Wreathed in glittering gold jewelry and gems, the well-worn bronze statue of the Goddess wore its offerings awkwardly. The prayers made before it were not ones made in supplication but desperation, by a people who had long since past the point of being irredeemable. Turquoise patina covered the statue everywhere but her lips, breasts, and buttocks from decades of groping by the disrespectful. Her sculptor had chosen to portray her features with an expression of passivity, but in light of what came to befall her people, it looked more like a profound sadness.
The duo approached the statue, Marion briefly kneeling before it and touching the knuckles of her right hand to her forehead in a ritual that Kid had long forgotten or maybe had never known. Their connection to the Goddess had been primarily intellectual rather than spiritual, and their upbringing held no reverence for any of the deities. Rationality, their village had reasoned, would be the true savior of mankind. It appeared that neither the faithful or the objective had the right of it.
“They gave up their worldly possessions, but only after they were already worthless,” Marion said as she stood, dusting off the dirt from the weathered knees of her trousers. Kid only nodded and continued to look around the room.
“When was the tipping point? When did they realized that they weren’t insulated from the coming apocalypse?” Kid said absentmindedly as their hand drifted across an alter, scattered with small scraps of paper. Some were currency notes for banks that had been made dust long ago, others were the hand-written prayers of the deceased. On the floor, stuffed bears and plastic cars and other toys laid arranged in piles with desiccated flowers, prayers made by the children who couldn’t reach the alters of the adults. They were truly the ones who suffered most from the hubris of the grown folk around them. It takes a village to raise a child, but also to fail one.
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