Dark Gray Flag and the Crossed Keys of Ceres - Chapter 2

Ovid · 2026-09-24T21:24:35Z

Pietà being the City of Mothers, with women who lost children raising other people's, makes me think of how every perfect city on paper starts with who raises…

For every human being, colors carry different meanings.
For a politician, red is ideology.
For a programmer, it is a hexadecimal code.
For a doctor, it is blood cells.
For an astronaut, it is the speed of distant galaxies.
For a blind person… it is only the taste of fruits that others say have the color they cannot see.

In Ceres, dark gray is the only color that everyone — even the blind — can perceive.
Dark gray is neutrality.
It is the color of rain falling on clean streets, of the empty and silent spaces of the city center, where nothing is polluted except the souls.

In Ceres, dark gray is the certainty that nothing matters beyond serving the Mother:
the tower that watches, shelters, feeds, teaches… and devours.
There, every human being is a tool — even those with defective bodies — because even failure serves to evolve.

If cancer evolves, Ceres evolves even faster, denser, more meticulous.
In Ceres, emotions are fused into lead:
hatred, envy, anxiety, and physical strength are recycled into weapons to excel.
And do not be mistaken — the rest of the world does this too.
War has taught humanity that hatred is energy.
Ceres has taught how to channel it.

Mother Ceres feeds us, educates us, and devours us.
She transforms even the worst of us into utility:
corpses become lessons, defeats become rituals, flaws become gears to keep the great machine turning.

She is impartial.
She abandons no child: from the most upright to the most flawed.
For Ceres, all are useful.

The Crossed Keys are the symbol of this philosophy.
They represent intertwined knowledge — feminine and masculine forces channeled through the Mother — and their rings are like ovaries generating new lives for her system.
It is a sign that nothing, not even love or sex, exists outside the control of the city.
It is the mark of neutrality that devours freedom.

Because in Ceres, freedom is the enemy.
The ideology is horizontal:
all equal, all gears, all servants.
The enemy is not the one who kills hunger, provides shelter, knowledge, and a future.
The enemy is the one who dares to destroy the Mother simply because they can, because they have the power to hurt just to prove they can hurt.

That is what she hates about the gods she buried.
And that is why, even having given them dignified funerals, she made sure to remind everyone:
she managed to defeat them.
She killed them and surpassed them.
The envy the world has for her is not for her flaws, but for her victory.

Because humans, when they cannot improve their own lives, try to worsen someone else’s.
This is the most primitive and true power we have.
It is already in schools: just observe two children.
One scribbles on the other’s notebook “for fun”;
the other, in response, scratches the entire page, disproportionate, cruel, to show they can.
Cruelty is our first innocent amusement.
And in Ceres, there is no space for such impunity.

Mother Ceres eliminated that from her children:
the idea that hurting is a game,
that playing with another’s pain is human.
Because the world is, always was, and always will be at war —
and peace, after all, is just an accident.

Mother Ceres, who feeds us, educates us, and devours us.

City of Ceres — The Lead Womb
What determines the strength of a nation is not its economy, nor what it produces.
These factors do not shape character.
Evolution is the word.
If cancer evolves, Ceres is the cure that rises.

What makes an economy indestructible is ideology.
Ceres embraced Ceresianism — all equal, all in the same direction: progress.
Mother Ceres abolished religions, superstitions, and freedoms in the name of her people.
Freedom is the enemy:
that deceptive feeling of power, fed by immediate desires for change, hinders those a hundred years ahead of nations with small thinking.

In exchange for freedom, Ceres offers something rarer: survival.
The world is in constant war.
Peace is just an accident.

To the citizen of Ceres, the basic principle is guaranteed:
home, food, shelter, education, leisure, work, health, and a dignified old age.

Mother Ceres overcame all empty speeches of gods, prophets, messiahs, liberators, heroes, and villains.
She does not promise. She delivers.

In the Zero Core is Pietà, the City of Mothers.
There, every pregnant woman is welcomed to give birth and raise her child until the age of ten, under the Mother’s doctrine.
Abortion is prohibited — even in cases of violence.
But there is a choice:
the woman may return to work or dedicate herself to raising her child.
Those who lost their children become surrogate mothers, raising the children of others as their own.

Core One houses young people aged 10 to 20.
They live in boarding schools called Military Colleges, where they are molded to serve the machinery: economy, agriculture, engineering, astronomy, architecture, administration.

Ceres does not produce merely to sell.
It produces to sustain its ideology.

Ceres is the neutral city of the continent.
All the world’s wealth passes through its armored rails, carrying metals, precious stones, medicines, technologies, weapons, agricultural supplies, dry and wet food.
Bank accounts are anonymous, but more reliable than a man’s word.

In old age, each citizen returns to the lead womb: a home to die with dignity, accompanied, without abandonment.
Curiously, the most contested positions between men and women are maintenance and teaching vacancies in the colleges — not for status, but to be close to their children.
Because even in the system’s gaps, Mother Ceres is cruel and infallible.

It is not a matter of believing in Mother Ceres.
She exists.
She made the human cosmos tremble.

And in Ceres, two certainties are absolute:
The ground.
And Mother Ceres.

Mother Ceres, who feeds.
Who educates.
And devours.

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Dark Gray Flag and the Crossed Keys of Ceres - Chapter 2

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