I have zero empathy to those who entered and butchered raped and mutilated people in cold blood
I am not saying it okay, I simply dont care
all these quotes to me. dear oh dear, its only polite to reply i guess.
The city of Eldermere was a place of clean streets and cleaner consciences. Its people slept soundly, comforted by the knowledge that the “Unruly” were locked away in the Black Citadel—a prison reserved not for thieves or murderers, but for them: the olive-skinned men and women from the Eastern Territories who’d crossed the mountains seeking work. They spoke in a lilting foreign tongue, wore headscarves dyed with desert flowers, and prayed to gods with too many names. Dangerous, the guards insisted. Savages. Invaders. The Citadel’s guards were celebrated as patriots, their brutality excused as necessity. “They’re not like us,” the baker would say, handing a guard free bread. “You can’t reason with animals.” For years, no one questioned it. Not when entire families vanished into the Citadel for “unlicensed gatherings.” Not when a farmer was jailed for singing an Eastern lullaby to his child. The prisoners’ screams that sometimes seeped through the prison walls? Deserved. Their broken bodies dragged into alleys after “interrogations”? A warning. The people of Eldermere turned away, their silence a pact.
Then, disaster struck. A guard captain, his conscience frayed, leaked ledgers to the Council. The pages detailed horrors—electric prods used on kneeling women, children forced to watch their parents beaten, a priest’s throat slit for chanting prayers in his own language. “They’re targeting us for existing,” read a prisoner’s scrawled note, smuggled out in a guard’s pocket. The Council, trembling under the weight of proof, arrested five guards. Eldermere exploded. “Loyalty to Eldermere!” chanted mobs, their fists painted in the national colors of crimson and gold. Dockworkers and midwives alike denounced the Council as traitors. A grocer smashed his own shop window to display a sign: OUR GUARDS PROTECT OUR WAY OF LIFE. “They’re protecting us from infestation!” he screamed, pointing at the Eastern slums beyond the city walls, where families huddled in crumbling tenements.
The Council backtracked within days. The guards were released with medals pinned to their chests, the ledgers dismissed as “fake news.” No one listened to the Eastern doctor who testified about treating Citadel survivors—boys with kidneys ruptured by kicks, girls bearing burns shaped like Eldermere’s crest. No one cared that the jailed priest’s daughter now begged in rags, her father’s prayer beads clutched in her skeletal fist. “Sympathy for them is treason,” hissed the mayor, as new laws banned Eastern festivals and erased their language from public signs. The guards tripled their arrests, hauling in shopkeepers for “suspicious bartering” and mothers for “harboring unpatriotic thoughts.” Eldermere’s children learned the truth early: Some people aren’t people. They’re stains to scrub away. They’re the reason your father drinks, your sister can’t find work, your country feels unclean.
And the Citadel’s ovens, burning night and day, made sure everyone could smell the proof.