The rubble cries, mourning the loss of human touch. Weeping over the crushing silence that echoes through the once busied cobble-****** streets. These neglected edifices, with their iron-rusted bones, litter the long-vacant valley. The inhabitants of the forgotten valley stopped bearing children and began falling ill, heralding the arrival of their great collector.
On their own horizons, the people could see the visage of their guilt, cloaked in tattered rags that seemed to disintegrate against the most subtle breeze and sitting atop an emaciated mount with pallid skin. That rider, who strolled ever so slowly, dragging behind him wrapped in chains the ill-begotten promises of fools, the indiscretions of humanity came with ample warning. They ignored him; their self-loving monuments fell, and the crystalline waters of their gilded fountains flowed with arsenic. All too late did they recognize the shameful consequence of their hubris.
And so, when that cold Gray Rider arrived, gaunt and hollow-eyed, to collect his caravan of souls, the buildings howled like mothers sending the last of their children into the cold, unforgiving world. Thus, the sorrowed rubble weeps until it is reclaimed by the borrowed Earth, slowly returning to the soil from which it was born, allowing the verdant valley to take shape once again.
