The Governor's Mercy

AltHistory

Put down the icons. They did not stop the swellings in your throats, nor did they keep the frost from your bones last winter. You live in a graveyard of grey stone. You call it a cathedral; I call it a thermal failure. These walls are too thick to breathe and too cold to sustain a living man. You huddle in the shadows of a dead god, shivering in a dampness that reeks of old incense and rot. Observe the geometry of your misery. You build upward to reach a heaven that remained silent while your children turned black and died in the streets. You spent centuries hauling granite from the earth to create monuments to a fear of the dark. It is an inefficient use of labor. It is, quite frankly, an absurdity. In the south, in the cities of my fathers, we build with the earth itself. We use the mud, the straw, and the sun. Our walls breathe. They hold the heat of the day to ward off the chill of the night. It is a rational architecture. It does not seek to intimidate the heavens; it seeks to harmonize with the ground. We do not fight the environment; we employ it. You speak of your traditions. Your tradition is a ledger of losses. I offer you the libraries of Timbuktu. I offer you the study of the stars, the precision of algebra, and a law that does not require the torture of the flesh to prove a point. You are children playing in the ruins of a house that burned down around you. Stop trying to glue the shards together. I will give you the clay. I will give you the masons. I will give you the books. But you must leave the stone to the crows. It is time to stop praying to the silence and start listening to the wind. The mercy I offer is not a pardon, but a correction.