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And so the procession endures,

each figure bound to the other by invisible filaments—

regret, nostalgia, the dull ache of repetition.

The pit is not merely a place, but a process,

an endless rehearsal of the same grim spectacle:

faces turned upward, blinking at the staged dawn,

Mouths working to form the old watchwords,

The rituals of belonging and banishment.

To climb is to be dragged down,

To reach for light is to find only the glare of interrogation,

The unblinking eye of judgment

That measures worth in increments of obedience.

Time here is not a river, but a stagnant pool,

its surface broken only by the occasional ripple

Of madness or vision, quickly subsumed.

Only the laws of necessity prevail,

Written in the scrawl of broken bodies,

The ledger of wounds and betrayals.

The pit becomes both cradle and grave,

Mother and executioner,

And the dream of escape flickers and dies,

Rekindled only when the silence grows unbearable.

There are nights when the dust in the streets

Glows faintly, as if remembering a time before the decline,

And the air is thick with the sense of something unspoken

Pressing against the edge of speech.

In these moments, the faded edges of memory

Seem less like gravestones

And more like signposts for the lost,

Each a scar in the marble

Becoming a map of what was endured.

The world waits not for another god

But for the answer to a question it cannot phrase.

There is a reckoning to be made, not with gods or kings,

But with an enemy that is flesh and bone.

The silence is not empty, but expectant,

and even the dust seems to hold its breath.

The end is not a closing, but a folding back—

A return to the first word, the first breath,

The moment before the fall of falls, when anything was possible.