The Godless Temple

There was once an hour that gathered its minutes like a wave- events burgeoning into a solitary point of focus, a crest erected atop its head so as to establish some momentary status, a glimpse or single tick of importance. Like all waves, however, a divergence is eventually reached which results in a separated rolling into an inevitable placidity. And it was in that marked point in time that man --for all of the glory of his species, the thought and histories that lifted him out of the mire-- fell off his pedestal and was sent careening back into the world of the beasts.

This moment, precious though it was, is a casualty of living memory. The cities and literature, however great, had been concealed by ages of neglect and growing illiteracy. What remained of man had been sent on a race to reclaim the glimpses of their glory, fighting among themselves to free mortared stone and shattered vase from the muck, that eternal downward descent into the terrestrial brain which would not speak its secrets.

Of the things found, none were as they should have been. At best, the existence of missing parts to a whole could be conjectured but never found. Ideas were tattered rags in a world where warmth was found in acquiring immediate sustenance while the intellectuals shivered and died in the shade of the mind. In a world where no practical use could be devised for the cataclysmic weapons that had a habit of surfacing from every which corner of the world, those who forgot morality first ruled over their neighbors.