Another day. I got into to bed at around 2230, didn't get to sleep until near midnight, and then only after I cried myself to sleep. It all sort of hit me last night, the hurt, the uncertainty. The devasating scope of the deliberate destruction of my family Crusty delivered. No need to ask why-he did it to hurt Fox, to hurt me.

Maybe this is explains Fox's anger toward me, that I strive not to let my hurt devolve into bitterness from which issues the drive for revenge. I don't want revenge, I want my son, my grandson. I don't want my life back so much as I want the hope that Crusty smashed, on purpose, to punish me for daring to have it. That is what I want for my son, and for his son. That is what mothers do, they pray for hope to be a constant in their child's life.

Is this the end? The end of the world as we know it? Is the rush to embrace vulgarity ever going to end, or is Rome-bastard child of Greece though it was-going to burn out amid the revelries of the hedonists as it did two thousand years ago-unmourned, and blamed by the very citizens who cried "Down with it, down with it, to the very core, raze it to the very ground."

What if. We used to play What If.

What if I was there, and can recall it with the same dim clarity we have for our first day of school, or the birth of our sister's child, or a cousin's funeral?

What if I tried to sound the warning, and not only was the cry discounted, but my tongue cut out to silence me, to keep me from reaching even a few; my hands cut off to keep me from writing it out, and finally, that dreadful three days on the floor, writhing and begging that bastard centurion to finish the job-begging with my eyes since my tongue was gone and my throat smashed to prolong my death? What if?

What if it was not the first time I watched a 'civilization' turn and feed upon it's self until there was nothing left to consume, not even runes to mark it's existance at all?

Ah, the Pax Romana, what if I was there, too, when it died the slow death cancer of that kind brings?

What if?