Reptiles in One Terrible Fight

I guarantee you. Oh really? The Watchers on the Watch. 

We were all under surveillance now; we were all being reaped and wracked, sowed and treated like cattle, or grain, just another resource, nothing to them. 

The small families, the worthy lives, the honourable struggles, all the things that made them human and worthy of attention, from the gods, from the ether, from the fates, and we summoned the spirits and were afraid, we were gobsmacked by the beauty of the region and the desolation of old friends, as they all marched off on the mortal coil. The class clown. The bar room joke. And now they stood, javelin in hand, stamped into the ground; stand and fight. And so they did, against the bacteria, against the mycelium of the age, against the vast, dank, strangulating corruption of the times, the dank, the evil, the malevolent. 

There was nothing malign about the fate of this species, about the evil that stirred within them, the cruelty they displayed towards each other, the lack of ignorance, the arrogance. 

And he, too, entered a different realm. 

Each wave picked out along the shore, each flight of birds pinpricked into the light of a morning sky, the night a time for rest, the slumber of those all around. 

And he rose. And he flew. And the headlines told a different story; of an encroaching despair, of financial and social collapse. And the oligarchs and the political class who ruled them? They couldn't have cared less, literally couldn't have cared less.