Kingdom of Love
By Emily Nuñez
December 3, 2025
Graphic by Emily Yao
Men only look out for themselves, yet loathe their enemies for doing the very same.
In the Kingdom of Ends, each life is intrinsically valuable. People treat one another not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. Not as tools or weapons or targets or bodies,
shields of flesh,
bloody statements,
empty vessels,
replaceable clones,
empty vessels,
replaceable clones,
but as subjects. Autonomous and sacred.
A timeline where people have absolute, uninterrupted, unconditional value.
what could be further from reality?
The Earth has reached a fantasy state after all. Not Kant’s projected utopia, but
dystopia,
falling apart to the extent of fiction.
falling apart to the extent of fiction.
Hell churning in the atmosphere, flames melting ice and carnage. Earth’s project on suicide, on death, forests and cities indiscernible in its aftermath. Ash and debris float through the sky, gray snowflakes polluting what’s left. Breathe deeply to console, and let the dust settle on your lungs, land on your lashes, water your eyes. Sit cooking under the sun, crisscrossed in dry grass, and inhale the dense mixture. Acid rain washes away today’s tragedies, dirty runoff into little streams.
Missing people tossed from planes, planes dropping from the sky, weightless till the lethal collision. In the dead of night, stray debris crashes into my room. The ceiling implodes, the house trembles, yet miraculously I am saved whilst sleepwalking and away from bed. I could have been there, pulverized in an instant. It could have been any of us. Somewhere it was.
The freak accidents recur, experimental test runs with living dummies. Up above, an illegitimate ruler, in a tailored suit from the comfort of his ornate office, plays with life, running pretend aircrafts into block edifices and giggling at the calamity.
mechanisms as unreliable
as our sources and authorities,
principles paper thin,
purged protections
and purged peoples.
as our sources and authorities,
principles paper thin,
purged protections
and purged peoples.
Graphic by Emily Yao
Your Myers-Briggs results indicate_ psycho-narcissism!_
National personality scores_
E N T J - The Commander_
Climactic plotline to the dystopian novel.
Setting: Earth ca. 202X
Conflict: Man vs. Self // Man vs. Machine
Character Analysis: Wealth-generating pawns, complex beings: spiteful and hurt, yet delicate, tired, and trapped in the systems they built
Resolution: The Kingdom of Ends
Conflict: Man vs. Self // Man vs. Machine
Character Analysis: Wealth-generating pawns, complex beings: spiteful and hurt, yet delicate, tired, and trapped in the systems they built
Resolution: The Kingdom of Ends
The Kingdom of Love.
Love, love, love love love!
If you say it enough times, it sounds off. Like it wasn’t a real word anymore.
Love love love love love love love love love love love love love love
It washes over me in spectacular waves. Refreshing and ticklish, when a sweet breeze twirls my hair and ruffles my skirt and makes me forget. I am full of it, and the feeling always comes back. Between every devastation is an intermission of peace, losing track of our troubles till they are scathing us again. The Kingdom of Love seems to barely exist in this middle ground, isolated in each soul. A place like home. It is a collective consciousness and intrinsic equality common to all, only too far fragmented to actualize the existence of a reality free of constructed subjugations. Sometimes we still feel it, empathic restlessness vibrating from our heart.
Home is a vast obscurity now, existing metaphysically. Something to believe in, something to tailor, no longer a given, but a choice. Fleeting moments to grasp onto, authenticities to recognize and pursue.
In childhood, time moved slow. Those walls would be home for what felt like forever, but eternity was impossible when they never really belonged to us. Homeowned by self-elevated entities, cosplaying gods toying with fates, contorting their dolls forward and backward to fit the undersized playhouse. Forced to relocate, from country to country, apartment to apartment, class to class, job to job, person to person, attachments constantly betraying us, because the only thing you cannot train humans to accept is death. Could be the death of an era, the death of the home.
The artificial monster is metamorphosizing, exponentiating, commercializing decades of intellect into self-destructive algorithms. Our creations feed it, and there it waits on us, in mild pity and anticipation.
The dystopia continues to unfold, inevitable and rapid. Unravelling the only things that ever mattered, developing all the rest. Mistrust for our leaders is the expectation, abuse at the hands of institutions created to protect; sickening state of normality. Stomach contorts at the hopelessness. Complacent cogs churn the machine.
Maybe home was never meant to be the structure or the system we bought our way into. Maybe it was the root, the motherland trampled and exploited. It hurts almost too much to claim. Yet if only we can curate an experience of belonging, wherever we exist, and hold onto it with all our might. Nurture and expand it, till the homemade substance, the Kingdom of Love, completes us again. ■
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