A toxic dynamic.
They assembled,
not to ask,
but to declare.
“Confess,” they murmured,
“repent what you are.”
To speak of sorrow
was already a crime.
The weight of the altar
outweighed a hundred lives.
A place was carved in silence:
the bowed,
the diminished.
To stand apart
was to invite the blade of belonging.
Not deeds,
but existence was the fault.
A pause became guilt,
a feeling, madness.
To ask respect was jest.
To keep an identity,
sacrilege.
The idol was small,
yet insatiable.
Fragile,
yet worshipped all the more.
The throne was young,
yet proclaimed eternal.
The mask was thin,
yet no one dared touch it.
How dare one not adore?
Doubt became envy,
distance became disease.
Leave, and you become an exile of your own name;
we will unweave you from the fabric until there is nothing left to miss.
Yet mercy is a coin kept in the dark:
keep a scrap of humility, bow so the light cannot find you,
and a sliver of yourself may be left to breathe.
In their hall of echoes,
judgment turned to ritual,
ritual to chant,
and chant to law.
Each voice lost itself
in the next,
until no origin
could be found.
“I” dissolved into “we,”
a chorus of borrowed tongues.
The throne sat behind silence,
untouchable.
Every path toward it
ended at the same sealed gate,
guarded by chosen hands,
zealous enough to echo its sorrow
until their own throats bled.
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