“… but the populace at large believes in Nothing. There is no room for either glorious or terrible. We are in danger, too, trapped in the tomb with an uncrucified carpenter, blown away with the burning bush as the east's Black Cubicle cracks it’s mortar and falls. The world is at war. They do not name us the enemy, no, for that would give us flesh and substance. You must see the face or the mask in order to strike through one to deface the other. They war against us by pretending, no, assuring each other we have no flesh or substance. It is a figment war. And if we believe as these disbelievers believe, we will flake out bones to litter the winds.”
Ah, whispered the many shadows at the council. Eeee, came the murmur. No.
“but yes,” said Father in his ancient shroud. “Once the war was simply between Christians and Muslims and ourselves. As long as they believed in their sermones lives, and disbelieved in us, we had more than mythical flesh. We had something to fight for to survive. But now that the world is filled with warriors who do not Attack, but simply turn away or walk through us, who do not even argue us as half unreal, we find ourselves weaponless. One more tidal wave of neglect, one more titanic rainfall of nothings from nowhere and the Apocalypse, arriving, will with one neglectful gust blow out our candles. A dust storm of sorts will sneeze across the world and our Family will be no more. Destroyed by a single phrase which, if listened to and leaned on, simply says: you do not exist, you did not exist, you never were.”
~ Ray Bradbury, From the Dust Returned
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