This is an image post. Inspiration for this sketch came from this image.

The city has been burning for days. We have gathered at the lakeside to celebrate it, to remember its glories, to drink to the destruction of our memories. We have left pride, honor and names to curl in the fire; here we are nameless, our faces hollowed and consanguine with anonymity. We build smaller fires and dance over them. We hurl burning brands far out over the water, racing to meet their uneasy reflections in the dark sky. We plunge in after them.

At daybreak we are scattered, some drowned among the slime at lake bottom, some lost and tangled in the woods (faces pressed to faces, bodies twitched to bodies), some still and cool and turned to the ashen billows of the sky. We have become more than ourselves: we are elemental, we are undine, we are tree-bole. Sharp urgency of leaf must. We tatter with the black reach of smokehand. We are civilization, the watching, unsleeping eye, the sound of tires against dirt roads.

We are stranded here at the place where the forest marches down to lake bed. We swim between drowned trunks and the city waits beneath for some stronger gravity to pull us back.