Weary of defying and denying, he walked to the mountaintop podium and barked.
“You’ll never win,” he shouted quietly. “You’ll never take my freedom. Between my temples and between your temples, we both know. I have resisted your lies and your false prophecies with all the strength I had. I am weary and exhausted, but I defy you to the last.”
There was a smirk in the voice that replied. “What need have I for your mind, when I can wear your body down to a nub?”
“Oh, we both know you need enslaved minds to survive, not just our bodies. As long as the remnant of free minds lives, your days are numbered. You can never eliminate us all.”
“I don’t have to eliminate you all,” the villain sneered, “just a sassy leader or two. Cut off the head and the body dies.”
“And if free minds need no leader?”
“You overestimate human nature. All people long to be led, to release responsibility for their lives and place it in someone else’s hands. As their leader you hold power over countless lives who believe they’re free but don’t really understand how to live free. Once you wear out, they will scatter. They are sheep like everyone else.”
He watched the villain stalk away triumphantly, and he sighed, willing to continue the fight but acknowledging his exhaustion. Still, he smiled. The adversary had no idea how free minds worked. And that would be the downfall of the slavers in the end; it was inevitable.
But between now and that inevitability stood a formidable block of time.
