Pax Romana

“ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

The hard dry ground was a thicket of little broken sticks and hollow seed casings; protruding splinters demanded slow progress, the dead things scratching out a mastery over living flesh, desperate to catch the notice, the attention of a mind that would help them breathe once more. Under the eternal harsh stare of the sun the earth was dusty, and so thirsty that it had drawn the very colour from the abundant scattering that the overlooking trees had lavished upon it, an offering in gratitude for a place to rest. These worshippers never forgot where their roots lay.

From the worn ground to the empty sky stood a huge ruin of little broken bricks; shorn walls and dirtied, dusty mosaics fixed the eye. Now only an utter stillness reigned; empty sky and abandoned walls and tense earth. And yet the emptiness had claws of its own.

There was a silence that had been flowing unnoticed from somewhere beyond the trees and the bricks and the dust, and was now filling the still clearing intensely. Under the void of blue sky stripped by a constant light, above that tired earth. All that was left of a broken empire, moments before held leisurely in interest, now threatened to rear up and impose itself beyond the corners of the mind that held it, gripped in a fatal peace.