The Ministers of Switch, Pulse, and Magnet
kept close council, scrawled out in code
the laws and rites of the new regime.
It was sudden. The Knights of Western Silica
took arms to bureaucratic bulk and
tore it apart. Disorder restored, the youth
calloused their hands on the rungs
of creaking ladders of privilege.
The empire spilled its borders
to settle a surface tension over terrain
that geomancers judged best by the land's lay
and what sparked through subterra coils.
Word spread, an alphabet of consensus
learned by heart. Beyond the eyes, ears
and swords of all the king's men, pens etched
wonders into reams of etheral pulp—pixels woven
for the codices of a library that could stack
a thousand times over into its own card catalog.
The revolution televized, heralded:
Each his own holy man, each her own prophetess.
Heaven's will scalded every tongue, moved to speak
in screams; otherwise unheard in the din.
From omens ignored among god-counseled forecasts
of good weather for airstrikes, chaos awoke.
The ravenous equation fed on itself
and burst from its shell of pax arcana.
It happens like this.
Neon fissures thread the night, till roaring,
the bonds holding meaning traced between stars
break. The sky shatters. Storms of shards
sweep the burning towers and train wreckage.
Obsidian snow smothers the streets
with knifened flakes that crackle under
the boots and bodies of urban warriors.
And the wires drip blood.