And Then There Were None

 

The true nature of North. Instead of being abandoned, as he had almost hoped, for who could bear these torrents of voices and responsibilities and roles in a destiny unfulfilled, who could bear the urgency and lack of reason and the universality and the frightening nature of it all. But there it was.

If it be your will, he thought he would never write again. But instead they gathered in protective determination, all the ruined villages and spooky medieval churches against leaden dark skies and cliched crows and forlorn lives on the edge of starvation, all of them determined to vanish. 

The authorities and technocrats abandoned on point, for his own failure and the nefarious nature of their world. We couldn't be here and there at the same time. Well, we could, but you were boring and predictable, and the self flagellation was too tedious to bear. 

And so he stood up and beat his chest like some circus bear, and the ancients gathered because there was something that had to be done, and the betrayals, they were endless, to err is human. Mistakes happen. God forbid we should be filled with regret. There was something at his age, an age that came as much as a surprise to him as it probably came to everybody else, a time and a place, a long sought, ethereal wisdom which provided, in fact, no comfort, for self abnegation and the absence of thought, the oblivion seeker he so easily became, well he just distracted himself with American political podcasts, colourful in the wake of the public execution or assassination of Charlie Kirk and the rise of Candace Owens.

All was their loves. All was their lives. Here was quiet, his head an ossuary. 

Until the time of the great rallying, as all sides talked of God and a spiritual war. And he became determined to finish what he started.