‘‘Ask ye not what dread society dwelt once yonder…’
This is the warning carved into an ancient plank of wood that hangs over the entrance to ‘The All-American Cement Quarry.’ Beyond it, one can see that it doesn’t look like a quarry at all.
‘The All-American’ looks like a field of statues, massive and ancient and uncanny in that these figures appear humanoid, at a glance, and alien upon study, their ratios not quite right. Their balance strange and their emotions guarded. These statues are privately owned and their owners are in the process of powdering them. The resulting product is considered the highest-grade cement available on the global market.
Historians have attempted to regulate the destruction of these relics, of course, but Capitalistic Democracy is a one-way machine and, having won the right to powder these stone figures in a short appeal in the early 1900s, the landowners rely on established precedent to protect their income and have done so to great success. The plank’s message is said to pre-date the claim and the plank itself is a replica, now ancient, of what was found there at the earliest point in which ‘The All-American’s’ history was recorded. Whether or not the original message continued past these nine cryptic words is a matter of debate, but they seem to have shaped the fate of the land.
Nobody gets to ask questions about the statues or the beings that made them.
A short clip of a teenage boy recently went viral. He is bleeding from the nose and appears, briefly, to levitate in the air before collapsing. On the ground, his hair waves wildly as though blown by a sudden and personal gust of wind. Details about this event suggest that the boy powdered and snorted a small section of a cement wall with origins in ‘The All-American,’ and though this may not be true, the quarry is facing its first crisis since the appeal as teens descend upon the buildings it has produced and, in some cases, upon the statuary itself, looking not for a high so much as interesting content for their feeds.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
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