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In the city of Ephron, beneath the towering statues of long-dead prophets, the people moved like a river—obedient, smooth, unquestioning. For Ephron had, for centuries, been known as the Most Virtuous City in the World. They walked in rows along the limestone avenues, reciting morning prayers, their heads bent in an attitude of submission. The city had been built on law and devotion, on a strict hierarchy of virtue and vice. Virtue, in Ephron, was a measured commodity. There were strict laws on how to be good. To be good was to be meek, to bow, to obey. To be evil was to question, to desire, to want beyond what was allotted.
It was in the libraries of Ephron that Varian, son of a scribe, first felt the crack in the great foundation of belief. He had spent his youth copying the sacred texts—his fingers ink-stained, his mind absorbing the delicate architecture of scripture. Goodness is the root of strength. Humility is the highest form of power. The weak shall inherit the city.
But then, one day, when he was sixteen, he found a forbidden book hidden in the stacks, behind the orderly rows of legal decrees. It was nameless, bound in crumbling leather, and written in a hand both furious and precise.
“Goodness is a cage for those afraid to live.”
That sentence, scrawled in the margins by an unknown hand, struck him like lightning. What if goodness was not a virtue but a chain? What if meekness was not strength but fear?
Years later, when he stood in the Council Hall, accused of heresy, he would think of that moment. He would remember the taste of ink in his mouth, the way his heart pounded as he realized that the laws of Ephron, the very structure of his world, had been built on a lie.
Varian stood before the High Priest, the sacred laws unrolled before him.
“You have been accused of questioning the divine order,” the priest intoned. His voice was thin, reedy, a thread stretched too tight. “Do you deny it?”
Varian did not deny it. He was just tired.
He had spoken in the squares, in the hidden rooms of the university, in whispers in the night. He had told the people of Ephron that morality was not absolute but a weapon wielded by the weak to bind the strong. He had argued that goodness was not an end, but a sickness, a slow wasting disease that turned men into ghosts of themselves. He had said—more than once—that the city needed fire, not law.
And so, they banished him.
He left through the southern gate, past the statues of the prophets, past the market where women haggled over dates and olives, past the outer walls where the desert stretched endlessly in all directions. The guards did not look at him as they locked the gate behind him. He was already a ghost to them.
Varian wandered for weeks, half-mad with thirst and sun. And then, when his body was at the brink of collapse, he found them.
They lived in the ruins of an ancient city, a place older than Ephron, a place whose walls were carved with symbols no one could read anymore. They called it Canopus, but that was only a name they had given to something that had no name.
The people of Canopus were artists, warriors, philosophers. They had been cast out from their cities for the same reason—because they had dared to think beyond. In Canopus, the city of exiles, Varian encountered the terrifying reality of people who lived by no moral code whatsoever. There were painters who painted whatever they pleased (including things that made no sense, like a chicken wearing a crown). There were warriors who trained because they wanted to, not because they were ordered to. There were musicians who played without permission. Here, in Canopus, the laws of men and gods had no hold. Here, desire was not a crime, and ambition was not a sickness.
The city of Ephron had always prided itself on virtue, but virtue, like any foundation, could crack under pressure. And when it did, what lay beneath was not logic but something far older, something primal: the movement of the mass, the irresistible pull of the crowd. The city of Ephron had, for centuries, been a place of measured thought, of minds that moved like clockwork gears, interlocking, grinding together in perfect synchrony. The elders, the scholars, the mathematicians, and the merchants—each played their part in an intricate system, a careful edifice built on the principle that knowledge was an accretion, a slow, deliberate layering of truths upon truths. But then, as in all stories of collapse, there came a disturbance, a fault in the structure. And that fault was Varian.
At first, he was a curiosity. A boy who had sat too long in the shade and annals of athenaeum, whose questions had been small stones cast into the clear waters of doctrine. But the ripples grew. He asked, not why the rules existed, but why they should be believed. He traced the outlines of thought and found the cracks, the places where assumptions had settled like silt. And then he did the most dangerous thing of all—he made others see them too.
At first, the debates in the great halls and the markets were just that—debates. People fancied themselves thinkers, reasoning through new ideas as though they were architects adjusting the beams of an old house. But soon, those ideas took on weight, and weight, when gathered in numbers, becomes momentum.
It began in whispers, then in shouts, then in movement. The people of Ephron, so long governed by careful discourse, found themselves swept along by forces they barely understood. They did not know whether they were making or unmaking their city. The cage of goodness was broken, and now existed an abyss irking to be filled with oblivion of masses. They only knew that they had joined something larger than themselves, and that was enough.
The fall was not a dramatic thing, not at first. It began as all undoings do, with a shifting in language. People began to hesitate before speaking, as if they could feel the ground tilting beneath their words. Old arguments, once taken as immutable, now seemed flimsy, like the husks of insects left behind after molting. A creeping doubt entered the city. And then, the crowd did what crowds always do when faced with uncertainty: it turned feral.
It was an old pattern, one that had played out a thousand times in a thousand cities before them. The crowd does not think; it reacts. It does not weigh possibilities; it is carried forward by the loudest voice, the most urgent fear. Those who had once been cautious, who had once doubted, found themselves caught in the tide, saying things they did not quite believe, condemning those they had called friends only days before. It was easier, after all, to be part of the many than to stand alone. They gathered in the forums, in the marketplaces, in the colonnades where knowledge had once been a stately procession, passed from master to pupil, from merchant to scribe. Now voices rose like the screeches of gulls before a storm. The crowd moved with a single will, but a will that changed shape from moment to moment, from praise to condemnation, from yearning to rage. It no longer mattered what had been said, only what had been felt.
And what they felt was fear.
The young, those who had been drawn to Varian’s ideas, to the wild, terrible beauty of a world unchained from fixed thought, rejoiced in the new freedom, even as they found themselves lost within it. The old, the ones who had shaped the city’s knowledge like potters at a wheel, saw in the disorder the premonition of ruin. And ruin, once glimpsed, becomes inevitable.
There were moments of violence, though not of the kind found in crude uprisings. This was a violence of words sharpened like knives, of reputations dismantled in public debate, of accusations flung across lecture halls. The crowd did not think; it responded. One moment Varian was a prophet, the next a corrupter. One moment they sought to enshrine his words, the next to erase them. They did not want truth; they wanted certainty, and certainty was something Varian had taken from them. They burnt the temple and the seven oracles, then they burnt the orphanage and finally the city turned to rumbles with the dust of time.
There were those who saw it for what it was. The old scholars, the weary merchants, the few who had lived long enough to watch a new idea rise and fall like a wave against the shore. They knew the shape of this thing, how the mob gathers with a sense of righteousness and then, when the fervor has passed, disperses in confusion, wondering what it had meant, what had been won or lost. But to stand against it was to be crushed beneath it.
One day, a messenger came to Canopus from Ephron. He was young, nervous, his hands trembling as he held out a letter sealed in wax.
“The city is in chaos,” he whispered. “Without the old laws, there is only blood. They beg you to return.”
Varian did not take the letter.
“They built their city on a lie,” he said. “And now they want me to fix it.”
“They would rather have a master than face their own freedom.”
And that was the truth of it. Most people did not want power—they wanted to be ruled. They wanted the comfort of law, the security of morality. They would rather be slaves to order than masters of chaos.
Varian turned away from the messenger. He did not care for the fate of Ephron.
“Tell them,” he said, “that they are free to build something new. But I will not return.”
The messenger, confused, stammered. “But… who will rule them? who will end the chaos?”
Varian laughed, and then he laughed for an aeon.
“Let them learn to rule themselves.”
Ephron teetered on the edge of itself, on the edge of a moment in which it would either be reborn or be forgotten, lost to the dust of history, just another city that had failed to hold itself together under the weight of its own thoughts. The people turned their eyes outward, to the horizon, to the roads leading away from the city walls, waiting for the return of the man who had undone them.
Varian knew the crowd would always move in patterns—first in fury, then in longing, then in disillusionment. He knew they would not seek him for his wisdom, but for the comfort of a leader, a voice that could replace the silence they had created. And he knew, too, that those who now want to anoint him would resist him again, for there is nothing more dangerous to those in power than a man who has already learned to walk away.
And so the city waited, torn between fear of what it had become and fear of what it might yet be. The people who had cried for destruction now whispered for restoration. And beneath it all, the truth remained: the mass does not seek truth; it seeks certainty, even at the cost of its own reason.
And Varian, wherever he was, knew they would wait. He knew, too, that they had not changed, not truly. They still moved as a single body, seeking direction, seeking an answer that would give them back the security of not needing to think.
And perhaps, for that reason, he would never return.
Ephron faded into the desert, a ruin among ruins. Its people had waited too long for a savior. Waited for the day when the excitement would turn to exhaustion, when the people would realize they had torn down the foundations of their city and had no knowledge of how to build anew.
Years passed, and Canopus flourished. They did not have laws, only a simple creed: Do what makes you stronger. Destroy what makes you weak. Some called it barbaric. Some called it dangerous.
As for Canopus it rose, because it could, because the people who were in general tired found new thrill in recklessness. Canopus became a belief that unfurled, slow and creeping, in the folds of daily life, in the momentary hesitations that ceased to be, in the small, quiet surrender of inhibition. Canopus thrived on the whispers of laughter at the edges of what all once had been forbidden. For the people of Canopus, love, unshackled from vows and measured courtesies, became raw and immediate. It happened in doorways, in shadowed streets, in houses where beds were never empty for long. They blurred the hierarches of old into irrelevance, and their voices murmured over the clinking goblets and rustle of silk with the air thick with the scent of indulgence.
As Varian walked in the cobbled streets of Canopus with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half lidded, he saw what the others refused to see- that this was not freedom, not pleasure, not the triumph of human will, but only the long, slow unravelling of what had once been held taut.
He watched the men and women of Canopus who thought themselves to be kings and queens, who took what they wanted when they swaggered through the dust chocked alleys, their hand slick with wine and sweat, their lips red with juices and their belief of being immortal. He watched them laugh with bright, brittle mouths. He watched them whisper to one lover in the night and another in the morning, believing- because it was easier to believe- that love could be boundless, that longing could stretch infinitely without thinning to nothing.
He knew better. He had seen it before. Not here in Canopus or Ephron, not exactly, but in other places, in other times, in the shifting landscapes of power and collapse. The names changed, the faces changed, but the rhythm was always the same. The rising, the flourishing, the gorging, the decay. He knew this thrill will become commonplace as the taste of stolen fruit is sweetest only when theft is still forbidden. He knew that mass will begin yearning for the old rhythm of denial and reward. And so, they gathered, a churning mass of figures moving under the cover of darkness. And for a time, it was radiant but entropy does not breed permanence.
For Canopus fed on momentum, on the excitement of being new, of being unshaped. There were always those who waited in the wings, patient and still, watching the tides change. They always wait. The old weight of order, did not disappear, only retreated, coiling like a snake in the shadows until the momentum was right. And Varian knew, when that moment will come, it will not be with a battle, nor with the clash of steel against steel, but with slow, inevitable turn of the crowd. He observed the first signs of weariness in their faces, the first moments of hesitation where there had once been only indulgence. He listened when the voices grew quieter, when the laughter stopped lasting through the night. He watched as pleasure curdled into habit, as habit soured into boredom. He knew that Canopus had been a feast and will be a famine in time. He pitied them, in a way. But only in passing. The world would always be built and broken, built and broken again, some will see it through some will perish. They always do. He knew that Canopus will not be mourned or remembered. It had been a flicker in time, an untamed, impossible dream- and like all such dreams, it had no place in the waking world.
And Varian?
He stood atop the highest hill of Canopus, watching the sun rise over the endless sands. He had left behind the lies of morality, the false dichotomies of good and evil. He had become more than a man—he had become a creator of new values, a master of his own fate. He had become free. And in the end, that was all that mattered.