For All Will Be One

(Unearthed, the archaeologists discovered the skull of a man. It was pre-union, but dated to around The Epoch. Wads of paper had been stuffed into it’s jaw, and careful examination showed these the remains of an unaddressed letter. What survived of the manuscript can be read below.)

Let it not be said they are unkind. It was but for the asking that I was given pen and paper to write to you. It is tomorrow, and I feel it. Had they not allowed me a window or any recourse to know time, I’d have still known.

The meals they spare me are of poor quality, but I little doubt anyone here is eating well say for select officers. I breakfasted upon jerky, and expect little more until dinner, say that the snow is melting and a cool stream between the cell’s bars flows. From this I must be careful, for though it is clean and refreshes me, it is cold—I must stay warm. I am shortly to be much colder than I am now.

Forgive me my morbid ramblings. It has been on my mind, my death. I wonder at it. Shall I know myself dead? Will it be like a dark dream with no memory? I can’t say. I had a friend who told me he’d come back to life as an animal after dying. It sounded something like purgatory, except the earth is the place of purging ourselves.

To be honest, he’s not one I’d believe upon such things; a superstitious fellow, always worried about offending some god he’d done no wrong to in the first place. I liked him though, honest. He was awash in backwards ideas that seemed to run him ragged, but he’d no shame in it, he was a man. We’d argue about it, but no argument seems able to prepare for that final moment.

I write this, for I know things suddenly this morning, things I don’t know how I know, and though I address this to no one, have no one to leave this behind for, I know that I must write. This war, I suddenly see that it is the same war as in every history book I’ve ever read. Everything we’ve said about ourselves, every reason—and good reasons!—we’ve given, have been proffered every war.

And this is what I see, an end. Not mine—there’s little prophecy in that—but an end to war. It’s like the bomb when America dropped it. There’s going to be something, something soon, that will shake us to our core. And one power will have it. Unlike what the histories say, how America never used the bomb again, even when she fell apart and disintegrated, it’s a tyrant will have this power, and all the world will know no more war, for they’ll have no more freedom or hope. It will be the end of man.

His rule will be so complete, that he will spread his mind over all, that all would be consumed in him. There will be no more rebellion, no more bloodshed, no more anything.

My friend who believed in that reincarnation crap, for that’s all it is, bunk, crap, he’d be forced to believe what this tyrant wants him to believe, and I see that all opinions will be monolith, all thoughts one thought, and never again will there be war or contention, for all will be one.

I’m glad I die before that day, before the end of war.