Rotted from Within

The obelisk split the sky.

Once a monument of marble and pride, the Washington Monument now stood blackened and fractured—its reflection shattered in the floodwaters pooling around the fallen capital. Lightning stitched the horizon, illuminating the skeletal remains of the city that had once ruled a continent.

And at the center of it all stood Silen.

He watched from a distance, his coat whipping in the sulfurous wind, as the ground trembled beneath the monument. The storm had not come from the heavens—it had risen from below. The foundations of power were collapsing, quite literally, as the sins of the old world tore through the surface like a wound that would not heal.

The obelisk groaned—a long, hollow note like the dying breath of an empire. Then came the sound of splitting stone. The earth beneath it buckled, cracked, and finally gave way. A chasm opened wide, swallowing the reflecting pool, the marble steps, the flags, and the ghosts of speeches long forgotten.

Silen stood transfixed. He had seen the end coming for years—how corruption, greed, and ideology had devoured reason itself. The politicians had called themselves saviors, prophets of progress, promising salvation through control. The people had believed them, handing over their freedoms for comfort, their dignity for illusion.

When the first pandemic hit, it had only taken months for truth to become treason. When the second wave of lies came, it was called policy. And when rebellion finally sparked, it was too late. The Republic had already rotted from within.

Now, as Washington D.C. sank into its own grave, Silen felt no triumph. Only the weight of inevitability.

He knelt beside the fissure as the last of the monument slid into darkness. From deep below, a pulse of light—red and gold—flared and then vanished, like the dying heart of the world.

He knew what it meant. The collapse was not just the end of a city—it was the tearing open of something far older, something the founders had warned of in principle, if not in name: the destruction of moral order, the breaking of the covenant that bound the nation to its ideals.

Ash fell like snow. The storm raged. And somewhere beneath the ruined capital, something stirred in the dark—a whisper of the rebellion yet to come, the murmur of those who would build again.

Silen turned away from the abyss, his face ghostly in the flickering lightning.
There would be no restoring the old world.

But perhaps… perhaps there was still hope to forge a new one from the ashes.

He whispered into the wind:

“The obelisk has fallen. The lie has ended. Now begins the reckoning.”