Prometheans Rise
A science-fiction story of Giordano Bruno’s final night
The prison was dark, grotesque, and void of hope. Maddening cacophonous voices and screams reverberated throughout the wet and moldy stone walls. These were the voices of the damned. The iconoclastic minds who dared to speak against the church. The church purified these heretics through stone walls, pain, and fire.
Other sounds ensued, too. The plop…plop… of dripping water. The squealing of hungry rats and scratching of nails from other prisoners. These sounds were the pure beating heart of the monster inside the stone.
In the first week or two, the dripping water was like an orchestra of comforting sound, telling the prisoner a world still existed beyond the eternal night. But after those few weeks, it became a drumbeat of damnation and hellish insanity that no man could take for long.
Giordano went mad within those first weeks.
He watched his memories dance upon faded walls. His children were playing at the pond near their house, laughing merrily. His wife was watching a candle melt, hands buried in shame across a yellow streaked grimace. Each tear was a dagger to his heart. He was a forgotten face among the ruins of time. Even his father, long dead as of twenty years, visited him to give…
