As I sat down in the back of the launch, I stumbled upon an image of Mother Nature that sent shivers down my spine. For I had found her badly beaten body lying on the cold stone floor of a fantasy that’d been forged in hell. Unable to free her from the chains that fettered her to the floor of this fantasy, I stooped to wipe her badly bruised and battered face, but broke down crying instead. As she reached out to comfort me, of all things, I took hold of her terribly mangled fingers and, with great care, kissed them.
“Thank you, my son,” she painfully uttered with the distortion that’d once been her mouth.
“Who has done this to thee, my lady, that I might avenge thee?” I demanded to know.
“Why the beast you call Brute Force!” she exclaimed.
“That cannot be,” I retorted, “for I, myself, have seen his demise.”
“You have seen the demise of but a shadow of the collective beast,” she reiterated with great pain, “which, like Cain, doeth yet terrorize those able to withstand the temptation to use brute force.
“To defeat the evil beast, once and for all, you must slay the great dragon with which he doeth sleep,” she painstakingly added, “for nothing is more dangerous than sincere ignorance nor mightier than sincere truth—the double-edged sword set in stone, long ago, to keep it out of unscrupulous hands.
“In defense of the truth only, may you draw upon its incredible power,” she concluded with a sigh too deep for words.
