The Maddening Scar, left to gape,
howls its crazed winds in anger.
Its keepers – creators – have gone.
The Vulmandr wage new wars.
The victorious allegiance,
contentious post-victory
and beyond negotiation,
implodes and bellows outward;
disputing through blind destruction
and opportunistic strife.
Our Vulmandr, instruments born,
lay their sights on those they'd loved
and are made to vanquish, eyes wide.
Circumstances so bemoaned;
they, wielders of might beneath heel,
despair and condemn themselves
for such slights against kin and creed -
a stark few grinned as they slew.
While the world spits and convulses -
flaking at edges and core
as its face is marred, defiled -
the wary superpowers,
spreading tendrils, hungry and far,
force their Vulmandr to breed.
A tinny cry is made: so frail,
yet heard and felt by all who
once occupied the roiled Scar;
whimpering Levesque is born.
This babe that emanates purpose -
cutting teeth on sanguine prose
and calculated heresy -
grows and matures; ignorant
of what lay inherent within.
The eldest surviving sect,
stripped bare of old Vulmandr lore,
are kept from the cooing young
lest they ignite a fantasy
in tiny Levesque that he
and his kind are anything more
than weapons in wiser hands.
No sooner a man is he made
to stand stoic on front lines.
An artist affixed to canvas:
the wrath that expels from him
is unlike anything yet seen.
Swaths of towering fallout
are generated and fall swift
by will of Levesque alone.
He, of the brazen Vulmandr,
can only defer, and serve.
All the while he orchestrates
his mandated march in woe,
the Maddening Scar of yore days
rages and gathers itself,
like a coiled spring wrought from stone,
and pleads with the planet to
return its denizens to home.
Spewing fault lines form and spread
about its wide perimeter
and the essence of the Scar
begins to pour into the sky.
Like its Vulmandr children,
the Scar now burns the atmosphere.
Those who've occupied it, flee.
Ill with the plight of their homeland,
the divided clan revolts;
suffer as they will at the hands
of those who now possess them.
Caught between State and Tradition,
Levesque is sought, battered and
sent to a solitary grove
where few disturbances reach.
The Maddening Scar, having wept
for its colonies before,
aligns itself and releases,
surging its anger to coasts
once unknown to it long before.
Distant Levesque, his ears perk -
the call of his true home is heard:
he escapes, and then, departs.