Into the darkness

Once, the great universities stood as beacons of knowledge, temples of free thought and intellectual discovery. But those days were gone. Now, they were indoctrination centers, churning out zealots instead of scholars. The walls echoed not with debate but with slogans—endless chants against systems the students barely understood, fed to them by professors who had long since abandoned the pursuit of truth for the worship of ideology.

Amid the smoldering remnants of what was once Whitaker University marched a girl named Mara, a sophomore literature major. Her face was painted with righteous anger, her eyes shining with purpose as she clutched a sign that read, "Tear Down the System!" Around her, students screamed through megaphones, smashed windows, and scrawled graffiti across the stone façade of the university library: “Decolonize Everything.” “Burn the Past.” “No Borders, No Brains.”

Mara believed she was fighting for justice. She believed she was tearing down oppression, striking a blow against tyranny. She never noticed that the only things being destroyed were the very institutions that once empowered voices like hers. She had never read the Constitution she claimed to despise. She had never asked what would rise from the ashes of the nation she called evil. All she knew was that her professors told her to be outraged—and so she was.

Beside her was Theo, an engineering student with more rage than reason. He had been told his future was stolen, that the world owed him reparations, apologies, and endless accommodations. When he lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the student records building, he cheered with the others, never realizing he had just erased his own degree.

They were joined by hundreds more—faces painted with slogans, fists raised in fury, convinced they were on the right side of history. And perhaps they were, in the most ironic sense: they were history—the kind that marked the end of civilizations.

Within the professor’s lounge, Dr. Kessler watched the smoke rise from his office window. He sipped his coffee with trembling hands. For years, he had warned of this. He had tried to teach the works of Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Burke—only to be accused of hate speech. The administration pushed him into silence, into compliance. And now, it was too late. The revolution had arrived, and it did not distinguish friend from foe.

On the edge of campus, a lone janitor named Mr. Hall stood with his mop in hand, watching the flames devour the building he’d cleaned for thirty years. He had no slogan, no ideology—just a bitter taste in his mouth and a quiet question in his heart: How did it come to this?

The answer was simple, and horrifying. The students had been taught to hate the very soil they stood on. And like children playing with matches in a library, they did not understand the value of what they were burning—until it was gone.

But by then, the fire had spread beyond the campus walls. Law and order were retreating. Justice had been redefined. And what was left behind was not a better world—but a world stripped of memory, of identity, of sanity.

A world tipping into a new dark age.