This whole godforsaken patch of earth is a message, a screaming billboard stapled to the hide of time itself.
We didn’t carve this warning because we were bored; we were a civilisation swollen with technology and hubris, insensible on our own power, convinced we were emperors cosmic...
But what we created outlasted even our most obscene desires.
Yet - listen closely now - this is not a monument. There is no glory here, nor does it approach. This is no noble place of conquest to bring you peace, or worth, or power.
There is no treasure or meaning here for your
beautiful
living
future
hands.
There is nothing here but the residue of our least kept worst secrets. What we made and could not unmake. What we knew would come back to bite us in our literal and figurative arses.
What lies below is a grotesque insult to life itself. A great, toxic, fragile and angry sword hanging over us that made us roll in fitful sleep.
A horror we bottled and buried like loons trying to conceal an angry cougar under a picnic blanket.
But we knew what we were doing, so this is a warning - one scratched into the wall by the last inmate before they broke free from all hope and senses. Still, even the wretched know what they fear most.
It is a warning against a danger with a pulsing hateful heart growing more foul, and defiling more of what makes you true, the nearer you approach.
Down beneath whatever gods you pray to now, beneath the dirt and bones and your very own hope lies a pocket of energy that does not care about you.
It didn’t care about us either.
And here’s the pitiful gift we give; It did not mellow with age, or fade like us. It’s just as vicious now as when we sealed it away like an angry demon in its fragile bottle. It will eat your body alive. It will unmake you in ways you couldn't and we didn’t have words for. Its shape is not claws, or teeth, or hunger - but a dark, consuming emanation.
Invisible, silent, patient.
The kind of threat that hums softly while it makes your organs stumble, exhausted, with their heads in their hands weeping.
But this monster, small mercies, will only wake if you disturb its crypt. Do not dig, disturb, drill, or desecrate. You’ll open the wrong door on the wrong side of midnight to find only that the whole place, like you, is fucked.
Leave it. Pretend you never saw it. Jog on.
SHUN THIS PLACE lest your fate matches ours. There are reasons we are gone, and what you stand upon is just one.
Let it sleep.
Let yourself live.
And stay soft, warm and beautiful in the light.