On the top of the barren hill, flailed by winds and acid rain, stood the ancient stone monument, slender and proud against the bloodred sky.
Thomas had walked all the way up there. He thought it showed more respect. Now he stood in front of it and looked at the long inscription. After long hours of studying, the eroded characters and the half-forgotten grammar of that ancestral language were finally clear to him. Today he would translate it all. He took a deep breath, focused his concentration, and started to read in a half-voice:

" We have forgotten our fathers and betrayed ourselves. We have bartered the magic of meaning to the seduction of thoughtlessness. Our civilization, once founded on honour and virtue, rightful battle and firm law, now stands upon the rotten pillars of morbid needs, the weakness of our flesh. We have lost ourselves, our days come to an end.

Our tradition, fostered in centuries of glory and pain, is waning together with our pride, powerless memories for antiquarians and lovers of curiosities, devoid of the strength and the passion that burnt in our forefathers' hearts and made them rise from the mud of our creation. Race is but a forbidden word whose manifestations are too blurred to be seen.

Our nations have molten into one formless conglobation of purposeless beings, perpetuating life in a pathetic circle of nescient cooperation for survival, fuelled by the simplest and coarsest instincts, like a colony of insects. We have given up our souls to follow the lead of our organs in a pointless race to feed, stock, reproduce, and rot in the grave after having started the cycle again.

We are becoming insects, powerful insects that no one can crush, pestering like bugs. Bugs who feed on the sickening body of the world, without knowing why, without a reason or a goal, until we or our host organism die. The days of mankind are soon over. The flame of the times when our race was young burnt out long ago, put out by our greed, unfed by our slothful lust.

Deprived of our innermost structures we will in no time change, mutate into spineless beings that will bear no memory or resemblance to what they once were. Our days are numbered. The word mankind will one day no longer be used, its meaning lost, as lost as mankind itself will be. Our days are over, the first signs are already to be seen..."

Thomas paused and thought about what he had just read. Perhaps his friends were right: he was wasting his time studying history, "a bunch of useless boring stuff" as they said "just lots of empty words, life is here and now". He should think about making more money, buying more stuff, having more fun, that was good.
Who needs the past anyway? And all those unrealistic paranoid thoughts people had about the future: ridiculous. Mankind was still of course what it always had been. Those words made no sense. His mother had told him many times; his curiosity for the past was probably just a senseless adolescent fancy and it was time to outgrow it.

He was probably still in time to join his friends and enjoy the evening drinking and eating and talking about the latest things they had bought. It didn't really matter anymore to translate the rest of the text, he had had enough. He should probably start thinking about getting a better hobby. Thomas shook his head, turned away from the stone disappointed , drew in his feelers and his six forearms, spread his black coriaceous wings and flew back towards the colony.