The Lysander Gospel- Prequel to Melancholia's Elegy

Part Five

   I'm dead, you, see? Just a ghost in the empty expanse halls of my own making, screaming into

 the void, and it doesn't matter if anyone hears me. It doesn't matter at all because that's the

 rotten truth of this life—the grand cosmic joke where the punchline is your own damn existence.

   Look at them down there, those hollow-eyed false saints of the SRC, clad in their polished

 fascades, prattling on about progress while they shove it up into our brains with their

 godforsaken system. They're nothing but puppets dancing on strings, and I was foolish enough

 to think I could cut those strings. To think I could forge a new path for humanity—ah, what a

 joke! 

   They dole out a salvation that suffocates us under the weight of their dogma, their sterile

 ideals that have nothing to do with the dirt beneath our nails or the sweat on our brows.

And what about my grandfather? He left this legacy of faith, a heaping mound of dust and

 promises that turned to ash in my mouth. "Mars is New Jerusalem," he said, with that starry-

eyed naivety of a lost soul chasing a mirage. But what did it matter? We built a city of glass and

 steel that gleamed in the desolate Martian sun, a shining monument to our own hubris, while

 the dust outside thickened around us like a shroud. A bloody sanctuary turned into a tomb!

   My father, that wretched architect of industry, strove for wealth and recognition—God, what a

 drivel! He taught me how to measure worth in credits and contracts, how to wrap my hands

 around the throats of profits, but what did it bring him? Nothing but a cold grave, and here I am,

 inheritor of the empire of dreams, A grand king I was to become, the new Ozymandias, well, just

 another fool. I became him, didn't I.

   And me—damn myself for a fool! I thought I could lead, that I could rally the lost and broken

 souls around me, and we would ascend, free from the shackles of what was. But I was a

 charlatan, a snake oil salesman wrapped in delusions of grandeur, luring the desperate into a

 nightmare of my own creation. I wanted to save them, to lift them from the filth and bind them

 to the divine, yet I was blind—blind to the fact that the divine is just as fallible, just as lost as we

 are. God, where were YOU in that moment of despair? Where were YOU when the flames

 consumed our dreams, when the screams echoed through the silence?

   I wanted unity, a cosmogenesis of man and nature, but all I achieved was white hot chaos. The

 ship was supposed to be our salvation, our ticket to a new beginning, but instead, it became our

 bomb—a metal powder keg exploding into oblivion. What was I thinking? That I could carve out

 a destiny with my bare hands? That I could rewrite the very fabric of existence with faith alone?

 The universe chuckled at my foolishness, and I burned, oh how I burned!

   I am dead now, forever of raging and regretting,yet my spirit remains here, thrashing against

 the  confines of my own failure. Icurse the SRC, my grandfather, my father, myself, and yes, even

 the heavensabove. I shout into the abyss, demanding an answer, a reckoning, but the stars

 blink back, cold and indifferent. I am just another voice lost in the noise,another martyr in the

 grand play of existence, and as I drift away intonothingness, I realize perhaps it was never about

 finding the path but learningto live with the chaos of having lost it all.