Stygian Crown

In the underworld of governance,

where light is a liability,

the king sits not on a throne but a ledger,

each line a name erased,

each decree a shadow cast over the commons.

He rules by subtraction:

of protections,

of voices,

of memory.

The purge begins with silence,

and ends with a snitch’s whisper sent to a bureaucratic abyss.

His scepter is forged from grievance,

a list of donors and dissenters,

those who paid,

and those who dared not.

He rewards the former with gold-laced influence,

the latter with exile,

sometimes literal: students detained for thought crimes,

researchers vanished from campuses for proximity to protest.

This is not rule.

It is ritual, a coronation of cruelty.