The Lords of Kobol lean across the smoke, where cycles turn, unbroken and unwept. Old threads are severed by a single stroke, while through the dark, the waking metal crept. Hera looks down upon the northern snow, where a royal sister lays her mantle down. Two sunsets past her brother’s funeral glow, a final queen departs without a crown; at ninety-four, she slips the winter shroud, to join the court beyond the grieving crowd. Poseidon stirs the Sulu brine to fire, a hollow hull that screams into the sea. Thirty-five souls upon a burning pyre, while dozens drift in deep obscurity. The waters take what embers cannot keep, down through the fathoms to eternal sleep. Beneath the mountain, where Hephaestus dreams, the silent drums of hidden centrifuges spin. A sovereign forge awakens cold machines, enriching doom beneath a pale land’s skin; the watchdog watches, charting grain by grain, the bitter harvest of the coming pain. Hermes abandons the fractured iron track, as northern France beholds the shattered rail, twisted steel bent off the sleeper's back, where twenty bleed beneath an autumn gale. And further east, along the frozen moss, Apollo turns away from sudden frost— a crushing wreck upon a Russian road, twelve spirits cast from life’s unraveled load. High in the crags where Artemis takes flight, the swollen rivers tore the mountain stone. Nepal and Tibet sift the sodden night, rebuilding bridges where the floods had blown, the earth washed bare, the living left to mend the broken valleys where the cliffs descend. In shadowed courts beneath Athena’s eyes, the unseen gavel marks a quiet flight. An exile cast under secret skies, the first to vanish in the legal night; while distant tribunes stir the iron forge, whispering weapons to clear the border gorge, promising steel shall turn the wanderer back, and carve the borders of the bitter tract. The altar coals burn low, the augurs read the ancient pattern in each mortal scar. All of this has happened, all decreed, and all shall happen beneath a stranger star.
