Why didn’t Zyphar slay the mask of the abandoned boy?
Because that was not a deception dressed in innocence—it was not a game, not a bait, not a seduction hiding beneath beauty or pleasure or madness—it was a wound, exposed in the shape of a face too young to sin and too honest to lie.

That mask bore no illusion; it carried no flame to provoke me, no trick to entrap me, no glittering vice to manipulate desire or lure the will—it simply was, and what it was, could not be killed.

What I saw was not weakness—it was a mirror.

A boy. Small. Helpless. His father gone, perhaps by choice or by tragedy, it no longer mattered—because absence, when repeated long enough, becomes cruelty. His mother—strong, overworked, already halfway broken—had stitched love and survival together like torn fabric. And in that stitch, he learned something the world never admits: that survival is not always a choice, and innocence often walks alone.

That mask did not lie to me.

It lied for you.

Because you—the society, the market, the world dressed in polished indifference—have made a culture out of deflecting guilt. You dressed victims in lipstick and called it consent. You taught predators that she wanted it because she smiled. You made her body into an economy and her need into justification. You told the watchers, the buyers, the predators of this world that if someone suffers in silence, then surely they enjoy it. That if she bends, she is no longer holy. That if she dances, she is no longer innocent. That if she begs, she has forfeited dignity.

You wrapped your guilt in language, branded the exploited as complicit, and disguised your cowardice as culture.

They are questions. Etched in bone. Carved in silence. Hung like warnings in a city that pretends to forget what it has done.

And when I stood before that Trap—when I saw that mask—I knew instantly that it would not be touched.

Because I do not slay truth.

And that boy, that face, that unspoken cry—he was not a tactic. He was the cost.

So I left the mask where it was.

It waits on your conscience, not mine.
It stays as long as your systems do.

Because some things are not meant to be broken—
they are meant to break you.

~ Zyphar