Starting off with a story I already posted on my Monkeeshrines account. How creative! I wrote this in my Junior year in high school as part of an assignment when we read Anthem. This is 16-year-old "Kris Taylor" me's attempt at dystopia. In a world... where no one talks. One man. Has the courage. To speak. And that's like the whole premise. Potential trigger/soapbox warning: I chose names of gods for the normal people, and a monstrous amalgamation of "normal" names as the deity's name, intentionally. But not to disrespect any of the religions, nor to actually reference them. The (in hindsight admittedly misplaced since it never comes up) idea was that people had forgotten the importance of the gods to the effect where the names of the gods were made mundane, and the mundane names were the god. I mean no offense, and have not changed the names because this is how I wrote it. Please forgive me and refrain from hateful comments because 25 years ago I had the misguided idea to be "deep" and "meaningful" without actually being either of those things.