Jabie
Wanted in Monte Carlo...
Some of the old ones still talk of that day... The day the sky turned to blood and all the angels wept tears of poison. The day when sand smothered the wind, and the fires raged without end, and the steam rose off the seas and the earth cracked into pieces. The day the last of the great human empires fell.
The first blast took many, the rampant disease claimed more and the spectre of starvation haunted those that remained. Rats chasing rats, shadows chasing shadows, none emerged from the darkness unscathed. The cities became graveyards, the towers that once dared to scratch the sky became little more than sepulchres, glossy tombs, signposts of a dead past.
We said we were saved. We said we were the lucky ones. We said we survived. We are the blessed few. But nothing could be further from the truth. In our hearts we knew we were the damned. Doomed to hear to the funeral chime of the lost generation. Doomed to bury the lucky few that had gone on before us. Doomed to climb into the grave beside our brothers, pull a blanket of soil over earthen beds and close our eyes and dream only vacant dreams of oblivion and forgetfulness.
And then came the hate, the recriminations, the scape-goating, the blame, as if any of it mattered any more. God had forsaken us, or worse, maybe he'd just given us the justice we'd always deserved. No longer the freedom of the spirit, no more the joy of the soul. This is what it means to be human: to be hungry and alone, to be scared and helpless.
And little by little, all the nations, all the clans, all the tribes, all the facades of civilization cracked and splintered. Each new cut stripping away a new streak of our arrogance, our pride, our hypocrisy, and who could say that there would be anything left at the end.
We were that close to dying, that close to being nothing more than smear of circumstance, a random collection of freak occurrences that should never have been, a forgotten experiment of a forgotten god, an insignificant blemish neither noticed nor missed in a blind and uncaring cosmos. And only in the suffocating darkness, only when we learnt the true bleak nature of our precarious existence, did we learn to fight back against all that would conspire to destroy us. Only then did we harness all that it meant to be human.
For in the end we learnt that the only true thing that outlives the pain is the fury. That very anger at the heart of every human. The capacity to say No. The ability to say up with this I will not put. The gumption to say this far and no further. The free will to eat that bloody apple and to hell with the consequences. The disobedience that flung us from Eden, that cast out from the gates of Paradise itself.
But Paradise has no place in this world. For now we walk a new path. A path borne of pain and fire. A furrow carved on the back of bitterness, lashed with the sting of sorrow. A road to a new salvation. The Fury Road.
The first blast took many, the rampant disease claimed more and the spectre of starvation haunted those that remained. Rats chasing rats, shadows chasing shadows, none emerged from the darkness unscathed. The cities became graveyards, the towers that once dared to scratch the sky became little more than sepulchres, glossy tombs, signposts of a dead past.
We said we were saved. We said we were the lucky ones. We said we survived. We are the blessed few. But nothing could be further from the truth. In our hearts we knew we were the damned. Doomed to hear to the funeral chime of the lost generation. Doomed to bury the lucky few that had gone on before us. Doomed to climb into the grave beside our brothers, pull a blanket of soil over earthen beds and close our eyes and dream only vacant dreams of oblivion and forgetfulness.
And then came the hate, the recriminations, the scape-goating, the blame, as if any of it mattered any more. God had forsaken us, or worse, maybe he'd just given us the justice we'd always deserved. No longer the freedom of the spirit, no more the joy of the soul. This is what it means to be human: to be hungry and alone, to be scared and helpless.
And little by little, all the nations, all the clans, all the tribes, all the facades of civilization cracked and splintered. Each new cut stripping away a new streak of our arrogance, our pride, our hypocrisy, and who could say that there would be anything left at the end.
We were that close to dying, that close to being nothing more than smear of circumstance, a random collection of freak occurrences that should never have been, a forgotten experiment of a forgotten god, an insignificant blemish neither noticed nor missed in a blind and uncaring cosmos. And only in the suffocating darkness, only when we learnt the true bleak nature of our precarious existence, did we learn to fight back against all that would conspire to destroy us. Only then did we harness all that it meant to be human.
For in the end we learnt that the only true thing that outlives the pain is the fury. That very anger at the heart of every human. The capacity to say No. The ability to say up with this I will not put. The gumption to say this far and no further. The free will to eat that bloody apple and to hell with the consequences. The disobedience that flung us from Eden, that cast out from the gates of Paradise itself.
But Paradise has no place in this world. For now we walk a new path. A path borne of pain and fire. A furrow carved on the back of bitterness, lashed with the sting of sorrow. A road to a new salvation. The Fury Road.
