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Within and outside the Tower
The One Who Mods is alone now but for his victim and it is time for the message to be delivered. A large owl flies silently into the throne room a drops a metal cylinder onto the stone floor. As the shrill notes of metal striking stone ring through the room, the bird turns and in the same swift silence of its arrival flies back to the shadow filled halls of the tower.
Within the cylinder is a page taken from a book which tells the tale of one tortured for his defiance of the power and authority of Olympian Zeus. The Greek of its words is that spoken more than two millennia in the past and in its speaking of an ancient and foolish act of resistance it provides the words with which to describe another:
Prometheus: Yes, to my friends I am pitiable to see.
Chorus: Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?
Prometheus: I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom.
Chorus: What cure did you provide them with against that sickness?
Prometheus: I placed in them blind hopes.
Chorus: That was a great gift you gave to men.
Prometheus: Besides this, I gave them fire.
[*]from Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
As the One Who Mods reads the ancient words, clouds and wind stir again into movement and the rains begin to fall once more around the tower. And with a silent relentlessness the grasses continue their encroaching movement to the very edge of the moat and its dead monsters bearing the quiet defiance of life to the doorstep of death.
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