We can't remember what was here before the landslide but we know it was important enough that we built a monument to it. We made a mountain so we'd always have somewhere to come back and mourn for...whatever we'd lost.
In a way it worked. Tens of thousands visited the site every day to touch the steeply slopes sides and some even took a small handful of earth home with them. It was theorised that if enough people took a single handful then eventually the whole structure would gently collapse.
And it did.
Not quite as slowly as the predictions claimed but nobody died. Not until the ground finally levelled off enough to reveal the blackened side of a colossal crater with the remnants of a skyfleet scattered throughout. They looked like wrecks at first but their doors all opened and chaos came crawling out.
We thought we were alone in the universe and we were so very wrong. We didn't build a damned monument - we bombed the offworlders and before the crater had even finished smouldering we threw as much dirt as we possibly could and tried to keep the bastards buried for good.
They'd been alive the whole damned time and reached out to us, to our minds. They made us forget what they were and what they did and made us revere the mountain like it was a temple instead of a prison we'd thrown over them in the hopes that they'd smother and die.
And now, thanks to our stupidity and sentimentality, they were free.
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