Blood runs cold in bare violence. Violence murders all living beings upon entering and calls itself righteous. Adventurers approach.
“I, I at last, can enter and exit unscathed,” thinks the hero.
He doesn’t want treasure or riches. He only wants to say he has done what no one else could.
Perhaps he dreams of ruling it.
“They are deranged, these heroes. The land is poison,” says the Guide. “Once armies approached and died just within the borders. Blood soaked the land and spilled out of it for days.”
“Oh, monster land!” said Miss Emeline Traveler who has visited only the border. “It consumes all who come to it.”
“Were you not tempted?” asked her Great Auntie. "For there is no place that does not welcome you and your bravery and skill as a Traveler is unmatched."
“No, Auntie, I believed," said Emeline. "Whether, it stretches its great maw up and swallows people whole or shreds them into bits, Violence kills. There’s no mystery to this place.”
The size of Violence waxes and wanes depending on how much it is fed.
Desperation, a little fence made of found materials encompasses, Violence.
The materials include scraps of wood, stone, sand, and bones.
Desperados work incessantly to rebuild the tiny fence where it has been beaten down by foolhardy adventurers. They put up signs.
“Keep out!”
“Stay back!”
“Do not approach!”
“Monster!”
Many enter Violence, but many are deterred, not so much by the fence of Desperation as by the neighboring land of Nonviolence which beckons brightly.
“One day our citizens would like a city where we can gather and meet instead of this ragged fence. When Violence shrinks we can come together, but when it grows we live far apart, loneliness increases, and our cause becomes ever more desperate,” says the Guide.
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