The Lysander Gospel- Prequel to Melancholia's Elegy

Part Two

      As my father's health faded later in his life, I would visit him, sitting beside his bed in the cold,

 sterile glow of our medical ward. He would ask me about the business, the latest venture or

 some new project on Ganymede or Phobos, and I'd answer, dutiful and distant.

   When he finally did die, taking over my father's empire should have brought me some sense of

 satisfaction, but all I felt was the hollow echo of his ambition. InterSolar Orbital was a powerful

 entity in the cold recesses of Mars, yes, its reach spanning from the dusted red plains of Chryse

 Planitia to the outermost mining stations among the asteroids. 

   Yet, it all seemed trivial to me now, a pointless accumulation of wealth and power built on an

 altar of empty promises. I began to see it all like that; Mars, Earth, the Council—for what it truly

 was: a gilded prison. The SRC, for all its claims of preservation and progress, was nothing more

 than a godless council of stewards, an oligarchy dressed in the thin veil of science and 

 "rationalism." The truth being that they held their grip on humanity's soul, stifling every prayer,

 every faint glimmer of meaning that lay beyond their calculated formulas and measured lives,

 meaningless. To them, faith was an artifact, something quaint and forgotten, a relic of

 humanity's primitive years. They tolerated it as one tolerates a fly, before swatting it.

    I saw the SRC as a blight on our future, a decadent regime drunk on its own secular dogma.

 Their so-called "progress" had done nothing but lead us into a sterile, heathenistic existence.

 They clung to the hollow morals of science and reason, deaf to the cries of its divine. They

 would have us worship at the altar of science, of Mans' knowledge for knowledge's sake, tearing

 us further from the eternal truth that lay beyond.