1st of Decembary, 5500
Abecedarian after RimWorld

All I want to say is, we made some mistakes that first year.
But I should back up. Miesha had unearthed an ancient
cryptosleep chamber; we found her cowering,
deathly pale and unable to speak about the contents.
Everyone checked gun chambers, safeties, stacked up at the mouth;
Freckles, our animal handler, nocked an arrow in her bow. “Here we
go.” Thus began the most harrowing fight of our lives.
Half a dozen man-eating, mutated insects. When it was done, we had three
injured, including a donkey. As many of us learned that day,
killing is as easy as building once you know where to aim. After dinner,
Lance punched Saio over some offhand remark, splitting his lip.
Maybe he was just sick of hauling slag while the teen helped
negotiate construction plans, fix solar panels and sun lamps.
Our two rescued slaves, whose freedom we’d bartered with gold and
pemmican, didn’t fit in with everyone. Saio, the boy, was unapologetically
queer, had notoriously thin skin – Lance called him a wimp – and wouldn’t
raise a finger in violence, not even to defend his home. Miesha, his
“sister”, in a manner of speaking, had been pampered, had a
thinness of skills to speak of, but was coming into her own.
Usually, colonists like that couldn’t cut it on such a
vicious rimworld. Many didn’t make it. You’d hear stories:
would-be farmers found frozen, or mauled by hostile
xenofauna. Sold into slavery, or worse. I guess that’s why we paid for two
young kids with dirt on their lips, standing stubborn in the shade of the marble
ziggurats on the outskirts of home; so we had a hero complex, sue us.

dagoth ur ponders final death

come nerevar, you may have bested me,
but could either of us have foreseen this outcome?
each of us has learned things don’t happen
how we want, or even how they ought,
no matter how many eras spent plotting.
now this most final of ironies: though we are both
gone, our last aspects obviated, you remain exalted, nerevar,
“moon-and-star”, while every hall seems well rid of me.
how can you kill a god? many ways were rumoured.
my favourite: wait until the third night of last seed,
when masser eclipses secunda, then dig in the dirt
with your grandfather’s blade, curse my living name
and bury your spit. what a grand and intoxicating innocence!
of course, it didn’t work. here is one way that does: scour the earth,
collect the artifacts he once stole from you, travel into his body
and plunge them into his heart. then, blast his mountain apart,
bury him under centuries of ash waste. then, scatter his people,
make them refugees in a cold, hostile land,
subjugate them to the slow crawl of time.
here is another way: forget him. let him find out
not a single soul in skyrim speaks his name, not in
dunmer ghettos nor illegal dragon cults nor in
hushed tones at the throat of the world.
we gods are only as immortal as the earth, only
as immortal as prayer. if you meet tiber septim on the road,
or i suppose he prefers “talos” now, tell him he has already won;
no aldmeri arrow nor blade can carve his love from a true nord’s
heart. luck to you both, but our deaths are many, and i tire of them.