The air.
It whistles past my face, rips through the strands of my hair,
Slides over my skin, stretched tight across my knuckles,
The only movement in this sad, dark, cold
place.
Just me and the wind.
Ten million sorrows are locked here, immobile,
Frozen in this space in a cruel trick of posturing and preemption.
They were the lucky ones
To have been swept away in an instant,
No pain, no regret, no tortured continuation of this pathetic strand of life
To trap and trick them into the inspiration of progress,
The fallacy that the human spirit is immortal.
They know the truth:
Unmistakable
In raw intensity,
In fire, in ice,
In sound, in fury,
In an instant.
It was our oath, our sovereign promise,
And we failed. In our moment of glory,
Of power, of triumph over the dark child of mankind
We could not not stop it.
We submit this
Our yearly penance
As weregild,
Tax levied by our past.
Read this upon our ashes,
Upon the brittle remains of souls--
They died where others did not--
And forget not the coals.
/Still not the Archons/