Flaking, scabby and rusted. Like melancholy, greying patches of flesh, swarmed and clogged with the dirt of hard labour, calloused and broken, over and over. They said they wouldn't let this happen. They filled us up with false promises, leeched us of our solace, to distill and get drunk off it, cackling like hags to themselves, enveloped in the blood red of velvet sofa cushions while the rest of us can only imagine their soothing tepidity. Abandoned us like parents deserting starving infants, turned a blind eye as we begged and bargained for just a moment to relish in the cool relief of relaxation.
Gold dust. That's what we were supposed to be. Stainless and superb, the phoenix that would rise from the ashes of their previous failures, the crumbled experiments of alchemy. But they mistook tyranny for strength, selfishness for pride. Injected our leaders with corrosive vitriol that languished as elpis began to trickle away, as we descended into inky black sludge and they stood resolute, smiles as gleaming as the daggers forced into the backs of their people. Spewing false oaths, as their people slaved in the blistering sun, no way of quenching their thirst.
It's a new system, they had claimed. A trial run, not something permanent. Nothing to worry about, just an experiment. Then their little experiment morphed into a game of terror and trepidation, where bargaining for life's necessity became the norm. No work meant no water. Rebellion meant retribution, usually in the form of the removal of one's head from one's shoulders. Hours of backbreaking labour in the arid fields digging and scraping at the dirt. And you'd think, surely they took pity on someone? What about the children? No dear reader, the children had their brains swamped with chemicals, fed worms of doubt and poisoned by snake bites until they gave up their naive hopes of a better world.
They parched the men. They scorched the women. They allowed the children to shrivel and snivel in the fields, bone dry while they lazed in their sun blushed paracosm of prosperity, turning protests to murmurs. Scrubbed our fingers raw with brambles, left us out to melt in the searing sun, moulded us into automatons with no fuel. Blocked up the dams as we fizzled and spat in the blistering heat, an arid architect of our capitulation.
There is a reason many of your people are said to grovel at the so called gods of the rain, the cool trickle of life that streams and dwindles closer for your people with each passing minute. Our people, my people, we shall never feel its sharp sting on our lips again. They've taken it away from us, those miracle molecules that sustain us all. We are shells of ourselves now, washed up on the hazy sands of defeat. Wishing we could drown in something else than our mind forged pools of despair. Praying for water other than tears.
Tinfoil-Tim: This letter is seemingly from an unknown person on a dystopian-esque planet where, we have inferred, people were forced to do hard physical labour due to their water supplies being withheld by the people in power. This letter was found written in broken old English, suggesting it was written between the 10th and 15th centuries, but English was not the native speaker's language. This intriguing development reminds us that these artifacts vary between their time of production and many of these messages have been delayed, or travelled so far it's taken them too long to reach earth, meaning that even though we have now received them, it's inevitably too late.