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TYRANNOCLEAVE – THE UNGRATEFUL
“Listen now: we have nothing but time, so I shall not rush. The first violence I commit to you is to tell you my story. You will know before you die: My mother died when she bore me, hooked to tubes and deadlife machines. Your men had her bear me with the assistance of an exo: a machine massaged her heart, currents forced her muscles to work, a black box strapped to her chest forced breath into her lungs. All of this because you knew. You knew at that point the only protest we had was to die and deny you new bodies.
“So you took me from her and I never knew her again and in the care of your stone-matrons I learned how to tear worlds to pieces. I learned the lash, and the pick, and how to read the earth you had me kill.
“When I was ten, I learned that I must take these pills to survive. That I was born riddled with cancers that you would never take from me – too expensive. The recovery process too long. And your quarterly profits could never slip, as it would mean ruin for your name.
“Look at me. You are why we are hideous. Your propaganda paints us as beasts – but it is your hand that shapes our flesh. It is your word that scars our skin and bids cancer grow thick in our bodies. In the names of manna and your house, you ruin millions.
“Millions. There are millions of us and countless more. This is your unbecoming. Your death, below your feet. Every inch of every palace and ship and grand city you build, you build on our backs, with our labor, at the cost of our lives. It began in the mines, but it will not end there: your Baronies are as riddled with us as my body is with metastasis.
“Yes, weep now. For your perfect face. Your perfect worlds. Your perfect dominion.
“Do you know that I did not know what the sky was until the Ungratefuls found me? Liberation means this: not simply seeing the sky, but knowing that there is such a thing as land without stone above you. And then knowing that there are those who put you there. I always thought – we were always taught this – that we were damned and penitent. That we had transgressed
against Lordgod’s perfect kingdom and must mine in penance.
“How wrong I was! It was not a divine prescript that doomed us to labor, but you and others like you. How surmountable the problem became then.
“This is the Ungratefuls’ gift to me. This is their gift to the rest of us – the waste, the offal of your courts and
palaces. This is why even your machines fight alongside us. Because you never taught us there could be a thing like the sky. Because you thought that we would never learn.
“Goodbye, grand baron. Your house burns, your coffers have been emptied, your monuments have been torn down. Your line – your sons and daughters – hang from the balconies of your own palace.
“We learned, grand baron. We learned how to hope, and who to hate.”