They buried the war where flowers should have grown.

Long after the last scream evaporated into the sky, the land refused to heal. Red caps bloomed low and wide, fed not by rain, but by memory. Beneath them—layer after layer of skulls, smaller ones stacked like punctuation marks in a sentence no one dared finish.

At the center rose The Witness.

A skull polished to a mirror sheen, not by hands, but by time itself—time grinding guilt into chrome. It faced forward, unblinking, reflecting the sky as it once was and as it would never be again. You could see yourself in it if you stood close enough. Most people didn’t like that.

Behind it, the cross stood—not as salvation, but as record.
Not faith. Evidence.

Above the skull hovered the Halo of Measures: segmented, mechanical, unfinished. It spun slowly, endlessly counting something no one could agree on—sins, lives, seconds, chances. Every fragment represented a choice that could have gone another way. None of them did.

Two more skulls flanked the field, half-sunk, half-watching.
Guardians or prisoners—history hadn’t decided.