Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Two Hundred Thirty Seven

Today in the Lost Quarter, as across all the Greater Dominions, we remember those who perished fighting in our nation’s wars. The Great Wars of the last century that consumed the whole world with fire, but also all the conflicts that our soldiers have taken part in, whether as peacekeepers or combatants. Not all of these have been glorious conflicts to be sure. Lately most have had questionable  motives, as we joined battles that were not our own in service to the desires of the grand old empire to the south.

That does not lessen the loss of each of these lives. They were all young men and women with untold futures ahead of them. What they might have done, what they might have become is lost to us and we are poorer because of it.

It is hard on this day of remembrance not to consider the thousands in the dominions, and the hundreds of thousands across the world, who have been silenced by the grippe reborn. The dread lord has stolen their futures from us. There are those, including our leaders here in the western dominion, who like pointing out that it is largely just the elderly who are perishing in an attempt to downplay the risk for the rest of us. That is a cruel thing. As though their lives are somehow worth less because they have only a little time left anyway.

None of us knows the time we have. Who are we to judge its worth, or the worth of any life? We cannot. For so many now we can only try to remember.