after that event, the golem still did what it was made to do. Long after the corpses had turned to dirt and the estate had overgrown, the golem still trod the same paths to oversee its dominion.

The golem was many things, but stupid it was not. It was able to decipher what its masters' true wishes were from their words and manners. It would enact to the spirit whatever order it had been given. It does not take things literally; it understands what idioms were. Even if there were things it could not understand, it could learn to understand; things could be explained and elaborated to it. In its long tireless service, it eventually could do work any non-golem servant could do and sometimes even better. Some of its wards even regarded the golem as thinking, sentient.

But the golem was not sentient.

Certainly, the golem was partly sapient. It was capable of reason and understanding, but it ultimately was incapable of feeling and personal thought. It could not harbor opinions or emotions. It was numb to pain and despair. It could remember and recall, but it could not relate or emote. It was a creature of rote: it did what it was taught.

But it could learn.

The golem is many things, and able to learn was one of them. Long had its wards perished, long had its commanders perished, the golem was given no orders and chores. It roamed and overlooked the estate, and drove away invaders. There was nothing to learn, there was no order to enact, no request to decipher, and so its ability to learn tried to find something to learn.

Because even creatures of rote could learn to learn, and soon the bismuth golem did learn. With nothing else to learn, the golem learned things. It learned of things it wouldn't have bothered or even be able to learn. It learned to act on its own accord. It learned to inspect things though irrelevant. It learned that it could act without command.

Then it began to wonder what things it could have done beyond what had been asked of it. It had learned to be curious. What could it have done beyond guarding and serving? It could have tended to the flowers and carved lines into the dirt.

One day, the bismuth had began to wonder what lay beyond the malachite walls. For all its existence, the wall had stood surrounding the estate, a barrier that separated the estate from the rest of the world. It had never glimpsed what lay outside for all it had ever cared for lay within.

The golem examined the lofty walls. The stone it was comprised of had cracked and had fallen apart. Much of its facade were covered in flowering ivy, and its once splendid green stone had faded, and downpours had drawn water stains on the walls like hanging roots.

The golem turned to its bismuth hands. At that time, they were old. The golem had become a dull dark grey, coated in dirt. Its chipped scales had lost their iridescent luster, but beneath the surface appearance of the golem, the inhuman power it possessed had never ceased its flow.

The golem turned to the cracked wall. It gripped its hands into crevices and began to scale. The wall had stood twenty-fold its own height, but the golem went undaunted. The golem understood no fear. It ascended the wall swiftly, carrying its heavy body high into the sky until its hands had gripped the edge of the top.

After the arduous climb, the golem found itself on the ramparts of the protective walls. The metal spikes that once adorned these walls had rusted away long ago. Looking around, the golem had found itself overlooking the land.

It saw the sorry ruins of the manse its purpose revolved. It saw the neglected gardens being overgrown with small trees and untrimmed plants. It saw the grounds rife with lush grass growing from their dark soil. It could see the web of paths it took on patrolling the demesne from the lines of crushed foliage. On the other side, it saw the crumbling walls being overtaken with ivy, and their stone had fully turned into a greenish-grey.

Its vantage point did not only overlook the domain it oversaw, it also overlooked the surrounding countryside. It found the manse it protected stood atop a hill surrounded by a verdant forest. Out in the distance, it could see columns of white smoke rising from brick chimneys. Arising above the tree canopies, alongside the smoke and chimneys, were the roofs of particularly tall buildings. The golem had never seen such roofs, tiled with dark slate; for all its life, the only roof it knew were the spiked domed roofs of the manse.

And that was just the west side. On the eastern side of the demense it could see a vast expanse of dark blue. It shimmered in the sunlight and stretched ontowards infinity where it met with the sky. The golem turned its eyes lower, to where the blue met with the land and saw a strip of land covered solely in dark sand. Upon the shores, it spied a small bright blue boat. It was too far to make out, but it could see that there was a light-haired creature in a red parka sitting inside that distant boat.