Collapse of Deer City

There never was a Deer City. To speak of its collapse is foolish fancy. But it is an act of imagination to conjure Deer city before envisioning its fall. The despot of the city taunted his adversaries with empty threats & coy dissembling. This was a game to him. He was a master of the carved wooden pieces on the ornate board in the game room beside the bedroom chamber within the fortified palace atop the once-strategic hill. Now the hill exposes him. The squares of the board are redesigned by enemies. There is a circle within a circle within a circle within.... Deer City, below the palace has began to erode from within. But it's nothing I can see. The citizens play their own game, mysterious, seeming to consist of arbitrary penalties for violating contradictory rules, seeming to encourage contstruction in the form of disassembling, seeming to make no distinctions amongst the game's mirrors. Tidal pools. Shards of glass. Unfathomable quarries filed with the century's rainwater. Screens of disused computer monitors. The planes have come & gone, come & gone. The palace now a market. The game evolves, remains inscrutable even to the players, who with a despot's guilde dissemble, while outsiders attempt to divine rules & strategies. I have come to believe all the games there have ever been are divine jokes: despots are the fools, priests the jesters. Players are the very pawns they move. Writers & other docents? Errant folklorical scribes, mistaking the joke for a ballad meant to sing children to sleep & hum to oneself when fitful.