A Harvest of Hollow Idols
28 parts Complete In a nation drunk on nostalgia for a greatness that never was, a cunning Patriarch, believing himself chosen by God, makes a devil's bargain: to forge a new world, he must first create its god.
He stitches his heir together from the rotten parts of history, nepotism, flattery, and inherited privilege and unleashes this hollow idol upon the land. To serve this new regime, he offers women a gilded cage: renounce your mind, your alliances, your very self, and you will be crowned a "Crown-Consort", a jeweled accessory to power, worshipped for your obedience.
Those who sense the rot the artists, the healers, the thinkers vanish into the night, guided by a secret network that leads them to a new world. They choose freedom over gilding.
But those who remain, the "Loyal-Jewels," clutch their privileges tightly. They betray their sisters for a ribbon of approval, enforce the new scriptures that declare silence a virtue, and marvel at the splendor of their shrinking world. They believe their devotion will protect them. They are wrong.
For a society that devours its own soul soon hungers for other meat. As the Patriarch's heir ascends, propped up by the fervor of his followers, the laws twist into grotesque new shapes. The sermons grow violent, the spectacles bloody. The Loyal-Jewels, in their sapphire gowns and emerald chains, find the walls of their cage are not made of gold, but of knives, and they are trapped inside with the monster they helped to create.
It is the confession of the most celebrated Loyal-Jewel of them all, who now writes from the ruins, telling the tale of how they harvested a world of hollow idols and found nothing inside but dust and hunger.