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IDEATION
On a foul reeking vessel at anchor two miles from shore, vicious sailors and commanders prepared what was to occur in the morn.
EXECUTION
Boots landed, marched, poured into the village, the plunder began. Huts were torched, women raped. No law nor notion of it. A child fled in terror, then dropped. Parents slain, he wriggled on the ground, cried in wordless vulnerability, and bid the earth itself, the soil, homely turf, roots and worms, to take and protect him. The earth opened and did.
CONSEQUENCE
On the ashes a city rose, itself now a ruin. And on these ruins in turn, now rises REDACTED. Palaces, temples were dug when REDACTED was founded, lost rituals, superstitions imagined, guessed, explained. Corrupt academics visited, wrote falsehoods, took bribes. But on the streets the working man has no time for lore. A new corrupt class rules. They parcel the land to be mined. RITA was seen, now and before. Who's he? A superstition, no doubt.
RUIN
Despair continues. The pulling, the darkness, the taste of wet, black tar. A feeling of apparent stillness, secret motion. Burrowing, deconstructing. Injecting, poking. Sucking. Sucking out. Stakes slowly driven. And now pain. Searing pain in distinct shots. And now hunger. Hunger the like of which not felt in many reckonings. It used to be appeased, yes. Now he remembers how it was. This is not the end of anguish. It's the waking up of it. Mouths close, shrill voices somewhere.